Welcome back to my blog, where I talk about being an illustrator and a researcher. What’s the difference between research-based illustration and illustration(practice)-based research?

*Warning: this topic makes my blood boil, so prepare for a tsunami of rant incoming!

I’ve alluded to this difference in my previous posts, and I am finally getting to the details of their distinction. This is a question that stumps many practice-based researchers at the beginning of their journey. What makes something a well-researched project as opposed to a research project?

My answer, after many readings and thoughts, is quite simple. It all depends on whether the work being made has been done before. A well-researched practice is a pursuit that seeks to better the maker, regardless of whether someone else has done it before. I could try gesture drawing, for example, to expand my skillset. I could also try metalsmithing to translate my illustrations into 3D. In other words, the pursuit makes me better as an artist and an illustrator. Practice-based research, on the other hand, is a pursuit that seeks to expand the field itself, in its understanding, application, etc. New knowledge is formed through the making, so the making is a vehicle where new understandings emerge. In short, the difference between the two is that of individual growth vs. evolution.

In practice, the difference is more subtle. A practitioner may be inventing new knowledge without realising. The expansion of knowledge through practice-based research may be very small or inconsequential. Both are perfectly plausible, and in fact, such examples happen very frequently. Here, I think the intent plays a key role. The conscious effort to research through practice eventually leads to new knowledge because a good researcher always asks whether something has been done yet, if-not-why-not, and how to make available resources to achieve something new.

A simple answer for something that boggles many early doctoral researchers, isn’t it? Here is the backstory of my journey in defining what practice-based research is for me. The first time I thought something strange about the whole thing was when I started discussing the final outputs of my research. At Loughborough University, I was informed that the word count of a practice-based researcher’s thesis is halved compared to that of a fully written thesis – around 40,000 words instead of 80,000. Alongside it, the researcher needed to provide a ‘significant body of work’ to make up for the slashed word count from the original requirement. The first thought I had when hearing of this was, “That’s not a bargain in any way, that’s an addition of writing on top of a body of work!”

Setting aside the debate around how to measure artwork in words, it sounded like I was setting myself to do double the work of an ordinary researcher, not half. Not only do I need to write a big body of text, but I also need to make a portfolio that is of value.

The second strange encounter I had while researching around this topic was where the papers were coming from. I was determined to get to the bottom of this topic, so I read about it from all fields of knowledge. That’s when I found out that a significant portion of what is called ‘practice-based’ came from nursing – nurses talking to and making snap judgements for the betterment of patients. I thought this was strange – the medical field is one I think is at the centre of research – a prominent letter in STEM! I was surprised to find that practical knowledge about medicine is classified as ‘practice-based.’

(You can see here that I was assuming ‘practice-based’ to be something non-practical or useful to wider society. Don’t be like me!)

The third strangeness of the topic was when I was trying to define what ‘practice’ exactly is. I kept thinking, “art isn’t the only practice that’s being made – scientists do and make things to make knowledge too, don’t they? Don’t they put one liquid into another, see and take pictures of what they see under the microscope, record their findings and share them in the form of charts and whatnot? What makes these not practice, while what I do is?”

Then, the readings got interesting. I read more into the hierarchies of research and its traditional ways of defining what research is, or ought to be. I read about the supremacy of writing in comparison with pictures, which extends to the difference in perceived value of knowledge depending on how it was produced. It soon struck me.

No reading I encountered has explicitly said this, but I’ve come to understand that practice-based research is a separate term that defines what traditional research cannot grasp. The term was first coined by practitioners wanting to gain legitimacy over what they do, which makes me think that there was significant backlash against considering artmaking or nurses talking to patients as ‘proper’ research. In other words, the whole term may stem from the traditional research community’s inability to understand, or accept, how what we, the researchers, are doing is the same as what they do, the makers. So much so that a new phrase had to be coined to distinguish them from us.

I’ve explained this in more detail in my thesis and in a journal article I wrote. Although there is quite a difference between a research-led practice and a practice-based researcher, a practice-based researcher is just a researcher. I hope that whoever is reading this, and who is interested in pursuing doing research, won’t get stumped or confused by the term. Instead, I hope they get excited about the prospect of researching through making and the chance to expand the field of knowledge through their hands.