Rhodes University’s first Fine Art practice-based PhD breaks new ground in art and research

Rhodes University has marked a milestone in its research journey with the conferral of the institution’s first practice-based PhD in Fine Art, awarded to Dr Raphaela Linders.

Her groundbreaking study, titled Heart!❤️3.0: exploring the relationship between memory/loss, (re)presentation and place/lessness through a transnational family’s visual archive, uses creative practice as both process and outcome; a model that positions art as a form of rigorous research.

Professor Maureen de Jager, Head of the Department of Fine Art and supervisor of Linders’s research, explains that this new PhD programme “foregrounds creative practice as a distinct and robust research methodology, encouraging and enabling ways of knowing (and of making known) that are ‘hands-on’, embodied, experiential, performative and engaged.”

She adds that “the candidate’s practice therefore drives, informs and supports their thesis-writing reciprocally and holistically.”

Launched in 2021, the new Fine Art PhD programme at Rhodes University was inspired in part by the model offered at Kingston University, London, where Prof de Jager completed her own practice-based PhD. “Raphaela Linders was in the first cohort of Fine Art PhD candidates to start in 2021,” she notes.

Linders’s research draws on her transnational family’s analogue and digital archives, spanning three generations, to “explore the complexities of transnational identity in the context of memory and its loss”. Through video installations and writing, her work “teases out the entanglements, tensions, and slippages between memory/loss, (re)presentation and place/lessness.”

“Creative practice and research are interchangeable for me, so it didn’t make sense to pursue a traditional text-based PhD,” Linders explains. “An integral part of my research is the emphasis on process and how working with and through material generates new knowledge.”

She continues, “The only way that I could understand my material (transnational family archives) was to work with them, and thus it didn’t make sense not to have my practice as the foundation of my research.”

Navigating new terrain

Being the first candidate to attempt this type of submission at Rhodes University came with challenges. “I think the main challenge was that there wasn’t anyone at Rhodes University who had done this type of submission before, so I didn't have an existing local model or framework to follow,” Linders recalls. “This meant that there was quite a bit of uncertainty around the structure and expectations of what a submission might look like.”

“Fortunately, I had great supervisors, and I also had colleagues with whom I started my PhD, and we could navigate this terrain together.” Linders also benefited from the insights of her peers at Kingston University, through an informal partnership established by Prof de Jager with Kingston School of Art.

Her installations, shown in both Switzerland and South Africa, connect the emotional spaces of home. “This created a dialogue between the two places I inhabit and represented the emotional transnational experience of place/lessness,” she says.

In her South African installation Here / There (2024), “two digital projections onto transparent material” created “a spatial conversation” between digitised family footage and a Skype recording. “In the installation, the audience's body becomes both the presence and absence of memory in its embodied/disembodied involvement,” she explains.

Emotion as method

“Doing research on/with family members on memory/loss, (re)presentation, and place/lessness is emotional. Rather than shying away from the emotions, they acted as a wayfinder for my research,” Linders says. “Emotions in many aspects were at the heart of my research; they were both research material as well as outcomes of my research.”

She adds that exhibiting such personal work publicly was difficult, yet crucial. “These public engagements… allowed others to connect with the work, revealing how personal family archives can speak to shared transnational experiences of memory/loss and (be)longing.”

The originality and impact of Linders’s submission were widely recognised. Examiners described it as “rich and vivid”, “distinctly original”, “profoundly moving”, and “a complex and thorough body of creatively shaped research.”

Reflecting on the feedback, Linders says, “It affirmed that autoethnographic research allows one to access and communicate certain experiences that might not be accessible to someone outside of a family network. It affirmed that interrogating emotions through creative practice and vice versa can be seen as academic rigour.”

Towards a broader vision

Professor de Jager believes this PhD sets an important precedent for creative and socially responsive research at Rhodes University. “The nature of the programme is ‘practice-based’ in that it entails a research process informed at all levels by the candidate's creative practice,” she explains. “It enables candidates to produce research that is both critically and creatively rigorous - work that engages with the world in tangible, human ways.”

Through this milestone, Rhodes University reaffirms its commitment to fostering research that expands understanding, deepens empathy, and strengthens connections between art, society, and knowledge itself.

 

^{Here / There (2024), digital video installation, colour, sound, duration variable. [Photograph by Leroy Payne]}