A Practice Research Enquiry: The Materiality of Meaning Making in Art Gallery Learning.

This collaborative opportunity enables an artist-educator to connect to the National Gallery's Collection through their own practice as an artist, at the same time directing this activity towards informing the development of the Gallery's Learning programmes. The knowledge held at the National Gallery on the processes and techniques of the artists represented within the collection forms a framework for this project.

A collaborative practice-based and pedagogical foundation for this research is formed through a partnership with Goldsmiths, University of London. This project will allow cross- fertilisation of expertise, as well as practical testing and experimenting by an artist-educator PhD student, with the objective of understanding how the new art studio in the Centre for Creative Learning at the National Gallery can be used most effectively.

Research questions include:

How can the National Gallery use the opportunities offered by the new Art Studio in the transformed Centre for Creative Learning to explore creative practice inspired by the collection in that space? How can this provide benefits for the Gallery's Learning programmes? More specific research questions to be addressed include:

How does understanding of the creative practices used to make works of art affect what learners come to know and understand?

What connections can be made between the creative and learning processes that some of the artists represented by the Collection would have experienced, and the creative processes that the learners could engage with in the National Gallery's new Art Studio, mediated by the artist-educator and enhanced by their own creative practice?

How can the National Gallery convert and embed the outcomes of this project into the new Learning programmes which take place in the Centre for Creative Learning for children and young people visiting the National Gallery in future? In particular, how can this research support the intersections between the gallery's learning programmes and their offer to schools?

Practice-based research acts as an investigation into how objects can be pedagogical and used to locate the commons of the in-between space within the national collection, where meaning, developed through making and informed by people who face barriers to cultural capital, can be activated.

The intersection of cultural capital, privilege, and accessibility forms a critical interest for this study through the exploration of the materiality of meaning making.

The practice-based research seeks to explore how the materiality of objects plays a crucial role in activating spaces and engaging people, opening alternative lines of enquiry. By carefully selecting and manipulating materials to make and transform ordinary objects into conveyors of meaning, provoking sensory experiences, enquiry and curiosity. The tactile qualities, textures, and physical presence of these materials invite interaction with the artworks, this engagement can challenge preconceived notions, evoke emotional responses, and inspire new perspectives.

Through the material nature of objects, the practice creates dynamic environments that encourage active participation and reflection, making the viewers co-creators in the interpretive and iterative process.

Locating the research within the National Gallery will utilise both the collection and programming to develop a practice-based research contribution to the fields of pedagogy, cultural accessibility, and social equity by providing a survey of, and response to, how objects can facilitate access to cultural capital. The findings will be relevant to curators, educators, programmers but fundamentally aims to talk to individuals who identify as facing barriers to, or disconnection from, culture.