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The art studio as archive: tracing the geography of artistic potentiality, progress and production

Despite artistic practices, sites and modes of production and expression being in constant flux, and artistic production being of fragmented and temporal, often precarious status, this article emphasizes how the studio is and remains an important instrument and base of contemporary artistic performance. Based on qualitative research on contemporary visual artists’ work practices in London, this study presents accounts on how artists come to perceive but also construct the work and studio environment in which they are located; how they recognize the potential opportunities of this relation as well as how they actively react in order to practice and use such space. The artist’s studio is a space from which the alchemy of an art form cannot be completely revealed. Yet, with all its material, the studio is a space whose materialities are manifestations, documentations and traces of studio processes and visual artists’ work. The studio represents collections of clues and traces of the artists’ working lives and, for the artists, the studio is not only a space for work in progress but also for storage and creative resources. It is a space where they filter, sort, store and appropriate active actants, remnants and traces of their working lives inside the studio as well as their inspirational journeys outside. The studio is a space where objects and documents are placed as a way to mark an end to a process, but it is also a space where things originate or are reinvented – it is a space where things begin. However, in its particular set-up there is a creative limitation; there is a limiting order of the material collected that can authorize and command the future development of artistic work. There is an archival notion of the making and thinking in the modern art studio.