What is it?
Arts-based research treats creative practice as a site of inquiry rather than just expression. The work is not an illustration of an idea—it is where the thinking happens. Through process, material, and form, it allows aspects of experience, especially those tied to uncertainty, embodiment, and mortality, to surface in ways that exceed purely analytical methods.
A Metaphor
Think of two ways to understand the ocean: One person stands on the shore with instruments, measuring waves, salinity, and depth. Another person enters in the water, swims, feels the currents, struggles, and floats.
Both are learning something real.
But they’re learning different kinds of truth.
Arts-based research is closer to the second approach.
It assumes that some forms of knowledge, especially around experience, emotion, identity, or mortality, can’t be fully grasped from the shoreline. You have to enter the medium, work through it, and let something emerge.
Research?
In arts-based research:
The making is intentional inquiry, not just expression.
The process is examined, documented, and reflected on.
The work contributes to understanding something beyond itself.
So it’s not just “I made this painting or photograph.”
It’s: What did making this painting reveal that couldn’t have been known otherwise?
The Ocotillo Brush: Toned Kallitype Print
This isn’t really a photograph of a plant. It’s a record of an encounter. The ocotillo is there, but what I’m actually seeing is the condition under which it was seen—light slowed down, translated, fixed, and then reworked through chemistry. It feels less like representation and more like a process functioning as a way of knowing.
If I approach this work as arts-based research, the question shifts for me. I’m not asking, what is this an image of? I’m asking, what does this process allow me to see or understand that I couldn’t access any other way?
The spines hold that question. They’re sharp, repetitive, almost excessive. But in print, they do not read simply as the defensive structure of a desert plant. They start to feel like interruptions—points where the flow of the image becomes caught. The light hits them, slows, translates into tone, and something in my perception hesitates. My eye doesn’t move cleanly through the frame. It catches, adjusts, and recalibrates. That hesitation feels important. It mirrors something closer to lived experience, especially in moments where awareness intensifies.
The tonal range plays a part in that. The warmth of the toned kallitype doesn’t lock the image down the way silver might. It leaves it slightly unsettled. The forms hover a bit. Nothing feels fully resolved. I’m looking at something that seems to be in the process of becoming or maybe slipping away. That ambiguity matters. It keeps the image open. It resists closure.
The edges are doing their own kind of work. The pooled chemistry, the uneven border—those aren’t mistakes to me. They’re part of the evidence. They point back to the conditions of making (proof of process). They keep the process visible. Instead of pretending the image is clean or neutral, they remind me that it was constructed, handled, and negotiated.
When I place the image inside my framework, it feels like it sits somewhere between exposure and metabolization. The ocotillo itself is already a structure built for extremity—for heat, for scarcity, for survival under pressure. But the image doesn’t turn that into something heroic. Instead, it holds the tension. The spines protect, but they also expose something fragile. They mark a limit.
What the process seems to do is metabolize that tension into form.
The wet collodion negative brings duration into it. There’s time in the image—time that requires stillness, attention, a kind of agreement between me, the subject, and the environment. The kallitype print then translates that into another material language, one that carries its own instability and history. What I end up with isn’t a window onto the world. It’s an artifact of pressure, decisions, and transformation.
The knowledge here isn’t something I can easily state outside the work. It’s embedded in the relationships—between the plant and the desert, between my body and the exposure, between the chemistry and its limits, between the image and its refusal to fully settle.
What I recognize in it is this:
Perception under pressure doesn’t simplify—it thickens.
Form, if I stay with it long enough, starts to show me where it breaks down.
And the act of making isn’t about translating what I see. It’s about staying with something long enough that it can take shape without collapsing.