A mode of inquiry in which creative practice functions simultaneously as method, site and output of research, producing knowledge that is embodied, material or procedural and that may require practice-based documentation or exegesis to be articulated.

Principle

When artistic practice is treated as a research method, knowledge claims arise from iterative, material and reflective practices rather than solely from propositional texts; evidence often includes artefacts, documented processes and critical reflection.

Demonstration

Illustrative scenario: An artist-researcher develops a novel pigment technique through studio experiments, documents procedures, variants and failures, and presents the resulting works together with a reflective commentary that situates the material findings as contributions to knowledge about material durability and visual effect.

Misapplication

Labeling any creative activity as research without an explicit inquiry aim, documentation or reflective framing; the error is to conflate art production for exhibition or sale with practice-based knowledge production.

Consequence

Recognition as artistic research affects evaluation criteria, expected outputs (artefact plus reflective documentation), funding eligibility and the methods by which findings are communicated and assessed within academic and cultural institutions.

Reversal

If creative practice is used solely to illustrate, test or communicate an external theoretical claim rather than to generate its own evidence and insights, it is practice-informed art-making but not necessarily artistic research.

Boundary

Clearly within: practice led by an explicit research question, with systematic documentation and reflective analysis. Boundary case: studio work with informal notes but no formal exegesis. Clearly outside: purely commercial art production or scholarship that uses only textual, archival or experimental laboratory methods without practice-based inquiry.

Semantic Tension

Artistic Research ↔ Conventional Academic Research — embodied, tacit and practice-based evidence competes with expectations for reproducibility, formal hypothesis testing and propositional validation.

Synthesis

Artistic research broadens epistemic categories by treating making as a mode of knowing: it requires methods that privilege material practice and reflection alongside or instead of propositional argument.