To what purpose?

This study is being carried out as part of my studies at New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling (NSPC) and Middlesex University. This study has received ethical approval from the NSPC (in affiliation with Middlesex University) Ethics Committee.

I am seeking to collaborate with (visual) artists, who are themselves psychologists, who have experience of practicing, researching and educating in both disciplines. Whilst psychologists will have exposure to practicing, researching and educating as part of their training, artists experience in these areas is not limited to or definable by formal qualifications, but is inclusive. For example, as a practicing artist you may undertake research in preparation for an upcoming exhibition or offer workshops as a form of education.

I intend to provide a rendering of how a person engages with, makes use of and applies these different aspects (practitioner/researcher/educator) of their identity. For example, how as practitioner artist they make use of their skills, knowledge and/or experience when researching or educating as psychologist, and so on and so on.

I am also seeking to legitimise claims about the use of interdisciplinary research methods, informing training programmes for artists and psychologists, so as to enable trainees fuller access to and congruency across different aspects of their developing identities.

Through the act of collaboratively creating art, in the artists own studio, that tension between an artist trying to make work and the reality they encounter, is taken as rendering visible and textual the in-betweenness of their (co)responding identities (practitioner/researcher/educator).

You are fully entitled to claim any artwork generated during researching, and you will be contributing to a novel application of an interdisciplinary research methodology (a/r/tography) abridging visual arts and psychology.

The process is fully voluntary, you fully reserve the right to exit at any point.