Making an Exhibition of Ourselves: a participative inquiry that seeks to create change through generating artful representations and curating new ideas using ‘Bridging, Making and Curating’

The question this inquiry asks is ‘How can we hear what people have to say, have their words represented for others to hear and for them to be organised in a such a way that positive action can emerge into their world?’.
This is an Action Research inquiry set in the industrial modernist world. The start was my first-person inquiry as I tried to be heard again following a work-related mental illness. Through this very personal experience I developed an approach that helped me recover. The approach was based on Artful Knowing; ‘questioning norms and assumptions through artful activity that is directly sensed and experienced’1, where I expressed myself through made objects. I learned that my Making practice only served me so far and that the additional factor in recovering was through the curation of objects with others and then learning from their responses.
While my recovery was nearly complete my inquiry was not. I extended this to a second-person inquiry involving first individuals and then groups of participants. From these separate inquiries emerged a method. My thesis is that for people’s potential to emerge a series of steps are necessary. This approach is Bridging, Making and Curating. The Bridging is about creating engagement and social connections; the Making asks people to build artefacts that respond to an inquiry question; and the Curating develops means of displaying the artefacts so they can be understood and developed through conversation and interaction. Any one of the individual steps is not enough, it is only the whole system that creates the environment for change.
This work provides a method that can be used by creatively orientated Action Research inquirers. Specifically, it adds a comprehensive element to Artful Knowing and Making by offering the elements of Bridging; Making links with co-inquirers and the context around the inquiry, and curational practice from the art world; namely keeping and display, postproduction and interactive exhibiting.
Inquiries undertaken using this approach have made positive changes for individual co-inquirers -and teams involved. This thesis offers the approach for others to use.