11/09/2025 - Practice as Research

Ritchard Allaway
Sep 11
4 min read

11th September 2025

Dissemination: Visualising Practice as Research

Thoughts on just seeing work up - seeing as a collective together - visual representation working? Playing with visual presence/communication.

After my second-year students had concluded their studies, I took the opportunity to use the exhibition space they had created to install some of my own work from the past twelve months. This was a chance to place ongoing research into a gallery context and consider how it operated in situ. I hung a mixture of soil chromatographic prints, fabric hangings, soil chromapictographs, microbial prints, and soil samples contained in unearthing bags. Alongside these, I included a series of field tools and unearthed soil. While the prints and hangings were placed on the walls, the tools and soil were instead arranged within a table with a glass cover.

I have long been drawn to artists who use museum-style display tables or vitrines, something I would have dismissed many years ago. Over time, however, my understanding of practice-as-research has deepened, and I now see these display strategies as valuable methods of dissemination. While they can frame objects with an archival nuance, they also situate them as active, vital components of the research process. Displaying tools and soil in this way transforms them into artefacts, inviting spectators to look down upon them, to study them, and to consider their role in the work. This raises an important curatorial question: are these tools and unearthed materials as significant as the images on the wall? Do they function simply as supplementary evidence, or do they carry equal weight as creative and research outcomes? For me, this mode of display already begins to test how my curatorial decisions shape audience engagement, balancing context with experience and preparing the ground for installation-based approaches I intend to develop further.

Curating the work as a collective was both an enjoyable and revealing experience. This was the first time I had situated my research in a gallery setting where it could be viewed, studied, and experienced beyond my own studio practice. Unlike earlier presentations, such as the narrated film shown at the Pineapple Black Summer Show, the sound piece at Middlesbrough Art Weekender, or the sculptural installation Soil Respiratory System at my college, this exhibition was not centred on a single outcome. Instead, it brought together a group of works that interacted with one another across the space, from chromatographic prints and microbial images to soil samples and field tools. This approach allowed me to test how the works communicated aspects of my research question when seen together, while also observing how audiences navigated between them. Whereas Soil Respiratory System established a direct, participatory relationship with its viewers through live interaction, this display encouraged a slower form of engagement, asking audiences to move, shift attention, and draw connections. In doing so, it revealed how the research might be encountered as a collective body rather than as an isolated work.

The difference between Soil Respiratory System and this body of work lies primarily in the mode of audience interaction. Soil Respiratory System was a sculptural installation that demanded tangible engagement: audiences could read soil energy through a meter reader, pour small amounts of water onto the soil to boost nutrient and vitality levels, and then witness the energy output rise in real time. It was physical, measurable, and participatory.

This recent collection, however, took a different form. It functioned more as an archive, particularly with the inclusion of the table of contents. The wall-based works were playful in their visualisation of microbial movement, encouraging audiences to look closely and with patience, yet they did not always invite the same direct, participatory exchange as the earlier installation. As Claire Bishop notes in Installation Art (2005), “Installation art is a term that loosely refers to the type of art into which the viewer physically enters, and which is often described as theatrical, immersive or experiential” (p.1). This collection, though immersive in a different sense, was ultimately more static: a gathering of interactions I have had through walking across rural landscapes over the past twelve months, translated into experimental photographic forms.

The distinction Bishop makes between installation art and an installation of artworks (p.1) feels particularly relevant here. My exhibition leaned toward the latter, and I don’t consider this a negative. Instead, it provides clarity on what I define as installation and where my work currently sits. If I am to further disseminate my research through the frame of installation art, I must more directly address its physical form and, crucially, the role of the audience.

Julie H. Riess, in From Margin to Centre (1999), reminds us that installation art is a widely used term encompassing a range of practices, including video, performance, site-specific work, critique, and process. Yet across these diverse forms, Riess argues that “there is always a reciprocal relationship of some kind between the viewer and the work, the work and the space, and the space and the viewer … the essence of installation art is spectator participation” (p.13). The curation of this exhibition certainly considered audience navigation, guiding movement through varied materials, soil samples, and archival displays but it also raised questions about the extent of the audience’s reciprocal interaction with the work as a physical presence within the gallery.

In this sense, while the exhibition may not have fully embodied the immersive qualities typically associated with installation art, it nonetheless addressed key elements of the form. The work opened a dialogue between viewer, space, and object; it required audiences to negotiate materials and ideas across multiple registers. Although its identity as installation art may be uncertain, the exhibition carried within it significant components of the practice. This, for me, is not a limitation but an important step: it positions the work within the ongoing discourse of installation art while leaving open the potential for future iterations to expand more fully into its immersive, participatory possibilities.