Test Space
Test Space offers practice-led PhD students, early career researchers and artists from across Falmouth University, and the School of Art, Design Architecture at the University of Plymouth, the opportunity to engage in a speculative, uncertain, creative, and theoretical dialogue, about their individual and / or collaborative practice led research projects.
Test Space offers the opportunity for practice-led researchers to sharpen dialogic potential and further strengthen the research culture within their respective faculties, schools and departments. Test Space perceives transdisciplinary research as its core value and provides individuals a space to share creative intentions.
Project details
| Project lead | Tom Baugh |
|---|---|
| Start date | September 2017 |
| End date | Ongoing |
Test Space was launched in 2017, and is led by Dr Tom Baugh, Head of art, at Falmouth University, with Dr Laura Rosser, Dr David Paton and Dr Karen Abadie (UOP) as co-leads. Test space aims to test and explore the potential of individual, and collaborative research projects, shared by individuals across institutions. Furthermore, Test Space invites international research cluster groups to share current and live research projects, most notably Nangyang Academy of Fine Art, University of Singapore. Test Space explores the various facets and nuisances of practice-led research in a live context, which mentors, challenges and nurtures ideas from conception to realisation in readiness for milestones such as REF 2029, PhD viva’s, Funding call outs to gallery ready outputs.
Test Space is responding to the need of researchers in the field who place practice at the forefront of their investigations, and who are looking to refine their research in terms of reach, impact and peer review. Our rationale considers the value of transdisciplinary research in the contribution to new knowledge and provides opportunity and encourages less obvious collaborations between different subject areas to occur. The research question asks, how does Test Space provide new approaches to the idea of making and knowledge production, by embracing uncertainty and not knowing through the lense of transdisciplinarity, as a methodology in practice-led research? Our research enquiry is one of openness and self- reflection, that embraces multi-faceted research methodologies, methods and dialogic contribution in the production of creative outcomes. We are investigating and unlocking the potential of transdisciplinary practice-led research, through peer review and mentoring, and how this can advance live research projects. We are trying to find out what the common barriers are to realising and sharing practice-led research, and way of supporting how practice-led projects can impact and contribute to wider research questions and concerns across institutions nationally and internationally. The insights include revealing if Test Space can be referred to as a research methodology for transdisciplinary practice, within the context of practice-led research.
Test Space is built on the experience of traditional arts research cluster groups, symposia, in the field of arts practice, humanities and the social sciences, which has taken place across HEI’s nationally and internationally. Test Space aims to advance practice-led research by utilising the various qualities and approaches that sit within historical and contemporary research frameworks. The contemporary trend includes utilising platforms that are committed to space between creation, meaning and critical analysis, exploring uncertainty, knowns and unknowns. In doing so Test Space aims to contribute to the field of transdisciplinary practice-led research. Test Space aims to contribute to several academic departments as part of its rationale to unveil new and diverse approaches to practice-led research. Test Space is currently offered to PGR students in the university and will also be attached to the new MA Fine Art on campus course which starts in September 2024.
Since its start point in 2017 Test Space has invited practitioners from across subject areas to discuss existing and new projects either online, (mainly through covid) and in person, through a scheduled annual symposium. The steering group mentioned in section 6, present a call out across institutions, FSA/ IOP, ADA (UOP) and UAS. The call out maintains an openness to practice as research, and only requests for the format in which the individual/collective will present, accompanied by a short abstract to share. These aid planning in terms of participant numbers and technical provision required. The face-to-face event is normally held over 2 days and located in visual arts organisations such as CAST in Helston, or previously the Royal William Yard in Plymouth, or equivalent, where is there is spaces to occupy including a cinematic screening. International collaborators and national partners are asked to stream in via a live video link.
Project team
- Dr Tom Baugh is the head of Art at Falmouth University. Thomas situates his artistic research across the field of art practice, medical humanities and the social sciences. His artwork explores methods of making manifest equivalent experiences of CTPSD through methods associated with cinematographic projection and performance, in the context of installation art.
- Dr Laura Rosser’s practice entails an in depth and speculative investigation into the relational agency of error in analogue and digital technologies and online spaces – which begin to exhibit their own voices. She refers to their dialogue as cross-talk. The entangling of her print-based practice, writing and conceptual diagramming facilitate this enquiry on how through errors liveness and messiness, we might re-think our complex relationships with technology and the nonhuman.
- Dr David Paton is an artist-researcher and a craftsperson with a specialism in Cornish granite. He has been a practicing artist and stone sculptor since 1993, and for many years worked extensively in the public sphere, initiating a number of artist-led and socially engaged projects across the UK.
- Dr Karen Abadie is an installation and moving image artist working with video, analogue film and sound, whose films and installations have been shown both nationally and internationally. She employs the materiality of analogue film to articulate ideas of the body, both in the context of human and non-human agencies. She creates haptic immersive installation spaces that situate the human body alongside the mechanical liveness of the analogue machinery, confronting the conflict between the soft fleshy matter of the body and the hard-edged matter of the machine where the celluloid film becomes the mediator between them.
Partners
Test Space has collaborated with the University of Plymouth since 2020 and has also collaborated with Limerick University and is currently collaborating with Nanyang Academy of Fine Art, University of Singapore.
Outputs & outcomes
Outputs generated for Test Space are often a work in process in ready ness for a particular individuals’ milestones. In Test Space 2021 Dr Tom Baugh tested his film screening ‘Dialogues of Disorder’ ahead of the 2022 international conference Futures Ahead – Translations and collaborations between medicine, social science and the humanities at the centre for Medical Humanities and Bioethics, Linkoping University, Sweden. The 2023 Test Space saw Dr Tom Baugh present photographs and abstract that would later be used for an AHRC funding bid, titled ‘Revealing the lived embodied mental imagery caused by Complex Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder implicit to prolonged childhood trauma’. In 2022, and 2023 Dr Laura Rosser and Dr Karen Abadie presented artwork that was subsequently exhibited in the 2023 solo exhibition, ‘Resonating Bodies’ at the internationally recognised gallery, Arts Institute in Plymouth. All outputs are accompanied by an exhibition or conference catalogue and /or archived on websites.
Impact & recognition
The work presented and explored through Test Space has resulted in AHRC funding bids being applied to in the field of the medical humanities. Outputs have raised staff profiles and by doing so, contributes to wider projects such as Falmouth University’s ambition to secure a UKRI focal award, to create an arts and health humanities-led multidisciplinary Centre for Doctoral Training with Derby University (PI) and Nottingham University.