Erkkilä, Jaana

present job: Director of Research and Development, Novia University of Applied Sciences, Department of Culture

interest in art: What and where is art, when it is not in an object/presentation that can be seen and touched or heard?

my interest in research: How can new knowledge be found, become into being, when you take art as a resource and method in research process? What kind of knowledge you find by using art as research? What new information about life of human beings can art combined with research produce? Work, which means art and research, is meaningful for me as long as it can take me by surprise. I am also always very surprised, when I realize that something that I present in the field of research is taken seriously. It reminds me of speaking a foreign language and realizing that a stranger understands it. description of my recent research work: I am working on my PhD thesis. The research is focusing on the question, whether art education can give a voice to a student in the margins. I am using visual methods in my research analysis and also most of the data is in visual form. The main focus is in visual narratives and I am also trying out mixing fact and fiction in my monograph. The images in my research are part of the text.

By the side of my PhD research I have been studying visual language that has been produced outside the set systems of art education. I had a presentation on Management of Stigma by Visual Presentation of Self in the Nordic Visual Studies Conference in Iceland in November 2009. The conference was focusing on the works of Erving Goffman. I am going to continue to write about that theme. The presentation was not part of my PhD.

In my work in Novia I am working on research of art and wellbeing and focusing on the question ” Can art bring wellbeing for artist, who are working as art educators/teachers?” The name of the project is “Sunday Painters”, which describes the situation of professional artist teaching art in the week and making art in the weekends. I see the situation of researchers very much alike.