Creative Arts Practice

Trinity College has an exemplary tradition of creative arts education in its arts disciplines (Creative Writing, Drama & Theatre Studies, Film Studies, Music) and more recently in Digital Arts and Literary Translation. Creative Arts Research has long been perceived as being conducted mostly in linguistic media, whereby the process of the arts research is interpreted for the knowledge it generates, in some cases standing in for the arts practice itself. Nevertheless, in the past decade and more the arts themselves have come to be seen as the end products of research processes: the practice of the art is a research process in itself.

Creative arts research at Trinity College is visible currently in its innovative music compositions, theatre productions, its digital films, and its creative writing in a wide variety of genres. Further, the formation of creative artists in Trinity College’s associated conservatoires, The Lir –National Academy of Dramatic Art, and the Royal Irish Academy of Music, provides further impetus for research not only in arts education but also in the education and training of artists themselves.

The practice of creative arts rarely exists in an ‘arts’ vacuum. More often than not the arts act in interdisciplinary ways; for instance, they are processed as culture in humanities research, their practices are analysed as social processes in the social sciences, they are purveyed as content for creative technologies, economic markers for creative industries, and are applied in health-care settings. By building on existing strengths in the creative arts, Trinity College is in a unique position in Ireland for nurturing and developing new approaches to creative arts research and is well placed for exploring new interdisciplinary models, methodologies and practices in a variety of research settings for a range of new research outcomes.

The Creative Arts Practice research theme thus aims to broaden an understanding of the applications of the creative arts in interdisciplinary research contexts, as well as furthering and expanding existing research in the arts’ specific media.

Research Champion

The research champion for this theme is Professor Brian Singleton.