Thinking Back, Making Forward

• Forthcoming: expected December 2025. You can pre-order this book in our webshop. As soon as the book is available, we will dispatch your order.

Editors: Brad Haylock, Charles Anderson, Jessica Wilkinson

Contributors: Annie Bellamy, Nicholas Boyarsky, Jeremie Brugidou, Jessica Bugg, Carla Cruz & Nina Hoechtl, Lionel T Dean, Anne Douglas, David Gates, Ismini Gatou, Joost Grootens, Graeme Harper, Andrew Hodgson, Alexander Hunter, Jessyca Hutchens & Naomi Vogt & Nina Wakeford, Åsa Johannesson, Eduardo Kairuz, Roger Kemp & Anthony Fryatt, Ilona Krawczyk, Victoria Lynn, Clare McCracken & Pia Johnson, Fraser Muggeridge, Yogan Muller, Libby Myers, Gerrie van Noord, Katerina Olivová, Alvin Pang, Cecilie Sachs Olsen, Benjamin Sheppard, Keg de Souza, Alice Twemlow, Chanda Vanderhart

Design: Zuzana Kostelanská, Maud Vervenne, Virginie Gauthier

Partner: RMIT University, Melbourne

December 2025, Valiz | pb | c. 400 pp. | 24 x 17 cm (h x w) | English | ISBN 978-94-93246-53-9 | € 29,50

In the last three decades, creative practice disciplines, such as art, design, architecture, creative writing, fashion, and others, have undergone a ‘research turn’, strongly stimulated by doctoral programmes to deepen artists’ reflections on the roots, relevance and urgencies of their work. There are many reasons why an individual practitioner might decide to undertake a PhD: a desire to uplift one’s practice, to contribute to the intellectual artistic climate, to teach, to pursue an academic career, or some combination of these, or other reasons.

The rise of artistic research or practice-based research is subtly transforming these disciplines. The integration of research into practice, however, has not always been smooth, and the transformations not unequivocally positive.

For this book we issued an open call to ask artists how PhD research has influenced their making and thinking. Our questions were: What are the impacts, urgency, and significance of the PhD for creative practitioners? How are these understood, captured, communicated? How did it change your practice? We even asked: should creative practitioners undertake a PhD in the first place?

Through its thirty contributions Thinking Back, Making Forward tackles these questions in an open way, to acknowledge, equally, the advantages and disadvantages of the creep of the PhD into artistic practice. At the same time, this book shows a wide range of possibilities of what research in artistic practice can entail.