Thinking Back, Making Forward | Naarm / Melbourne Book Launch
Perimeter is delighted to present the Naarm / Melbourne launch of Thinking Back, Making Forward: Artistic Research in Practice (Valiz, Amsterdam), edited by Brad Haylock, Jessica Wilkinson, and Charles Anderson. From 3pm, Saturday July 18, the book will be launched in store at Perimeter Books (734 High St, Thornbury), featuring a panel discussion with the editors with a casual celebration to follow.
EVENT DETAILS
Perimeter Books
734 High St, Thornbury VIC
Saturday July 18, 2026
From 3pm–5pm
This is a free event, with no reservations required.
Please note that while children are welcome in the space, we are unfortunately unable to offer a 'kid-friendly' zone where kids can entertain themselves, and we require close supervision by parents or guardians while in the store.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In the last three decades, creative practice disciplines, such as art, design, architecture, creative writing, fashion, and others, have undergone a ‘research turn’, strongly stimulated by doctoral programmes to deepen artists’ reflections on the roots, relevance and urgencies of their work. There are many reasons why an individual practitioner might decide to undertake a PhD: a desire to uplift one’s practice, to contribute to the intellectual artistic climate, to teach, to pursue an academic career, or some combination of these, or other reasons.
The rise of artistic research or practice-based research is subtly transforming these disciplines. The integration of research into practice, however, has not always been smooth, and the transformations not unequivocally positive.
For this book we issued an open call to ask artists how PhD research has influenced their making and thinking. Our questions were: What are the impacts, urgency, and significance of the PhD for creative practitioners? How are these understood, captured, communicated? How did it change your practice? We even asked: should creative practitioners undertake a PhD in the first place?
Through its thirty contributions Thinking Back, Making Forward tackles these questions in an open way, to acknowledge, equally, the advantages and disadvantages of the creep of the PhD into artistic practice. At the same time, this book shows a wide range of possibilities of what research in artistic practice can entail.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
BRAD HAYLOCK is a designer, publisher, and academic. He is a Professor of Design at the University of Technology Sydney, where he is Head of the School of Design. His research and practice activities span typography, material culture studies, and the sociology of critique.
JESSICA WILKINSON is a poet, editor and creative writing academic at RMIT University. She is the founding editor of Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry (est. 2011).
CHARLES ANDERSON is an interdisciplinary artist, landscape architect, and academic. Charles is founding director of the award winning CAStudios incorporating Stutterheim / Anderson Landscape Architecture (SAALA) and is Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture at RMIT University, where he was the Coordinator of the Higher Degrees by Research Program from 2019 to 2026 in the School of Architecture and Urban Design. His wide-ranging practice, research, and pedagogy foregrounds the fertile character of collaborative and interdisciplinary modes of practice and advocates processes of place-making which, rather than reproduce planned environments as systems of control, configure place as a meshwork of movement, encounter, and reciprocity.