Art-Shaped Analysis: Visual and Improvisational Practices as Sites of Inquiry

What becomes possible when qualitative analysis is done through artistic practice? This laboratory session invites participants into an approach where knowledge is generated through making and attention rather than represented. It emerges from a collaborative study with professional artists, and from a question: how can artistic ways of knowing — embodied, tacit, relational, and resistant to full verbalisation — be sustained in research without being flattened for clarity?
The inquiry unfolded through two intertwined analytic practices. One researcher worked through improvisational listening and reflexive response, treating analysis as an extension of the research encounter — attuning to tone, rhythm, affect, and the relational shifts between people. In parallel, a visual artist-researcher made image-based analytic works in response to the artists' narratives: material processes through which relationships, tensions, and conceptual movements became perceptible. These visual works are themselves analyses. They hold endangered conceptual worlds — forms of knowledge that resist immediate legibility yet carry epistemic force through material, affective, and relational engagement. Across both practices, meaning was allowed to emerge through making, sensing, and collaborative attention, in ongoing relation with uncertainty.
The session centres these works as primary research material, displayed for close, in-person viewing. Around them, participants are drawn through improvisational exercises into direct experience of attunement, relational attention, and in-the-moment responsiveness — a chance to feel this way of knowing from the inside, not only hear it described.
In foregrounding analysis itself as a minoritised way of knowing, the project shows how art-shaped analysis can sustain complexity, protect endangered conceptual worlds, and work otherwise than extractive logics in qualitative research.