Making Practice

The most exciting part of this project was the surprise of seeing how the other engaged and responded in this collaborative visual dialogue. It was a gift, the knowing of being seen. Canvases were mailed between Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, and New York City several times to develop this conversation. The artist-researchers were intrigued to acknowledge that the art works abstractly embodied the verbal conversations that ensued.

This project began with the invitation to participate in this curated journal special issue. Pauline Sameshima and Patricia Morchel were matched by the editor, and their journey began with e-mail conversations on sharing their experiences as women art educators in higher education.

In poetry, writing a line calls for more lines, the setting out of an image, the nuance of a word, and then its connotation sends out a line of relation. Collaboration is a line made in sand, the other’s relation cannot be erasure; what is erased is not gone, it always exits/exists in time, and what is set down overtop, like palimpsest, still carries the imagery or soundscape of the first call.

(Sameshima & Wiebe, 2018, p. 130)

Figure 1.

Pauline Sameshima and Patricia Morchel, 2018, Copse [Acrylic paint and India ink on canvas. 33 × 33 in.].

Figure 2.

Patricia Morchel and Pauline Sameshima, 2018, Bower [Acrylic paint and India ink on canvas. 33 × 33 in.].

The artists wondered how joint art making layered in a liminal studio, an ephemeral sandbox, with a sincere openness to unfixed-ness (Sameshima, Wiebe, & Hayes, in press) might enable them to articulate their understandings of being artist-academics in their studio practices. Wiebe (2018) suggests that “aesthetic work is a means of disrupting the merely material, objective entity of the body” (p. 58), and Pinar (2011) offers that the pathway through subjectivity and sociality is through the aesthetic experience. In their exploration and play with six raw canvases of the same measurements, they co-created a visual dialogue and discovered the mirror of yin and yang as echoes of the push and pull between being artists and academics, and that the healthy tension of playing in the liminal studio between the two is where they felt most creative.

Figure 3.

Pauline Sameshima and Patricia Morchel, 2018, Understory [Acrylic paint and India ink on canvas. 33 × 33 in.].

Situating Their Perspectives

Patricia is an adjunct lecturer and doctoral student in the Art and Art Education Department at Teachers College, Columbia University. She earned a Master of Liberal Arts in Museum Studies from Harvard University; a Master of Arts in Art and Art Education from Teachers College, Columbia University; and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Art and Art History from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Pauline is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Arts Integrated Studies at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada. She has a Bachelor of Education, Diploma in Visual and Performing Arts, a Master in Educational Leadership, and a PhD in Curriculum and Pedagogy.

Studio Practices

Pauline uses the arts in an interdisciplinary multimodal model she has developed with numerous teams called “parallaxic praxis” (Sameshima, Maarhuis, & Wiebe, 2019). Making art is integral to her research practice. She uses the arts in her research projects to support data collection, generate knowledge, analyze the data, and mobilize research findings to reach broader audiences. A key part of her data analysis is to translate the data from text to art and then to use the artefacts to generate dialogue amongst the research team, participants, and community. Pauline teaches arts-integrated methodologies in the graduate program.

Patricia is a practicing artist whose work focuses on organic abstract paintings and drawings. Her work is devoted to materials exploration with an emphasis on process by facilitating and honoring what naturally evolves on canvas and paper with a variety of mixed media. She is fascinated by the beauty of organic abstract shapes, marks, lines, muted colors, inkblots, layers, and rich textures. She highlights and celebrates these components within...