Ask three artists what artistic research is and you will get three careful, slightly incompatible answers. That is not a failure of the field. It is a clue to how it works. What is artistic research, in plain language, is a way of producing knowledge through making — through painting, performance, sound, film, installation or other practice — rather than treating the artwork as a mere illustration of an argument written elsewhere.
A working definition without the jargon fog
Most universities still recognise research when it contributes something that others can inspect, discuss and build on. Artistic research keeps that ambition but relocates the laboratory. The studio, rehearsal room, editing suite or field site becomes the place where questions are tested in materials, bodies and time. A finished work can be a finding, not only a decoration attached to a thesis chapter. We have written at more length about the boundary between science and creative practice; the short version for newcomers is that method and reflection matter as much as virtuosity.
Practice-based and practice-led projects usually share three traits. There is a question that could not be answered by reading alone. There is a body of work that carries part of the answer. And there is a reflective trail — notes, scores, documentation, exhibitions, or writing — that lets peers see how choices were made. Without that third piece, even excellent artworks struggle to travel as research inside academic systems.
How institutions actually evaluate it
Peer review in the arts rarely looks like a double-blind journal pipeline for a dataset. Mixed panels of artists and scholars, exhibition catalogues, public presentations and specialist journals such as JAR form the real infrastructure. Our overview of peer review in practice-based research maps that machinery. For someone asking what artistic research is in practical terms, the evaluation culture is half the definition: a project counts when a competent community can argue about its contribution.
Doctoral programmes across Europe have normalised this path. The practice-based PhD is no longer an exotic experiment; it is a mainstream route with supervisors, milestones and examination formats that try to honour both the work and the reflection around it. How that doctorate evolved explains why so many Nordic art schools now treat research as something artists do from inside the medium, not only about it from outside.
What it is not
Artistic research is not a prestige sticker you attach after a successful exhibition. It is not identical with arts-based methods used inside social science. And it is not a demand that every painting come with a fifty-page methodology chapter. Ambiguity, subjectivity and site-specificity are often productive rather than defects to be engineered away. The field asks for accountability, not for the erasure of art's own ways of knowing.
Nor is every strong practice automatically research. A commission that solves a client's brief beautifully may still lack a question others can share. Conversely, a modest installation that carefully tests how audiences listen in a particular Nordic gallery can carry a clear research claim. Scale is a poor proxy.
A short checklist if you are entering the field
Write the question before you romanticise the outcome. Decide what will count as evidence inside the work — material tests, iterative performances, audience protocols, archival interventions — and what will live in accompanying text. Identify the community that could peer-review you: a journal, a festival with research tracks, a doctoral school, a museum programme. Budget time for documentation as part of the making, not as an afterthought when the opening is over.
What is artistic research, then, for someone standing at the studio door? It is the disciplined insistence that making can inquire — and that inquiry can remain answerable to peers without pretending to be laboratory science. Nordic institutions have spent two decades building rooms where that insistence is taken seriously. The rest is the work itself: stubborn, specific, and open enough that someone else can continue from where you left the question.
About Dr. Mira Solheim
Dr. Mira Solheim is an art historian and writer focused on artistic research, Nordic visual culture and the intersection of art with technology and film. She writes for Artistic-Research.no on methodology, institutions and practice.