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Architectures of Art and Design Education: An exploration of UK and international design schools
No full textThe art school has had a fundamental effect on society internationally, influencing how the creative arts are represented and perceived. At a time that funding in the UK is placing arts education in crisis, this is the first book of its kind to investigate the concept of the 'art school' and its social impact and legacy. It highlights how the physical studios and workshops, designed for learning, teaching and making, influence and interact with the curriculum, creativity and practice. Beautifully illustrated, with both archival and contemporary photographs, many taken by the authors, this book celebrates the spaces dedicated to learning and teaching creative disciplines. Exploring a drastically shifting landscape in higher education, it celebrates the crucial relationship between the creative working spaces and the development of creative minds. A timely reflection on the current social and political climate, this book emphasises the significant role that the art school has to play in society, developing thriving creative industries and a wider culture of the arts
Exploring Generation Z Behaviour towards Different Digital Fashion and Immersive Technologies: A Stimulus-Organism-Response Approach
No full textWith rapid advancement in digital fashion (DF) and immersive technologies (IT), retailers are increasingly seeking innovative ways to create novel user experiences. However, existing scholarly research is fragmented and lacks an integrated approach that explores the interplay between diverse IT stimuli and user reactions and outcomes, lacks methodological novelty and context breadth. This study aims to fill these scholarly gaps by drawing on the Stimulus-Organism-Response model as the theoretical foundation in exploring the factors influencing Generation Z interactions, responses and experiential outcomes across a range of digital fashion and immersive technologies
Fashion Business Education for Social Change: Creating impact through Case Teaching and Lego® Serious Play®
Get PDFFashion is both an easily accessible subject and an extremely complex global system built on an unjust foundation. Integrating ethical business practices and sustainability literacies into engaging teaching and learning experiences is a priority for fashion and business schools, yet many educators struggle to engage meaningfully with Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). More than ever before, fashion education needs to address environmental degradation and social injustice.
This Lego® Serious Play® workshop, led by award-winning educators, provides a range of insights, information, demonstration and resources necessary for participants to write their own sustainable fashion case study, relevant to their specific area and cultural context. A range of innovative and impactful pedagogies drawn from the UN-supported initiative Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) Impactful Five (i5) Playbook are utilised, giving participants a hands-on opportunity to understand and adapt research-based pedagogies for responsible leadership
Creative Writing as Embodied Inquiry
Get PDFI have argued in a number of publications (Stephens 2021, 2023, 2024) that creative academic writing can achieve epistemological status, particularly when framed as a mode of ‘inquiry’. Specifically this can be of value in the disciplines of art education and performative autoethnography, I also borrowed Lauruelle’s term of philo-fiction to test this as a form of (non) philosophical literature (Stephens 2018). I take the strongest examples I can find in these fields to demonstrate, and illustrate, this argument, namely, my own meditation practice, and, the empty art objects -the so-called dematerialisation of art- occurring from the mid-20th Century onwards, as well as literary philosophy or, as a critical theory of literature in writers such as Blanchot, as enacting a creative academic writing for which such practices are central. Recent research surveying the field of Practice Research, now allows us to consider this broad category that includes forms of embodied inquiry, and my own ‘meditative enquiry’ where I write from my Koan practice, initiated by the question: ‘What is this? That is, practice research in the modalities of intuition, imagination, tacit, embodied, affective and sensory ‘ways of knowing’ (Bulley and Sahin, 2021). This short paper will contribute a summary of these arguments with examples quoted from my various articles in their process to becoming equally, both a monograph and a PhD-by publication. Which is the thesis, and which is the practice? Hence, the layering of these knowledge practices as ‘palimpsest’ and ‘paratext’ drawing on Genette’s formulations of these terms, best describe these simultaneous creative practices, of enactment and description, which non-dualistically collapse ‘epistemic distance’ and form new modes of practice research, at one and the same time. Much like the mid-20th Century examples of art’s disappearance, or Blanchot’s poetics of absence, or the rhythm of breath in literature, each, like Zen koans, act on, and as, the nature of (meditative) experience
“Squaring the Circle” between Greimas and Lotman: A Semiotics of the Firmament
Get PDFThe article explores two geometric and sacred forms — the square and the circle — and the theoretical and methodological vocabulary derived from and enabled by them through two distinct semiotic paradigms, inaugurated by Algirdas J. Greimas and Juri Lotman. Starting from the mystical and mathematical axiom of “squaring the circle”, I reflect on the extent to which the form and vocabulary adopted by a theory determine what worldviews, as well as what forms of analysis are enabled (or interdicted) by it. Utilising Greimas’s and Lotman’s postulates as its case study, the article reflects on the traces of cosmologies, mystical, hermetic, and religious principles contained in the representations adopted by these theories. Furthermore, through the theoretical leaps demonstrated in Greimas’s work De l’imperfection and Lotman’s image of the explosion, the article outlines an argument for what could be the firmament of the Semiotic theory: a holistic approach in which the spherical and plane aspects of phenomena can be integrated into analysis. Beyond the goal of falsifying competing theories, this proposition aims to reflect on the union of forms, striving to weave in connections that permit analyses contemplating both the planar and spherical aspects of our discourses and other meaning–making manifestations
From a Dark Place: Indigenous Australian Horror
Get PDFChapter in the book Transnational Horror: Folklore, Genre, and Cultural Politics, edited by Cüneyt Çakirlar, Liverpool University Press, 2025
Reaffirming Learning – A Micro Examination of Teaching Interventions and their Connectedness
Get PDFThis case study provides a perspective on engaging postgraduate design students in activities exploring eco-social responsibility in relation to their creative practice. It zooms into the roles and learning impacts of a collaborative online space and series of online discussion sessions, which are situated within wider research trialling a system of teaching interventions that positively disrupt the curriculum, as a mechanism for awakening learning around responsible design. It offers insights and reflection on the teaching and learning system, mapping the interconnectivity of its components whilst synthesising discoveries regarding the roles they play in building connections, reaffirming learning and navigating uncertainty
Roger Ackling: Work and Teaching
No full textThis PhD by curatorial practice focuses on the work of British artist Roger Ackling (1947–2014). Ackling’s career is notable for his artistic practice and his long and influential teaching career. The research aims to understand his career as an artist and teacher, and his work in relation to Land Art, Minimalist and Conceptual Art movements, and its impact on artists he worked with and taught.
Ackling made objects by burning wood or card, focusing sunlight through the lens of a hand-held magnifying glass to scorch repeated patterns of lines across the surface. Collecting materials from the margins, he is renowned for his work on driftwood but also used other materials of no or little value that were found or discarded. His primary tool was the light of the sun, transforming energy in a way that was fundamentally photographic and also akin to a cauterising of the surface. Within the parameters of this method, Ackling made work that is remarkable for both its consistency and its variety, the apparent simplicity of his process resulting in objects of great complexity.
This study examines the singular character of Ackling’s career, which involved a consistent commitment to making, exhibiting, and teaching through four decades. A fidelity to these three practices as an artist provides an opportunity, perhaps unique to Ackling, to reveal how his approach to making and his innovations in installation and exhibiting informed his teaching. A detailed examination of the artist’s Archive and extensive interviews with artists Ackling taught together provide insight into the intersection of these elements, how attitudes to making and exhibiting informed the way he engaged with students, and evidence of the influence of his work on artists working today.
The practice outcome of the research was the first survey exhibition of the artist’s work. SUNLIGHT: Roger Ackling showed at Norwich Castle from 18 May to 22 September 2024, at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, from 4 April to 22 June 2025, and at the Pier Arts Centre, Orkney, from 12 July to 1 November 2025
Homo Mondialis
No full textThe survey exhibition ‘Homo Mondialis’ at the 2025 British Textile Biennial traces Lucy Orta's textile-led practice over the past twenty years, shaped by Studio Orta expeditions undertaken with scientists to environmentally sensitive regions of the planet, from Antarctica and the Amazon to the Arabian desert.
Over thirty artworks on exhibition draw upon research undertaken in regions where natural habitats are increasingly depleted and indigenous traditions threatened. Techniques of embroidery, appliqué, patchwork, weaving and costume translate fieldwork into tactile, poetic forms. Immersive installations and performances filmed on location seek to embody humanity’s enduring relationship with the environment and the ancestral knowledge that enabled people to survive in the most challenging conditions while using the earth’s resources respectfully.
Curated by Artistic Director Laurie Peake, the exhibition is articulated through five biomes, where visitors are invited to travel across continents and oceans, from the polar ice cap to the jungle, from the desert to the forest.
THE DESERT
At the centre of the exhibition in The Desert biome is the newly commissioned textile-sculpture 'Bayt Al Sha’ar – House of Hair' (2025), based on a traditional Bedouin tent Lucy encountered in the Saudi Arabian desert during a field trip in 2024.
Suggesting a new paradigm for future living, rather than the traditional Al Sadu weaving technique, the 'Bayt Al Sha’ar' was woven on state-of-the-art digital Jacquard looms at the TextileLab in Tilburg. Nine immense tapestries, each measuring 170 × 170 cm and incorporating over 80 colours, are assembled to create a 5.10 × 3.40 × 2.50 metre sculptural structure.
The jacquard images are translated from Lucy’s research and practice of drawing and collage. They depict a speculative world drastically altered by climate change, where scarcity of resources results in conflict and displacement, yet hope persists as resilient desert species flourish among the ruins. The two threshold tapestries Gaia with Pleiades position the earth goddess Gaia as both guide and witness to past and future events. Others function as maps, drawing on celestial navigation and ancient cosmologies to understand humanity’s place within the natural world. The sequential narrative reflects the cyclical nature of changing environments, from abundance to scarcity, to conflict, migration and nomadic living, and the possibility for renewal.
Alongside research into Arabian vernacular architecture, Lucy visited Wadi Hanifah, a desert valley west of the city of Riyadh, with botanists from the National Centre for Vegetation Cover Development and Combatting Desertification (NCVC). The astonishing diversity of plant species surviving in extreme temperatures and drought conditions is the focus an ongoing collaboration with NCVC.
Lucy translated over one hundred endemic desert plants, shrubs and trees into meticulous drawings, which in turn became the patterns for 'Wadi Hanifah Embroidery Landscape' (2024) measuring 70 × 70 cm each. Embroidery-appliquéd silk vegetation is associated with geometric forms that carry corresponding symbolic meanings within Al Sadu weaving traditions.
THE JUNGLE
Participating in two scientific expeditions to observe the effects of climate change on the Amazon rainforest in Peru and Brazil, Studio Orta has amassed an extensive photographic archive of plant species that serves as inspiration for the two works presented.
‘Fabulae Florae Herbarium’ (2010-2022) is composed of a selection of larger-than-life flowers fashioned in diverse textiles and stitched onto brightly coloured canvases each measuring 70 x 70 cm.
In 'Lifeguard Amazonia' (2016), textile flowers are laid upon a long stretcher-bed tarpaulin. The stretcher bed is carried by a human figure, yet the figure is also integrated into the tarpaulin. This dual position points to the complex interconnected nature of things: the extractive practices leading to the degradation of rainforest biodiversity, vulnerability and survival, and the need for greater care and empathy for living beings.
The large wall poem 'Gaia Meets Progress' (2022) is composed of forty embroideries that relate, verse by verse, a conversation between the ancestral mother Earth, Gaia, and her more rational modern antithesis, Progress, revealing the conflictual relationship between technology and the natural world. Written in collaboration with eco-poet Mario Petrucci, the poem also forms the original soundtrack to the film 'Amazonia' (2010), presented in an immersive double-screen and audio environment.
THE FOREST
The immersive installation 'Symphony for Absent Wildlife' (2014–2020) comprises nineteen costumed figures, using wool felt as both medium and motif, alongside a video installation. The two complementary works draw on the history of European colonial trade and its impact on indigenous cultures and wildlife in North America to recount a story of cultural and environmental loss.
From the late seventeenth century, point blankets were woven in UK mills and exported to Canada where they were traded for beaver pelts needed for the manufacture of top hats. Point blankets were adopted by First Nations peoples, who ultimately abandoned their traditional clothing along with associated practices and beliefs. Lucy crafts felt blankets into costumes; masks and tailcoats depicting animals and birds connected with traditional spirit belief systems, as well as those pushed towards extinction through high-yield hunting practices, including bison, beavers and wolves.
The film interweaves performative sequences. Unmasked musicians rehearse the 'Symphony for Absent Wildlife' on hand-crafted wooden bird whistles that mimic native wildlife. It cuts to masked creatures roaming Banff National Park on the traditional territories of the Stoney Nakoda, Ktunaxa, Secwepemc, Cree, Ojibway and Salishan peoples. Finally, in Calgary, at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers where beavers were once hunted to near extinction, the full masked orchestra unites to perform the symphony live before a spontaneous audience in City Hall Plaza.
THE ICE CAP
The Ice Cap biome presents four works from Studio Orta’s Antarctica project.
'Antarctic Village – No Borders' (2007) is represented by two of the twenty-five textile sculptures installed across four locations in Antarctica in 2007. They symbolise a community formed from a multiplicity of cultures and identities, situated within a continent governed by principles of peace and international cooperation. The dome tents are stitched into a patchwork of clothing and glove extensions with world flags hand-printed with text excerpts proposing an amendment to Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
'Antarctica Drop Parachute' (2020) is inspired by parachute delivery systems used to distribute essential supplies to inaccessible regions of the world. Suspended from the webbing straps are bundles of symbolic and functional objects designed to meet basic physical and emotional needs of people in distress, such as food, water and love.
In the Lifeguard series, 'Lifeguard Aira' (2019) depicts a costumed-figure carrying a glove-covered stretcher bed, which is attached to a silk drop parachute. Hanging from the parachute harness is an array of functional and symbolic objects referencing the planet’s increasingly diminishing resources.
THE OCEAN
The four hand-embroidered works in the series 'Trajectories' (2022) are poetic representations of Earth’s constant state of flux. Embroidery and bead work are used to depict data sets sourced from scientific journals. Densely stitched French knots suggest accumulations of plastic particles, while running stitches trace the gyroscopic movement of currents that carry debris on arbitrary journeys across the oceans.
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The 2025 British Textile Biennial (2 October to 2 November 2025) incorporated 32 exhibitions across 19 venues in Lancashire, featuring the work of over 100 artists. Homo Mondialis was presented at the key biennial venue, Blackburn Cathedral Crypt, East Lancashire. Over 150,000 people visited the biennial, while more than 1,000 children, young people and students participated in its education programme