This new podcast episode, the start of series four, is a recording of my first Cultures of Care Group talks. For each CoC Group I write an essay to share on an aspect of care in creative practice. In April 2024, I chose to talk about research as a creative care practice. You can read the full text below or listen to it in the podcast.
Play here
Download the full transcript here
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I realised that my creative work needed to be research-focussed. In some ways it was always there but I didn’t realise it. Part of the teaching I do now on artistic voice and finding your own style is based on the principle that it is there inside you – and it needs bringing out rather than finding externally. One’s own artistic voice, creative purpose, is there within, we just need some help drawing it out, trusting ourselves to acknowledge what we truly know deep in our hearts. We need the belief and the focus to separate this from the commercial imperatives of running a business and the social expectations of what we are constantly told, as creatives, that we should be doing to be ‘successful’. That’s how it was for me, in the early years. I started my self-employed creative work in 2005 at the age of 30. In those days I was firmly a designer-maker, creating products for retail, alongside teaching and freelancing in museums. I had buried my true purpose, my voice, thoroughly under the financial necessity of making a living and all the practical advice that was available at the time about how you make a career from making things in textile. Looking back I knew I was taking the wrong route at the time. In my final two years working as an education officer at the V&A I had the wonderful task of developing learning programmes alongside Sue Lawty who was artist in residence with the textiles department. Sue was a tapestry weaver but for the residency and exhibition she worked with tiny stones collected from British beaches. I was fascinated but baffled by this as textile practice and in awe of Sue’s meaningful communication of her research process and confidence in her artistic voice. I wanted to do things like this but I didn’t know how and I didn’t think to ask.
Instead I pursued making bags and clothes and the things I already knew how to do and spent most of my time developing a textile workshop & teaching practice which kept me afloat for many years. I buried, indeed entirely forgot, that research and meaningful artistic practice was what inspired me before I even knew it.
I have regrets about this lack of self-knowledge which led me down a path that ultimately wasn’t right for me, but I know that if I hadn’t gone down the craft / product route, I wouldn’t be here now. More than regret, I suppose I just wish I had figured out my wrong path a bit sooner and taken a shorter cut to the right path rather than the scenic route of product, retail and shows that led to a depressing lack of sales. I could also maybe regret the diversion of writing sewing books and teaching sewing for over 10 years which again led me down a financially stable path but a long way from creative research and artistic expression. However, that textile and craft world has been so wonderful, the opportunities and connections I have made are a cause for celebration, never regret. I found my way back to research via places where research-based creative practice was an anomaly and if I hadn’t been in those places, I might not have noticed what it was I was missing. I truly believe that the journey I have taken away from research and the roundabouts of product and then back to research has made me better at what I do now. I learned so much, including how to teach, how to share, and write and create community and connections. It almost like having two interconnected careers in my creative practice. One did not stop and the other start, like my true first and second careers (first being museum practice) but in the same way as that change of career at 30, I know that I would not be the artist I am now if I had not firstly worked in the museum sector and secondly been a designer-maker and teaching in the craft and textile world. Of course looking back, I should have known all along that I am a researcher first and maker second. Of course it is obvious now but I had to live the life and do the work I’ve done to get to this point of self-awareness. I had to do the experiential and embodied research of scraping a living as a maker, teacher, freelancer to reach this point.
I have always been a researcher though, right back to my childhood when I obsessed over dresses in (now defunct) costume museums, I was a researcher in toddlerhood when I dug up broken china in old rubbish tips with my dad. I was a researcher when I subverted my A-level Geography project into historical & sociological research about local footpaths and access rights (which I have returned to over 30 years later). And of course I was a researcher when I chose to do a degree in Medieval Studies rather than art or design history which were some of my other options. I was not actually good enough at art to go to art college and my parents were less enthusiastic about me doing that anyway so I opted for an academic degree full of variety and truly interdisciplinary which really suited me. I fell deep into a well of women’s history, art and design history, religion and landscape history. And I was still a researcher at heart when I went on to a Masters Degree in Museum Studies and investigated the impact of replicas and reconstruction in museums and heritage buildings. That was about the knowledge and skills of makers and the lack of appreciation and understanding of craft skills in the museum and heritage sector, again something I have circled back to many times in the intervening 30 years. I didn’t know that what I was, or what I should become, was an artist-researcher, despite the fact that I spent my weekends and holidays re-enacting medieval history, learning forgotten textile techniques, developing my communication skills by sharing and teaching others and indeed starting my self-employed career making reproduction textile trimmings for clients including Shakespeare’s Globe, and demonstrating weave, tassels and trimmings in historic buildings as well as researching them in museums, archives and churches treasuries. Working in a semi-academic museum environment like the V&A in my late 20s was significant. I was in the learning department, running events and programmes and absolutely not expected to be knowledgable about any particular aspect of the collections but to be a generalist and good at sharing and communication. Many of my colleagues had art or design training and often a creative practice alongside their paid work. Mine of course was a bit different, being research-based with a purely hobby sewing practice. What I did have was a research interest that I was able to explore while I was there – textile techniques from the medieval to modern couture.
As I headed towards 30 I felt the need to get out of the museum profession, in part due to chronic repetitive strain injury in my dominant hand after 10 years of desk work and in part a desire to do something more research-focussed, namely a PhD. I explored two avenues: one the medieval textiles research that I had already begun (and which still sparkles in my memory sometimes, calling me back to the boxes of papers in my loft and the museum stores with tassels hidden within them). The other was related but broader, the transference of textile making skills and haptic knowledge – or the lack of it in the modern Western world – which so fascinated me in my research into historic techniques and conversations with curators and contemporary makers. I do almost regret that one, in some ways. But I also wanted to make. I was fearful that I was losing the use of my hands through computer use and thought I might as well try making things and then at least I would be creative with what was left of my hand and arm muscles. Also I couldn’t afford to continue living in London and doing a PhD, though looking back I might have managed part-time with continuing to work at the V&A. I thought a making career would be more financially stable too. I clearly didn’t research that very thoroughly!
At 30 I quit my job, bought a lot of vintage fabric and moved me and my sewing machine to Brighton to embark on this new career, shelving my research to focus on product and teaching. Those early years were tough, I tried many things without any real direction or purpose until I remembered how much I loved fabric manipulation and historic techniques that I had been looking at in my research. That wide-ranging group of techniques created the backbone of my making career. I created an impactful body of work that got me noticed and eventually led to a writing a book about Fabric Manipulation – during the development of which I got to research techniques, how they were used and taught and shared or forgotten. Of course I loved aspect of the book more than the writing up the step by step instructions or even in some cases, making the samples. It was a good time though, and I learned an awful lot about what I wanted to do with my time and creative energy. As an aside, despite this being my 3rd book and involving a lot of sewing, my hands were much, much better than they had been when I used a computer all day rather than just some of the day.
I built up my teaching work around this specialism and then expanded to wider textile teaching, including sharing a lot of what was my developing research-based artist practice alongside, so by the time the book came out, my own work had actually developed, I had found my artistic voice and confused everything by writing a book about what I no longer actually made.
In the years before the book came out, I had been slowly plodding away at developing my own style and doing some research-based work, which mostly resulting in products because that was what I knew. In 2007 I was maker in residence with Bilston Craft Gallery and I got to explore a historic building as inspiration for my work which really felt right. It was temporary though and I had to get back to retail and particularly to teaching which was my bread and butter income. In 2008-9 I got a year’s freelance work back in the museum sector, developing a community-curated fashion exhibition. It was intense and exhausting and wonderful and awful at the same time, but it clarified for me that I didn’t want to go back into museum work, I wanted to get back into my studio and do work that had this research-root, had meaning and told stories.
Looking back now, maybe that is the point where I suddenly made the change to research-based work, at least in my own mind. It took several more years to make that a reality, what with the books and teaching and making a living challenge thrown in. I had a commission from a museum shortly after finishing the museum job and that helped to push me in a new direction. Another project that I have often credited with helping me work this all out was actually a rather unlikely one: working with a primary school to make banners about their village history. I developed a project concept which was not about my own creative methods – fabric manipulation with 5-11 years olds was not going to work. Previously my community work had been about my techniques but I figured out in this project that what was going to work was a more research-based approach. I loved the project in a way that I have never before or since enjoyed working with hoards of children. We made drawings and cut-outs from photos, we painted papers and made patchwork, we did ethereal drawings on tracing paper and prints on sheer fabric and we explored ideas and concepts rather than focussing on one technique. Of course we did too many things and too many processes but it was enlightening for me and I hope for the kids too, they seemed to love it!
At the end I had a realisation that this was what my own work should be, not just for community projects. I wanted to do research and then find the right technique or process to share the story in a meaningful way, to engage with the story not just technique. I just wanted to do research and see where it led, to follow my own curiosity and to experiment and discover.
Around this time, in a very intense work winter, I contracted flu which led to post-viral dizziness which has continued to come and go regularly for the last 16 years and which took 10 years to properly diagnose. I am only now finally coming to terms with this chronic illness which has shaped the majority of my freelance career and life. This condition and the over-work which triggers it, is actually why I have been forced (or is it empowered) to shift my working practice from intensive teaching to more research-based, quieter model. My illness is not compatible with with a lot of travel, teaching and deadlines. My brain, my body, simply gives up after too many of these things and then I am good for nothing much for weeks or months at a time, which is also not compatible with a heavy teaching schedule and exhibition deadlines. For years I have fought against it, particularly in the undiagnosed years, and just tried to carry on regardless but eventually accepted that intense teaching and the travel associated with it was causing the flare ups. I pulled back on teaching and began to work on funding applications for exhibitions and closer-to home community projects for my income which was a considerable improvement. There’s been a lengthy transition period while I worked through all of this and cut back on teaching only to fill that gap with exhibitions which are differently exhausting and by the time we got to 2019-2020, I was needing a break from both, which if course the pandemic provided me with. Overall, in lockdown, I was mostly better. I established that my condition was also triggered by stress other than just workload, but the lack of travel and teaching actually improved things for me overall.
The work I did during lockdowns (such as Textiles in Lockdown research and artist support programmes) reminded me that research, quieter more inward-facing work is more nourishing and supportive to me that all the outward-facing, delivery-intensive work that I had been doing.
I know now that a PhD is far from the only way to pursue research, although I still yearn for the single-minded focus of a defined course of study) and that this model of artist-researcher is more caring for me than academic study. I think, I hope that it can also be so for others. I believe I am able to be more creative and broad in what I consider research than academia allows too. Research-based artist practice is, at least for me, a care practice. Research is also a caring way of being an artist. A research-based practice is slow and thoughtful, it takes us away from the capitalist imperative of productivity and making things that ultimately the world does not need. By making occasional narrative pieces out of materials that are already old I am able be creatively expressive and tell complex stories in artworks that don’t rely on a market of wealthy people to purchase or commission. Through this less intensive working practice, I am able to care for people and planet. I do rely on public grants of course, which is a pretty uncaring system overall, but it does at least focus on community and public good and very little on pure commercialism.
Research-based practice for me is a holistic approach to creativity and work. I’m never not being an artist, I am never not seeing and understanding the world through my own unique lens and I’m never not wanting to express some of those thoughts and understandings through creative practice and connection with others. You’ll probably have noticed that I have been talking about research-based practice for some time and have not given a definition of what it actually is. I am reluctant to share a dictionary definition here because in part, it’s my nature to resist formal delineation and boundaries of creativity, and also because I think it’s as hard to define as ‘creativity’ as a concept.
I struggled badly with the history courses that formed an essential part of my first degree in Medieval Studies. I loved the research but I hated the methods we had to use to present our findings, the established structure of how you do history essays. I much prefer to find things out and then share my thoughts and feelings, taking inspiration from this sources. I am not trying to be an academic historian, not trying to teach facts or even opinions. What I’m personally interested in with using historical and other research sources is getting to the heart of things, the emotions and personal stories and sharing what matters to me. It certainly makes things a bit tricky when your creative research overlaps with academics and specialists, as I did with Criminal Quilts.
I seem to have built my career around not doing things how you are ‘supposed’ to do it. Maybe that’s part of my artistic voice and indeed my life’s purpose! People in my Maker Membership will know that although the group content is heavy on supporting research to create meaningful work, I do not define what I think you should be doing to achieve this. There is no right and wrong with creative practice research, and this is another tick in the box for me in considering creative research a care practice. It allows you to explore what matters and tap into your own feelings and emotions around the subject without fear of getting it ‘wrong’. I noticed in my conversations with creatives that there can be a sense of fear with the idea of research, that there is some secret that you need to know to be able to do it and that there is right and wrong. I am sure there is right and wrong in other contexts, such as academia or science but not in creative practice research. It is possible that the way research-based practice has been talked about in the art world has contributed to this feeling of inadequacy and being not able to ‘do research properly’. I’ve talked myself round now to feeling that maybe I will give a very simple definition of what I think research is, fundamentally: ‘Exploring what matters to you.’
Exploring is one of my favourite words to describe what it is that I do. Curiosity is another way of thinking about research that makes it less intimidating. Exploring and curiosity might involve digging into current issues, historical events, personal emotions or the landscape in front of us. It might include or involve academic journals and other formal types of research, it might be browsing in museums (as mine often is) or it might be walking a footpath alongside an old hedge and noting the species or having a conversation with someone who knows different things to you. I don’t intend to try and list every kind of exploration that may lead to creative responses as it is an entirely unique to each person as their own creative practice is. Whatever the format or method the research takes, it requires slowing down and paying attention, it requires thoughtful consideration and it requires intensity of focus. Following your curiosity requires learning and discovery, finding out that you have been wrong or have misunderstood, it might require you to find out what others thing and how others respond or feel too. Exploration and curiosity requires taking care of your subject, being gentle with it and with yourself and your responses and engagement with it. We need to take care of our research subject, treat it with respect, maybe even reverence and be gentle with its flaws and failings, and celebrate what is wonderful and joyous about it too.
By exploring and noticing we are caring. By sharing what we are noticing, we are creating, generating and inspiring care by others. Research can open deep wells of information and alongside it, compassion and curiosity. Being curious about the world and its tiny, overlooked fragments of stories is care. Creating artwork which tells those huge or tiny stories is care. This all works as a cycle:
curiosity leads to creativity which leads to connection which leads to care which leads back to more curiosity in a cycle that we care-takers and care-makers share with the world through our creative practice. Through care-taking and then in turn, care-making, a research-based practice cares for both the maker and for the wider world, contributing to a culture of care.
Ruth Singer 
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