Future resource: Ph.D. student collaboration

Future Reflections Research Group (FR) was a collaboration of three Ph.D. student researchers that developed in parallel with their doctoral studies at Chelsea College of Arts (London, UK) between 2007 and 2010. The group's performative presentations, critical/creative writing and relational art addressed the interplay of theory and practice in art research as an emerging field of enquiry. Taking the art research conference as a main site of investigation, FR questioned the relevance of this largely academic format for valorising practice-based research. What emerged over the group's eight projects can be described as the beginnings of a shared sensibility that used reflective and reflexive techniques to interrogate the relationship between ‘art’ as an extradisciplinary creative practice and ‘research’ as a knowledge enterprise subject to university-based conventions. Written as a dialogue, this paper discusses how FR as a student-led collaboration ‘practised theory’ reflexively, with this understood as a particular kind of reflective work, operating towards a shared praxis of art research within the group. While the respective Ph.D. projects of FR's members informed their shared research, this collaboration developed aspects of both form and method that were not anticipated at the outset. The paper explores ways of resourcing collaborative Ph.D. student research in post-doctoral work and beyond. This reflexive potential suggests a means of making practice-based research more sustainable, with earlier enquiry providing a resource for later investigation.