Artistic Core – Excellence in Artistic Practice – Excellence in Artistic Research

From “Focus on Education” day, 6 April 2022

In creating “visions” for strategic relationships between artistic research and education at KHiO, where do we look first?  It’s important to first identify the existing threads and practices that make KHiO the institution of excellence that it already is as a producer of artistic partitioners and artistic knowledge at the highest levels.  These visions are not best as “top-down” demands, but rather as the product of insights that grow out of the fertile experience and activities happening at the root levels within the departments – the interactions between students and research faculty.  The artistic core can be held and furthered with confidence as the guide into the realms of artistic research. 

Most students apply to KHiO because they want to be artistic practitioners, and we excel in what we do as educators and faculty practitioners.  Excellence in artistic practice is the core of excellence in artistic research.  How can we help excellence in education and in artistic research to influence each other even more?  How can we avoid over directing art into research and potentially smothering new creative visions?  Stagnation is an enemy of new knowledge, and most certainly of creative practices. 

At the BA level, we continue to practice the high quality education that has produced artistic excellence for so long while ensuring awareness of, exposure to, and preparation for crafting the relationships between art and research.  Focus at this level is on education and practice.  The MA level presents opportunities to carefully craft dedicated research moments while also taking care to not overburden the development of artistic practice.  At this level, focus can be placed on understanding the artistic research framework, and how artistic practice exists both autonomously outside of it, and within it as a platform for developing, reflecting upon, and sharing new artistic knowledge.  Our faculty partitioners serve as examples of research reflection on methods, context, and new insights through artistic practice itself, while ensuring that the creation and reception of new artistic knowledge flows in both directions.