Roosmarijn Hompe: How has your research practice developed since being in the Research Group?

Rachel Bacon: I have seen an incredible growth in my research. When I started with the Design Lectorate Research Group, I was only just beginning to look into environmental issues. They had always played a role in my work, but I didn’t have any idea about the discourses. So, I came into it really as a studio artist, where for me research was just about working in the studio, trying things out. I think that’s how many artists would understand re- search, in fact. I didn’t have the methodological theoretical components as part of my understanding, and all that really started with the Research Group.

I started to really think about time and the temporal clashes between this ancient geologic time and then this panicked time of climate crisis, these environmental feedback loops that are spiralling out of control. Even while this economic time is always speeding up, I’m invested in the artistic timescale of slowing down, which is what my drawing practice is all about. I’ve also continued to develop the method of researching I started in the Research Group, which was to connect my studio practice with field trips to mining areas.

As part of the Research Group, we presented our re- search at the “Fault Lines Research Forum” in 2018. Someone came to see my presentation and invited me to take part in a Creative Industries Fund research project on landscape in Russia. It lasted for around two years, from 2019 to mid 2021. There were 10 people involved — artists, designers, architects, and writers, and half of us were from the Netherlands, and the other half were Russians. We were collaborating on looking for sites in Russia where we could do individual projects to uncover the stories and narratives behind the landscapes.

I ended up focusing on the diamond mines in Siberia. I got funding from Mondriaan Fonds and Stroom and was all set to go there, and then everything was can- celled because of COVID-19 and then the war. But because I had this funding, I asked if I could look for alternative areas. And so, since then, I’ve been focusing on coal mining. These sites are very, very damaged, but also beautiful and fascinating. So, I am now focusing my research on a really specific location, and establishing a geologic connection, where it becomes a kind of source material for the drawings.

The thing that came very directly from the Research Group was the Russia project, titled "What Do Land Landscapes Say?" It had two exhibitions, one in Moscow at the Na Peschanoy Gallery and one at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, both in the Fall of 2020. I also did a bunch of lectures, including one at the Drawing Research Network at Loughborough University in the UK.

One of the participants, Sarah Casey, invited me to give a lecture at Lancaster Arts in June 2022. And she also was the guest editor of the next issue of the peerreviewed Tracey journal, with the theme of “Drawing the Anthropocene”, and she invited me to submit a paper for that. That paper has been accepted, and it’s being copy-edited for the next issue, sometime later in 2023.

In 2022, I also took part in an exhibition at Pictura Dordrecht on climate called “Troubled Waters”, with the artists Anja de Jong and Suzette Bousema [a tutor and graduate of KABK]. And then later there was also a drawing residency at Drawing Center Diepenheim, funded by the Mondriaan Fund. So, I spent three months in Diepenheim, and we had an exhibition, “Deep Drawing”, that ran until May 2023.

Alice Twemlow: How do you go about trying to embed, not only your research but also, ways of researching in your teaching?

It’s been a real struggle at times, I have to tell you. I teach the first year in BA Fine Arts and so we get the students who are quite young, trying to figure out their own visual language, trying to figure out who they are. And with my class, “Drawing Notations”, my intention for really the last sort of five, six years has been to try to bring the world into the studio, to get them to think about the world in a way that becomes part of their work. And they have, in general, a really big resistance to this, perhaps because the KABK has a reputation as a place of material practice — it’s well known for painting, for instance, and it’s a very sort of nonpolitical space, I think. But if you look at the art world, politics is informing everything, all contemporary art.

So, my question was always, why is this missing from the final exam shows that I see here? And then I realised that the students have a really hard time combining ideas and making because they’re two different processes. So, I started to introduce what I called the “visual archive”. I asked them to collect images and, from those images, do visual research. And then from that research, they make drawing projects. So, we start from this level of any personal fascination or obsession — the really tacky things you like, the really old-fashioned things, creepy-looking masks from old horror movies, ancient art, writing, scribbling — almost anything goes. And then they collect and collect and collect. And then I ask them to explore the artistic context for these things, because they need to know how to translate these references into something that is also contemporary, elegant and interesting and beautiful to look at. So, they suddenly see that they can make something that’s very visual. And they can see that this is part of this contemporary conversation, and it also has theoretical and social connections.

Once they’ve collected all these images, I ask them to organise everything. And when they organise all the images, often themes start to arise. And then from those themes, you can say, “okay, well, from here you can look at these thinkers, these writers, this particular area of interest”. I think it’s an effective method for getting them to connect to something personal with something that’s part of the world beyond them. And it’s through visual research.

The other thing that’s wonderful is that my colleagues have started to use it as well. So, we started with drawing, but it goes into all the other areas. So 2D, or 3D, or whatever else they’re doing, and when we see them starting to connect things up, it gives them all a way to talk and think about their work in more depth.

AT: Do they make a collective visual archive?

RB: They’re all individual. If I had more time, it would be great to be able to make connections that could work together.

RH: And how does this relate to the work that theory tu- tors are doing in the first year? Is it also integrated into theory courses?

RB: I would like to collaborate with a media theory teacher on making this way of doing visual research much more sort of layered. And the other thing is we could also just choose a theme, like ecology. When I’m engaged and learning myself, I’m also a better teacher. So, focusing on art and ecology would be sensible. And then I would ask them to look at artists working in those areas, we would collect examples, we could do that using the same method, but then focus on what it all means in terms of ecology.

RH: Does teaching the Individual Study Track course allow more room for research?

RB: I saw the IST as this possibility to teach a more indepth form of research, but for me the ISTs have not been functioning so well. There’s a big difference in the approach between the BA Fine Arts students and the other students. The non-Fine Arts students often want to learn to draw, and I have to kind of bring them back to doing research. So, there’s sort of a dis- connect between the different desires from the different departments.

RH: To which domain do you think your research contributes?

RB: I think my research contributes mostly to professional art practice and society. As part of the exhibition that’s on now in Diepenheim, they made a little film of the artists talking about their work and I was describing the trips that I’m taking to these coal mines and people were really interested and engaged with that. I’ve also been approached by a couple of artists who are also working with materials and raw materials who wanted to talk about this connection between the mine and the artwork, the transition from the raw material to the interpretation. So, there’s a lot of people interested in how material can have agency and become visible.

In how I contribute to new ways of knowing the world, it's probably in how I think about the open pit mine as a form of drawing. The idea of these digging machines making drawings, and how we might think about that in terms of how to re-draw or un-draw this damage to our planet.