'Close' as a construct to critically investigate the relationship between the visual artist and the everyday.

This research proposes and develops a critical framework - a 'matrix' to make sense of the artistic process from the practitioner's perspective. It draws from the research of de Certeau into everyday culture and the art historical discourse of Bourriaud that positions art within models of social interaction. As a critical concept the everyday has benefits for re-thinking the nature of creative activity and its reception. The term participatory relational practice is used \ 11 this thesis to define an approach that situates the artist within the everyday. The matrix is constructed reflexively through three of my art projects and by analysing two artists engaged by the On the Edge research programme to conduct two projects. Used reflectively in and on practice the matrix sensitizes the artist to judgements, values and qualities within a dynamic process of exchange and transaction. The matrix represents a core from which judgements about practice are considered and negotiated. It comprises three inter-dependent dimensions, which the artist selfconsciously models. The aesthetic may be defined as the intricacies of giving form to experience, the ethical as enabling individuals to share a freedom to think, speak or act differently, and the polemical as forming, expressing and enacting a view or position. The research proposes that a nuanced critique may be defined as the interplay between the aesthetic, the playful and resistance. It responds to the need identified in the discourse to develop a multidimensional understanding of practice. The matrix is a way of considering and representing the aesthetic as part of an interdependent whole - a system of values. The research addresses artists and critical theorists interested in collaboration and multi-disciplinary work. The matrix is both interpretive and generative. It can be used to structure and evaluate projects. It has implications for pedagogy in terms of better equipping younger artists with the skills necessary for operating within the everyday as the multi-layered fields of civic society

Adjusting sensibilities: researching artistic value 'on the edge'.

An understanding of the relationship between systems of production and systems of value in the visual arts is essential to the production of new sustainable approaches to creativity. Contexts for working situated on the margins such as remote rural locations focus tensions between conflicting systems of value that require us to adjust our sensibilities. This paper traces these issues through an ongoing three year research project, On the Edge (OTE) (August 2001 - 4, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB)). Key stages of generative metaphor, originally identified by Schön, are used as an analytical tool to reveal the process of developing the research methodology

The dynamic of the edge: practice led research into the value of the arts in marginal spaces.

This paper articulates an approach to art and design practice that questions two fundamental assumptions: firstly, it is not framed by the creative practice of an individual artist delivering an authored artwork to a public or audience; secondly, it involves, in a creative process, people who do not necessarily or readily define themselves as creative in relation to their everyday life

On the edge: a new articulation of the visual arts in rural and remote areas.

This publication was published to accompany the forum Heaven on Earth which took place at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design on 7 December 2001