Going deeper into your research
Ruth Singer
I'm going to share some principles of creative research which I hope will help:
1. Going deeper rather than broader. While exploring for ideas and focus it is very easy to go very broad, researching around a subject in all sorts of directions. It's good to start with a broad exploration of your research theme but trying to cover too many areas just means we spread ourselves too thin. Concentrating for a time on two or three areas and going much deeper into them might help you find some of the focus you feel is missing. I'll give an example using a brief I saw recently to make new work inspired by the Egyptian gallery in a local museum. This is a very broad topic and almost impossible to tackle. So first of all I would explore broadly, maybe by mind-mapping some ideas in response to this, in order to find a few key routes to delve deeper into. There's the visual inspiration in the gallery - design, materials, function of objects. I think of this as surface level as I'm looking at the visuals not the stories within. So then I would go a layer deeper, maybe thinking about materials or making processes and see if that brings up something interesting. A layer deeper might be thinking about the makers of these surviving objects, or the archaeologists who dug them up. A deeper layer might be about Egyptian people seeing their ancient historical artefacts dug up and sold to western museums and collectors, taking me to repatriation of historical objects and current museum ethics.
So immediately we've gone from the purely visual to the much more complex social, political, colonial, human and personal stories associated with these artefacts. To take this deeper, I would research the museum catalogues for records of the archaeological expeditions involved, read more about excavations at the time, find out of there are contemporary accounts from Egyptians themselves, what has the museum got to say about colonialism in reference to these collections? Listen to podcasts and radio programmes, read novels and non-fiction. If you didn't know, you might have guessed, that I worked in museums as my first career and have a lot of thoughts about this - forthcoming episode of the podcast discusses this too! This is just an example of my thinking, going deeper into one or two themes within the much broader subject to find something that really fascinates me. Going from this research to making work can be tricky, I realise that. I'll come back to that later in the year when I've talked to more of you about the challenges you have with this.
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