Propositions for Studio Inquiry : A Journey into Artists’ Studios

A cross-Canada journey into the studios of contemporary artists, revealing the studio as a vital window onto the thinking, learning, and creative processes shaping art today.

Drawing on over one hundred studio visits and interviews with painters, this book offers a compelling exploration of the artist’s studio—not as a static workspace, but as a dynamic, relational, and generative site of learning, thinking, and becoming. Alison Shields shows that the studio can be understood in four interwoven ways: as place, as process, as material thinking, and as dialogue with the world.

As a place, it is where one dwells within subjective time and space, part of an active and interconnected ecosystem that, through artmaking, can transport us elsewhere. As a process, it is emergent, performative, generative, and always in a state of “not knowing”. As material thinking, it bridges mind and matter, thought and feeling, allowing intuition to roam within embodied and often messy environments. As dialogue with the world, it is relational, imaginative, and responsive to the ongoing texture of lived experience.

Rather than offering definitive conclusions, the book unfolds through a series of speculative propositions—drawn from the words and reflections of artists themselves—that illuminate the open-ended nature of creative processes. It invites not only artists but anyone curious about how we make, feel, and know to engage with the studio as a site of infinite possibility within an ever-changing ecology of practice.