Practice in artmaking

In the Visual Arts syllabus, practice is a big idea rather than another word for rehearsing a skill. It names three linked things. First, the agency of artists, critics and historians, together with the work they produce. Second, the social structures, positions, actions and sequences of activity that shape what those people choose, how they proceed and how they judge results. Third, the perceptions, directions, habits of working and points of view of the people involved in the visual arts.

When you study practice you are asking who acts, inside what structures, and with what beliefs and ways of working.

Practice is intentional and informed. Artists do not produce work by accident; beliefs, motives, actions and ideas are built up over time through training, looking, conversation and repetition. The visual arts, including design, form a field with its own history, and that history keeps being transformed by innovation, new knowledge, new technologies and new people entering the field. Because of this, ideas about what counts as proper practice are fluid.

Sometimes change comes from something new, such as digital tools that let artists generate, scan or draw images on a computer; sometimes it comes from older conventions re-emerging, as when an artist returns to hand-built ceramics, natural dyes or analogue film.

Artmaking practice is the network of procedures you use to make art in the artroom: researching, generating ideas, testing materials, editing, refining, presenting and reflecting. These procedures are linked rather than a fixed sequence. A failed test print might send you back to research; a conversation with your teacher might change the scale of a work.

Exploring the conventions of practice (outcome P1) means noticing the accepted ways of working in a form or tradition, such as making a maquette (a small model) before a larger sculpture, pulling proofs to check a print before it is finished, or printing an edition of identical impressions, and then deciding whether to follow, adapt or resist them.