Becoming Part of the Architecture: Embedded Artistic Research

This output surfaced from a dialogue between five researchers (Jonathan Orlek, Stu Burke, Julia McKinlay, Victoria Sharples & James Thompson), who have been embedded in different artist-led organisations in the North of the UK, including GLOAM, Threshold, The Tetley, and East Street Arts. For this interview with Sluice, they came together as friends, creative peers, and members of Plant: Embedded Research Network, a network that supports and analyses embedded research with arts and architectural organisations.

Embedded research is often characterised by an individual moving into a non-academic host organisation to undertake research as ‘some kind of team member’. Within arts organisations embedded research can produce uncertain or unstable positions – for example in her lexicon entry for ‘embeddedness’ (in the publication Making Maters: A Vocabulary for Collective Arts) Pia Louwerens describes her experience of entering an art institution with the role of Embedded Artistic Researcher as follows: “I would be embedded as an artist in an institution, but not working at the institution as an artist; it would be different. How, I didn’t know yet.” In response to Sluice’s 2024 Spring/Summer issue ‘VERNACULAR’, Orlek, Burke, McKinlay, Sharples & Thompson reflect on the type of team members they have become, and the different languages they use and script, in the process of undertaking embedded research in artist-led organisations.

In this output, Sharples focuses on their work as co-director and curator at GLOAM (Gallery and Studios) in Sheffield’s Cultural Industries Conservation Area. As an artist and researcher, her practice explores site-specific architectures, posthuman performativity, and necro-ecologies. For Sharples, GLOAM functions as an embedded research site – supporting network building and contributing to wider artist-led ecologies. Their role at GLOAM articulates how embedded research is not only a method of critical inquiry, but also a way of sustaining and shaping the ecosystems of artist-led practice