Recent years have seen a growing interest in arts-based methods for capturing data that often escapes more traditional methods. Creative industry value and impact measurement frameworks have largely been designed to capture instrumental benefits, with organisations and institutions in mind. As a result, intrinsic benefits and intangible value is often missed, and the experience of individuals overlooked. As contemporary creative practitioners continue to navigate the changing landscape of the UK’s creative and cultural industries, the need for approaches that forefront first-hand, individual experience of arts and culture increases. Current impact measurement frameworks are often shaped by policy attachment and competing agendas which can create tensions between organisational expectations and the values that underpin individual artistic practice. These pressures contribute to disparities, particularly when artists feel their intentions or ways of working are misaligned with expected instrumental benefits.
This project embodies a gentle approach to arts-based research, to explore gentleness within the context of contemporary creative practice. Through the ethnographic methodology of portraiture and using arts-based analysis, the experiences of six contemporary creative practitioners have been captured. A gentle approach has influenced the ethical grounding of the research, with care for the participants and the researcher prioritised throughout.
Participants took part in one-on-one studio visits and interviews. These took place in the participants’ places of work, including studios and homes. Interviews took place during the studio visits, and audio, field notes and images were recorded. A thematic framework was developed to organise the data, and visual analysis was used to interpret the data. A final round of sense-checking took place once the research portraits had been returned to each participant, through a short feedback survey.
Findings from this project demonstrate that portraiture offers a promising alternative method for capturing gentle and intrinsic value within the creative and cultural sector, that places the individual practitioner experiences at the centre of inquiry.