What can human spaces teach us when we engage them in open-ended observation and artmaking? This visual essay shares the practices of three artist-teachers engaging in fieldmaking, an arts-based research methodology conjoining open-ended artistic inquiry, spatial theory, and fieldwork in Montréal’s Shaughnessy village, a densely populated, transient neighbourhood shaped by ongoing redevelopment and mixed-use infrastructures. Drawing on visual ethnography, research-creation, and place-based art education, we engaged the site through iterative cycles of walking, observing, making, and reflection, attuning to the specificities of space. The authors reflect on the implications of their process, arguing fieldmaking offered a flexible and generative approach that informed their making and multi-contextual teaching in myriad ways.
Author Biography
David LeRue is an assistant professor of Art Education at Concordia University holding a PhD in Art Education. Trained as an artist, he also holds a BFA from NSCAD University and an MFA in painting and drawing. His artistic and research practice considers how artmaking can provide insights into space and place, developing methods of painting as arts-based research, and classroom approaches to arts-based research. He presently holds a SSHRC IDG grant to study how studio art teachers across contexts develop their approaches to studio pedagogy.
Marian Schurman (BFA) is an MA candidate in Art Education at Concordia University. Schurman’s work contends with disability studies and comics-based research, considering how the narrative structure of comics can be a tool for empathy and dialogue between students with diverse learning needs and teachers with heavy workloads.
Keyiana Marques is a PhD student in Art Education at Concordia University. She has a BFA in studio arts from Concordia University and an MA in art education from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD). Her MA work researched the positive impacts of targeted art classes in Quebec’s accueil classes, a program aimed towards the integration of newcomer students. Marques is currently engaged in teacher-based research in Quebec. As both a researcher and educator, she brings a reflective approach to issues of equity, representation, and institutional reform to develop pragmatic solutions to systemic issues in education
Recommended Citation
LeRue, David J.; Schurman, Marian; and Marques, Keyiana
(2026)
"Fieldmaking in the Shaughnessy Village: Conducting Arts-Based Research in Response to Human Spaces,"
Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal: Vol. 11:
Iss.
1, Article 3.
Available at:
https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/atj/vol11/iss1/3
