What is Arts Based Research?

“Art-based research can be defined as the systematic use of the artistic process, the actual making of artistic expressions in all of the different forms of the arts, as a primary way of understanding and examining experience by both researchers and the people that they involve in their studies” (McNiff, 1998).

Examples of Art Forms:
Performatives - drama, literature, poetry, music, dance, street performance, installation/interactive part piece, or any combination of the above…
Art-Based - painting, sketching, pottery, sculpting, textiles, photography, mixed media, anything else one can imagine…

Examples of why a shift to the arts is occurring:
“For instance, my reciting papers to audiences or, worse, reading text from PowerPoint presentations directly to them (audiences who were certainly capable of reading slides for themselves) contributed to my self-inflicted discontent. I began, therefore, to look to the arts and humanities for possible tools which might be transposed in order to better disseminate my interview material at conference gatherings. As collage-makers, narrators of narrations, dream weavers, qualitative researchers are natural allies of the arts and humanities.”- Dr. Kip Jones

“The arts, as Eisner (1998) and a host of artists remind us, invoke multi-dimensional responses both from their makers and their audiences. They allow an engagement of the whole human being. The use of arts-based approaches to research, therefore, has grown from the desire of researchers to elicit, process and share understandings and experiences that are not readily or fully accessed through more traditional fieldwork approaches” (Greenwood, 2012).

Arts have the potential to capture the attention of an audience in a deep and powerful way. The Arts-Based research approach has the potential to both inform and inspire.


“Arts-based research methodologies are characteristically emergent, imagined, and derivative from an artist/researcher's practice or arts praxis inquiry models; they are capable of yielding outcomes taking researchers in directions the Sciences cannot go” (Rolling, 2010).

Art Quotations

“Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research.”

-Pablo Picasso

“Art is research into the unknown, adding a little to the fund built up by earlier generations. This is the task of the artist.”

-Olle Baertling

References

Greenwood, J. (2012). Arts-based research: Weaving magic and meaning. International Journal of  Education & the Arts, 13 (Interlude 1). Retrieved March 16, 2013 from http://www.ijea.org/v13i1/

McNiff, S. (1998). Art-based research. Retrieved March 16, 2013 from http://www.moz.ac.at/files/pdf/fofoe/ff_abr.pdf

Rolling, J. H. (2010). A paradigm analysis of arts-based research and implications for education. Journal of Issues and Research, 1(2), 102-114.