Artistic research: pedagogical approach
My pedagogical approach is based on my ongoing deep interest in artistic or practice-based research. I utilise the understanding I have gained through my own ongoing artistic research into the role of the whole body in our meaning making and the importance of situated knowledge. I am basing my teaching not only my 20 years of experience of teaching and running sensory workshops, on my work as an editor of 🔗Tangible Territory, but also on a philosophical underpinning, informed by theories of embodied cognition and situated learning. I have recently completed writing a book, 🔗Exiled from our Bodies: How to come back to our senses, published by Routledge 2025. This book consolidates much of my pedagogical as well as artistic work.
My approach to knowledge is very much in line with philosopher Mark Johnson, who regards knowledge as a process rather than a fixed form, i.e. verb rather than a noun: “knowledge should be a term of praise for success in a process for intelligently transforming experience”. For Johnson, arts research is an inquiry into “how to experience and transform the unifying quality of a given experience in search of deepened meaning, enhanced freedom, and increase of connections and relations.” This is a qualitative, rather than quantitative approach, and it is performative rather than descriptive, differentiating it from a scientific approach. I have distilled my key pedagogical approaches into these points:
Experiential teaching focused on eliciting and examining:
- Non-verbal knowledge
- Multi-sensory knowledge
- Embodied/tacit knowledge
- Situated knowledge
- Emotional knowledge
- Poetic/ecstatic knowledge
Other approaches:
- Working with uncertainty, provisionality (reference artist William Kentridge)
- Studio: Safe space for uncertainty (reference artist William Kentridge)
- Importance of process over outcome
- Thinking through making which includes:
Dialogue with the physical world of materials, spaces, places
Role of accident/mistake
Role of Play - Importance of interdisciplinary “collaborative” dialogue, including the dialogue of art and science
- Importance of imagination
- Importance of narrative in meaning making
ARTIST/RESEARCHER MENTORING: I offer private mentoring for artists, researchers or companies interested in exploring new creative ways of engaging with the world, especially in connection to embodied knowledge and sensory aesthetics, in various media spanning film, video, animation but also performance and dance. I have an extensive experience through my teaching practice, supervising PhD, MPhil and MRes students, mentoring artists and running various workshops. The sessions are conducted online via Zoom or MS Teams. Please visit 🔗RESEARCH and 🔗ABOUT to learn more about my expertise. You can also visit 🔗Tangible Territory, an art, science and philosophy journal I edit to learn more. If you are interested, 🔗please get in touch to discuss further details of how we can work together.
MAKING SENSE LAB is an experimental space I set up for students from 🔗University of Creative Communication, Prague, to have a chance to work collaboratively, across disciplines, working towards a shared goal. The aim is to provide an opportunity to push boundaries of creativity through allowing open experimentation and cross-fertilisation. We invite guests: from musicians to practitioners in areas of arts, design and science, in order to inspire, provoke and stir up creative energies. Get in touch if you want to get involved!
More information: https://www.vskk.cz/cz/o-skole/making-sense-lab/ We also run an annual minifestival, the first edition took place in April 2025 https://cinestheticfeasts.com/2025/05/07/making-sense-mini-festival/.
Follow us online: https://www.instagram.com/making_sense_fest
SENSORY WORKSHOPS have been an ongoing part of my research methodology. I have run a number of them over the years, including at the Royal College of Art (for MA and PhD levels), Somerset House, as well as at various other institutions over Europe as well as Japan. Below are some examples of both current and historical ones.
Sensory Workshops at Dissenters Gallery: these workshops helped to develop my participatory performance called Journey to the Interior, for Open Senses Festival, 2017. Watch here:
Journey to the Interior: Interviews with participants of the immersive multi-sensory performance Journey to the Interior, created for OPEN SENSES festival by Tereza Stehlikova
FAMUFEST: Storytelling for all the senses
(Famufest is a multi-genre film festival organised annually by the students of the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague)
Our current Western society is dominated by visual perception. Appearance is more important than feeling. Our visual field is flooded with (moving) images. But what about our other senses? How do they contribute to the emotions, feelings, and reactions that the world evokes in us? How and what do they communicate? A workshop for sharing stories for all senses. It is focused on refreshing your (not just visual) perception, encouraging playfulness, and tickling your imagination.
SKIN DEEP Territories (Developmental phase of Infra-ordinary Lab), 2022-23
The Infra-ordinary Lab has been developed through a series of collaborative workshops and local encounters, engaging with the place through all the senses and experiencing it through all the seasons.
Below are some images capturing this process.
Places Senses and Imagined workshop (SISSA, Trieste, 2022)
Below is a film from a workshop I led, which was part of an art and science gathering MIND THE GAP , hosted at SISSA, Trieste and organised by Alessandro Treves and Noga Arikha, with the active participation of some of SISSA PhD students in cognitive neuroscience and in other fields. Mind the Gap invited participants to confront and analyse multiple aspects of space, from the perspectives of physics, architecture, urbanism, the arts, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy.
Below is a short document from the workshop, where participants share their findings.
TOUCH TALK TELL: Sensory Storytelling (London, Somerset House, 2017)
A free workshop devised in response to the Perfume exhibition, building on Tereza’s ongoing artistic research into using all our senses to tell stories, by activating memories, emotions and imagination, in order to offer a more rich and nuanced experience of the every day.
I led two workshops for Perfume: Synesthesia late event at the Somerset House, on 31st August 2017. My concept for these was developed in response to the Perfume exhibition, and builds on my ongoing artistic research into using all our senses to tell stories, by activating memories, emotions and imagination, in order to offer a more rich and nuanced experience of the every day. The participants were invited to activate their less dominant senses (especially touch and smell), to explore the connection between these and their memories, emotions and imagination, and finally had the opportunity to use these new insights to create their own multi-sensory mini-stories. They were first initiated by being taken on an interior journey, guided by instructions, hints and questions. What they encountered was a secret world, a miniature landscape of different textures, smells, shapes and consistencies… Once sensitised participants were able to associate various textures and materials with their memories, emotions and imaginings…Finally, the participants were able to create their own responses: scented journeys, enclosed within a transparent container.I have also asked them to write a full list of ingredients, real and also imaginary.
Tereza Stehlíková 