Visual arts offer a powerful tool for researchers as a knowledge-building practice that can challenge and dislodge traditional ways of thinking. The researcher can employ visual imagery in particular as a means of acquiring clarity and insight into a research topic. This can be achieved through collaboration with visual artists to explore the geographical ways of knowing through arts-based methods.
Harriet Hawkins, for example, worked closely with a practicing visual artist, Annie Lovejoy, who was exploring notions of community as an artist-in-residence at Roseland Peninsula in Cornwall, United Kingdom. The two artist-researchers collaborated to produce an artists’ book, “insites.” This project investigated the production of social relations and social spaces through creative cultural practice; it used photographs, drawing, maps, and reflective text to uncover meaning. The resulting book fused visual imagery with explorations of alternative “ways of knowing” place to reflect on the varieties of geographical knowledge that emerge from a creative-research partnership.