research

Even though I was accepted onto the PhD programme with a Scholarship, in the Scottish practice-led PhD system it is usual for researchers in their first year to be classed as MPhil students with a transfer to PhD after one year. For this transfer to take place students have to make a presentation of their work, give a brief talk and write a paper of around 10,000 words. Next week I will present some of my practical work in a public setting, the details of which I’ve listed below. After this I will be concentrating on my transfer paper for which I have been given a six-month extension.

It is almost one year since I started my practice-led PhD, and in that time my eight-page proposal has reduced to five hundred words and grew again like an unwieldy hedge that needs constantly maintained by clipping. This first year has also been spent avoiding the issue of how, as a practicing artist, I can fit my non-verbal language and ways of researching into a recognised framework, where my hypothesis or questions are still not clear.

For my Master of Fine Arts degree I started looking at the cross-over of interior and exterior landscapes. My initial investigations were done in quite a basic way, where I concerned myself with the sanitised representations of ‘man-made’ nature contained in domestic interior and exterior decoration, taking the separation of space provided by architecture for granted. The time-span that predominately interested me was from the 1750’s through to the Victorian age.