Visual Arts Practice and Affect

This erudite and accessible book is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on artistic research. As in a tête-à-tête with an old friend, Ann Schilo confides her insights and the compelling first hand accounts of her four artist scholars illuminate ways an artwork comes into being through inner dialogue and an interweaving of reflective, analytical and emotional processes.

— Lesley Duxbury, Professor, RMIT University



In Visual Arts Practice and Affect: Place, Materiality and Embodied Knowing, Ann Schilo and her four colleagues — and former students — continue their ongoing project to interrogate their practice as artists and writers rooted in Western Australia. Through a deft mix of “… geographical location, social and cultural meanings, historical conjunctions, embodied sensibilities and lived experience” they re-examine the ethos of this place as a catalyst for the ideas that inform their work as artists. Their intertwining journeys reassert a shared belief in the importance of the visual arts as a way of knowing and interpreting the world.

— Ted Snell, Professor, University of Western Australia



Beautifully written, Visual Arts Practice and Affect unravels key geographic concepts – place, landscape, region, space, and body – while seeking ‘ways of drawing an intelligence’ about the ‘practical aesthetics’ and challenges that constitute visual arts practice. Readers follow the journeys of five non-Indigenous female artist-scholars based in Western Australia as they navigate ruins, whale teeth, topographics, colonial settler subjectivities, scholarly texts, paintings, granite boulders, mappings and print-making.

— Karen Till, Senior Lecturer, Maynooth University, Ireland