PEER-SUPPORT | MENTORING | STUDIO-SPACE

IN MORE DETAIL

Welcome to the 2026 Graduate Research-Creation Residency, hosted by PopeCullen at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts on Toronto Island, focused on research-creation and practice-led approaches to graduate research. PopeCullen is a collaboration between artists Simon Pope & Sarah Cullen. Sarah has run the MOTHRA artist-parent residency programme at this venue for the past seven years, and we both host a walking & art residency during the summer. This latest residency is speculative, responding to conversations that we have had over the years concerning the different approaches to creative and artistic graduate study at various universities across different territories.

We have both been involved in these institutions at points when both the ‘creative turn’ in research and the implementation of doctoral degrees in creative practice began to take hold. We have both been graduate students within these institutions, and Simon was a tenured research-track professor in Fine Art in the UK, supervising and examining practice-led doctoral candidates and mentoring colleagues as they navigated the demands of research audits. He currently supervises for the joint Transart Institute (USA)/Liverpool John Moores University (UK) Creative Practice PhD. Sarah studied at masters level in Cultural Geography at the University of London (2008-9) at the point of the ‘creative turn’.

Simon will lead this residency and be your main point-of-contact, drawing on his experience of graduate programmes to support your work. He Returned to doctoral study at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (2012-15), and has first hand experience with dealing with supervisors, negotiating the line between academic and professional practice, working out how artistic practices engage with research processes, experimenting with how textual and other practical research outputs operate in support of a thesis, participating in research communities, defining research validity, “contribution to knowledge,” examination, and so on.

The aim for this residency to attend to these things, and more – the practical things, and their articulation in theory, that we deal with during a process of graduate study undertaken in creative, artistic ways.

So, to borrow from cultural geographer Harriet Hawkins, rather than focus wholly on the many ‘substantive concerns’ of specific disciplines and individual projects (e.g. concepts of space, place, participation, community, etc.), we’ll begin by attending to the ‘doings’ that sit at the heart of the creative turn’ within our disciplines (Hawkins, 2019).

In particular, together we’ll attend to how this ‘creative turn’ affects how we do graduate research. While this will inevitably touch on more general discussion of how creative work counts or qualifies as research, we will always focus on graduate degrees and their processes. Primarily, this is done as a way to head-off the inevitable (and persistent) barrage of sceptical questions that artistic researchers often get faced with (i.e. "how does art even qualify as research?" etc.) and the constant self-justification that they get lumbered with. As a manoeuvre around this, we begin by acknowledging that practice-led research is already underway within many arts, humanities, and social science disciplines, and already firmly established within specific higher education/post-secondary institutions – the institutions that we are currently enrolled in, are applying to, supervise for, or are employed by.

But we will also acknowledge that the graduate degree is fundamentally a process of learning and discovery. Following from what we understand of learning cycles and development trajectories (e.g. Belenky et al, 1986; Baxter Magnolia, 1992; Ambrose, 2010), we want to attend to how this creates opportunities for transformation of ourselves as researchers, as well as our disciplines, and our institutions.

The aim is to enable participants in this residency to concentrate on their own projects while also opening-up their work to others for discussion. In the spirit of co-learning that PopeCullen adhere to, we want to create opportunities for exchange between participants that will lead to self-reflexion and mutual transformation. We’ll steer clear of working according to the ‘banking model’ of teaching (Freire, 2005) where nuggets of knowledge are imparted from on high. Rather, this is a residency entirely focused on co-learning among peers; we all have our experience of graduate research-creation or practice-led research, and new knowledge and understanding will emerge from our conversations and exchanges during the week.