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Public Information Comics and Archival Memories
Get PDFThis paper examines the self-styled public information comics Chronicle: The Archive and Museum Anthology and Archives and Memory, both published by Scottish Centre for Comics Studies Scottish Centre for Comics Studies (SCCS) in 2018. The comics in question deal with notions of the archival in very different ways both conceptually and stylistically. The discussion highlights the legal and social justice issues these comics raise while focusing on the complex relationship between archival materials and memory. It additionally considers these in relation to the concept of public information comics and unpacks what such comics do that goes beyond the mere communication of information
Fashion, Decolonisation, and Living Labour
No full textPublic keynote lecture titled ‘Fashion, Decolonization, and Living Labour’ as part of the LOOMS AND LABOUR programme organised by Berlin-based art collective Slavs and Tatars.
Serkan Delice in his lecture exposes the ways in which capitalism’s increasingly predatory, planet-wide accumulation processes appropriate the living labor that creates and sustains fashion and cultures of craft. The lecture dwells into how under contemporary transnational capitalism the fashion industry continues to capitalize on the fashion of communities, labeled by the economically leading countries as a Third World”, and exacerbate the precarity of a globally dispersed surplus population of informal workers. It will touch upon how the decolonization within the realm of fashion needs a global approach to challenge the systemic racial inequities perpetuated by capitalism and the continual displacement of creative communities within settler colonialism. Serkan Delice will talk about possible practices of reclaiming fashion's transformative radicalism as a tool for shaping and altering the conditions of our existence and overcoming inequalities
Value-based nudging of ethnic garments: a conjoint study to differentiate the value perception of ethnic products across Indian Markets
Get PDFPurpose
Handloom products often fail to infiltrate the global or mainland market, resulting in small localized markets, limited demand and profitability. Recent times have also witnessed a decline in the weaving population of India. Assam, accounting for a third of all households engaged in the handloom industry in India, has been widely hit by unemployment, migration and demotivation among weavers due to lack of profitability in the sector. This research aims to study the case of Assam as an exemplar to identify the barriers and cognitive biases impacting the sales of such ethnic apparel and propose nudges as interventions to address such concerns.
Design/methodology/approach
A conjoint-based experimental study was used to understand and compare the cognitive biases of two study groups: an ethnic group from Assam and a non-ethnic group from various Tier I and Tier II cities of India. The groups were exposed to a variety of ethnic Assamese and ethnic non-Assamese products to understand their value perception using conjoint analysis.
Findings
Results indicate a potential lack of cognitive fluency when dealing with Assamese ethnic garments, triggering System II thinking among the non-ethnic (national buyer) group. The underlying cause may be the inability to attribute substitution of the given product for a more familiar product. The results suggest that exposure may lead to priming, which in turn can increase cognitive fluency.
Originality/value
Within the limits of the literature reviewed, designing a conjoint-based experiment and proposing the use of nudge to popularize certain ethnic garments are novel contributions of this study
Strategies and practices to reduce the ecological impact of product returns: An environmental sustainability framework for multichannel retail
Get PDFProduct returns in retail are inherently wasteful and have considerable negative environmental impacts. Besides the monetary costs, they lead to increased transportation, packaging and processing, and the returned items are often discarded. We present strategies and practices retailers can adopt to manage their product returns in a way that reduces environmental impacts. With eCommerce flourishing, product returns have increased significantly. Whilst highest for online sales, they are a challenge across all channels. The importance of developing sustainability management in operations and supply chains is evident from the growing body of literature, but there is a gap regarding the management of product returns in a more environmentally sustainable manner. To address this gap, we interviewed multichannel retailers, retail experts and return service providers operating in the UK and North America. The findings reveal that although retailers have started paying attention to the financial impact of returns, there is little awareness of the scale of environmental impacts. In addition, retailers lack a comprehensive approach to addressing the environmental impact of product returns. Based on our findings, we (1) unpack the barriers inhibiting retailers from developing environmental sustainability plans in returns management, (2) present a set of strategies for retailers to reduce the environmental impact of returns and (3) develop a framework for environmental sustainability in returns management. Our findings and proposed framework have implications for research and practice on addressing the environmental impact of product returns
'Do I feel that I’m part of the international brigade of avant-garde dressers?': The question of subculture in online menswear communities
No full text‘Where were we now?’ Ficto-heritage: a new approach to in-situ displays of historical photography
Get PDFIn-situ photographic displays are a recent form of heritage production that superimposes historic images onto the site of their origination. These photographic displays have been made possible by the accumulation of old images of place available to be displayed against and contrasted with present views. This form of heritage practice is driven by new museological approaches that aim to reach audiences outside the museum. In addition, it is a practice used by commercial organisations to commodify, brand and market locations.
Such displays are increasingly common. They appear to be an innocent record of the past. They seem unauthored and definitive. However, it is argued that these displays require a more thorough interrogation. Therefore, this investigation takes Chantal Mouffe’s discussion of consensus and dissensus, to investigate how debate might be encouraged or discouraged in the minds of audiences viewing the displays; and the writing of Henri Lefebvre, to explore ways in which in-situ photographic displays produce and maintain spatial and social relations. A number of case studies are explored using these theories to seek to establish what current in-situ photographic heritage practices ‘do’; how they are consumed; the way they make people feel about the present; and how they shape attitudes to the future. Based on the literature review and the case study analysis, this thesis argues that such displays are neither neutral nor innocent. Instead, they sustain or reinforce dominant narratives about the present while repressing other possible interpretations.
As a practice-based study, the investigation goes on to explore how in-situ photographic displays may, alternatively, become a creative tool for contesting and re-imagining the present and the future. A methodological approach is developed. Elements are taken from Michel Foucault’s analysis of power relations, which determine absence and presence in the archive; Michel de Certeau’s discussion of the narrative construction of the historical record; the varied approaches taken by microhistorians to document the everyday; and the work of artists who have explored the quotidian, who are concerned with absence in the archive and who employ fictional approaches to the production of the past in the present. This critical review leads to the formulation of an axiomatic framework for new experimental heritage practice that seeks to prompt an inquiring response among audiences by unsettling the self-affirming qualities of current heritage practice.
Drawing on de Certeau’s historiographic arguments the study responds to the axiomatic framework by developing a practical experimental approach called fictoheritage. The term describes a creative heritage practice which incorporates an interest in the vernacular; draws attention to absence in the archive; and adopts fictional approaches in order to prompt critical reflection among audiences.
The framework and the ficto-heritage approach are evaluated by developing an insitu photographic proposal using the test case of the Kugelhaus, a spherical building called ficto-heritage. The term describes a creative heritage practice which incorporates an interest in the vernacular; draws attention to absence in the archive; and adopts fictional approaches in order to prompt critical reflection among audiences
Here's Looking at You
Get PDFThis exhibition examined Mark Fairnington’s investigation of the portrait in many different forms. The intimate paintings of his twin sons at different stages of their childhood record the different images that they embody as they grow. Our identities throughout are lives are framed by different ideas, some we cling on to and others we resist. The two children were often identified as the twins, red heads, the boys and people regularly confused one with the other.
Paintings from the Wellcome Collection storage facility re-imagine human images: miniature portraits of anatomical heads, wax heads, death masks and skulls; poised between life and death. The Wellcome collection became a story of how the human body has been perceived, understood and studied in different cultures. It is a place where the histories of art and science criss-cross and intertwine. The paintings document and describe some of the objects contained in the Wellcome, situating them within the historical context of portrait and still life painting. The human figure is present here as specimen and image and in the form of objects made to fit the body, operate upon it, injure, disguise, protect, embellish and contain it. In the paintings faces and heads are re-presented as miniature portraits.
Fairnington’s paintings use photography as a way of recording information, a way of eroding the hierarchy between parts of the subject, rendering every part as if they are of equal significance. In the eye paintings, a single eye on a round wooden panel is all that is depicted, echoing Victorian keepsakes. In these Lovers’ Eyes the portrait embodies the act of possession; a person captured, collected, possessed by another.
The most recent painting in the show is a portrait of an imagined figure from the landscape, a character that may in part be a self-portrait, fecund with growths and protuberances on the trunks of dead trees
Landscape of the Gods
No full textThe exhibition brings together the work of nine artists to explore an interconnection with the landscape, the ceremonial, the mythical, the man-made, the dystopian, the inhabited and the emotive.
The idea of the exhibition, curated by painter Rebecca Scott, initially developed from a conversation with the artist Michael Petry, in which they discussed Petry’s ongoing visual investigation into the places of the Gods, and Scott’s own emotive exploration of the Cumbrian landscape which surrounds her.
Through his paintings, Michael Petry celebrates the ceremonial, memorialises the mythical, and acknowledges, honours, and explores the deeper spirits within us whom we all feel and hear, yet have found hard to name. For Petry, our belief (or disbelief) in the Gods is of no importance to them, for we are mortal whereas they are divine.
Following his own investigation into characters from history and religion is Manchester born Alun Williams, whose paintings mix figuration with abstraction to challenge our perceptions of the way we imagine these figures. Williams is interested in a kind of in-temporal aspect; taking historical characters and finding a way of making them exist in any kind of time. He places his portraits into extensively researched backgrounds, his characters acquire newfangled abstract forms that match the unstable circumstances of their rediscovery.
Mark Fairnington’s landscape paintings began as a commission for Cherryburn, the birthplace of the artist Thomas Bewick, reflecting the landscape and its history. The works connected with the historic context of Cherryburn evoke a sense of local identity and cultural continuity. They examined how a subjective response to the landscape can be framed within a collective experience, shaped by our knowledge of the history of landscape painting.
Alex Giles’ post-painterly abstract paintings are very personal, they are an extension of who he is: colourful, upbeat, outspoken. The source material for the work is grounded in the dewy-eyed nostalgia the artist has for the graphics of the 80’s and 90’s, subliminally archived, yet always available. Giles’s paintings start in geometry but introduces the organic, that the gesture adds life, and the hard edges exist to emphasize his colour fields. He use this style guide in combination with a narrative that expresses a love of movement, humour, natural forms, and the incidental beauty of the mundane.
London based Bex Massey examines the role of painting and the language of display in the face of popular culture. She amalgamates simulacra and allegory to investigate notions of ‘worth’ via motifs extracted from her childhood. Canvas therefore straddles the hyper real and erroneous as she imagines pixels into existence from low res files. Each coat of British nostalgia risks the ruination of the last, which to a degree mirrors the zeitgeist of post Brexit ‘Great’ Britain and her unease in this milieu.
Rebecca Scott’s series of paintings emerge from the inherent conflicts surrounding the notions of ‘the romantic’ and ‘the real’. The works take reference from the rolling hills and lakes, an idealistic ‘picture-postcard’ view of the Lake District. A scribble, a random spontaneous line cuts through the surface of paint representing a disruption, an interruption of the reading of the images. Scott primarily sees her work as a continuation of a feminist dialogue with the tradition of oil painting. Whereby the use of particular topics are employed to disrupt the expected reading of the chosen subject.
When Cumbrian based artist Julian Cooper finds himself walking among the fells, he is drawn to signs of quarries or mine workings, even going out of his way with hope of finding an evocative crater, tunnel, wall, or cave among these abandoned industrial landscapes. There’s an ambivalent grandeur in these abandoned sites that impels Cooper to make paintings – especially placed as they are within the romantic landscape of the Lake District – and perhaps part of their function is to peel off an outer layer of these perceived landscapes to reveal the further possibilities beneath.
The London-based artist Lee Maelzer is also well-known for putting used things and redundant sites to poetic purpose on canvas. Maelzer remains interested in the significance of matter and site to the common experiences and signature rituals that connect us. Encouraging one to linger in a cinematic twilight, contemplating the curious stylistics of the frozen image that can imbue the everyday with melancholy or wring a creepiness from the most mundane of details.
Martin Greenland’s painting has always stemmed from memory and imagination. The Cumbrian based artist aims to make his work a very delicate balance between the believable, based very much upon what is seen, and the unbelievable, which is about the unseen, the imagined. He also makes it a delicate balance between appreciating the physical beauty, the technical craft of paint and the concept; subjugating the paint to make it do the job of creating the illusion to carry the meaning behind the imagery.
Text extracted from Rebecca Scott‘s introduction to the exhibition Landscape of the Gods, featured in the catalogue alongside original texts by Michael Petry and Matthew Bowman
Introduction
Get PDFThe introduction to the book 'Disturbed Ecologies' contextualises the contributions. The book is in the form of an edited anthology of essays selected to offer a range of approaches that examine the critical role of visual culture in shaping and interrogating conceptions of ecological crisis, in relation to the northern imaginary. This is a broad field but the focus is largely but not exclusively on landscape photography, a medium particularly sensitive to the politics of place and difference. At its most challenging and critical the visual culture of place is able to represent a complexity and heterogeneity frequently absent or displaced within dominant discourses of environmental catastrophe. Conversely, many images of landscape and place within both fine art practice and commercial and popular forms play a role in supporting a more conventional interpretation of environmental crisis. It is our argument that images of northern places and landscapes have a pivotal function within the geopolitics of visual representation, and through the production of different visual imaginaries. Such images can typically exclude any reference to the everyday consequences of ecological crisis for heterogeneous populations; common strategies involve the inclusion of images of pristine wilderness as well as melancholic representations of man-altered landscapes and environmental damage and of an alternative sublime of eco-catastrophe in which scenes of ecological violence are invested with an awe-inspiring, perverse beauty. The findings of the research detailed in the various chapters suggest that the visual culture of northern places has not remained static in the era of ecological crisis but has played a dynamic role within this broad discursive field. Northern landscape photography can still give visual form to historically settled conceptions of a natural world, but these images are frequently placed within a context of human mastery and thus sanction the latter’s purported achievements; and ubiquitous representations of environmental disaster can also reinforce the notion of its techno-utopian resolution. Contributions to the book explore this visual field, presenting wide-ranging critical appraisals of landscape photography and its related practices, particularly more recent developments in art and visual culture in relation to the representation of place
Going beyond remedial learning support: reframing learning development as a catalyst for practice learning. A case study exploring father involvement in social work education
Get PDFThis conference paper presents Learning Development as transcending remedial and deficit notions of academic support. A Learning Developer based at London Metropolitan University, presents a case study that illustrates the values and impact of Learning Development and Praxis.
This research project piloted a Problem Based Learning (PBL) methodology in the curriculum area of Social Work. The project worked in collaboration with social work students, lecturers and university partners between 2019 to 2021. This session may be of particular interest to those working with students in the social professions and work based learning courses.
Key challenges and implications for practice:
Subject specialists seeing the Learning Developer role as one of ‘fixing students’.
Potential of Problem Based Learning as part of accredited Social Work courses.
Integrating Learning Development; embedded vs bolt on quick fixes.
Learning Development as scaffolding reflective writing practice.
The project overcame these issues with a reach that rippled across six north east London Local Authorities as part of a Teaching Partnership. It has also been included as a topical issue for reflection, titled: ‘Promoting Positive Father Involvement’ as part of modules in practice learning. Both students and staff engaged in a workshop programme that scaffolded a dialogue between them, addressing issues of father engagement as part of practice.
Students were able to synthesise themes of theory, policy, legislation and its application to practice. As a result, some students developed substantial case studies at both level 5 and 6, and these even informed their later dissertations and research projects. This demonstrates the social value and wider impact that Learning Development has had on improving outcomes for not only students, but fathers, children and their families