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Unveiling Transformation: Engaging Objects for Eco-Social Justice in Design Education
No full textCurriculum design, by its nature, is transformative, molding a progressive and adaptive learning journey.
It's clear that climate action and social justice are issues that will require our attention now and in the future. Incorporating object-based and transformative learning into higher education curricula can lead to the transformative understanding required to tackle these problems
Participating in Radical Visual Sociology: Supporting housing activism through gentrification and displacement research
Get PDFThis thesis examines whether participatory arts practices can be deployed in changing urban contexts without getting co-opted into that change and, instead, help to resist its uneven aspects. It presents a participatory arts and research project which responds to the politics and aesthetics of 21st century state-led gentrification, with a specific focus on Deptford, south-east London (UK). The project challenges dominant gentrification narratives by making visible and audible a variety of alternative perspectives that highlight the lived experiences of gentrification-induced displacement. It proposes a novel art and research methodology that, while emphasising participation and ethical practice, pays attention to the politics and aesthetics of creative research. It is underpinned by feminist participatory action research and the radical tradition of community arts and activism. Combining sociological research with a community arts project and the production, publication and launch of a book, this research offers rich understandings of the lived experiences of gentrification-induced displacement while also enacting these representations in the public sphere to support local housing activism. Therefore, my practice not only counters widespread depoliticised participatory practices that make community artists complicit in uneven urban change, it also offers a counterpoint to urban research that, while critically describing processes of change, does little in the way of actively engaging with those processes.
This research is an example of public sociology, engaging with non-academic and academic audiences. Publishing the research data on alternative media under the title Deptford is Changing to encourage public debate also challenges traditional modes of dissemination. It offers space for a multiplicity of voices and forms of representations with the aim of addressing a wide and varied audience. It is recommended to read the accompanying book of the same title alongside this thesis (The book can also be read online: tinyurl.com/deptfordischanging). The thesis argues for a creative activist sociological imagination, a Radial Visual Sociology which gets actively and creatively involved in working towards social justice
Customer Experience in Fashion Retailing: Merging Theory and Practice
No full textMerging three core perspectives – academic, creative agency and retailer - the book takes a chronological approach to tracing the evolution of customer experience from the physical store, to omnichannel through channel convergence to consider the future of fashion retailing and customer experience. Beginning with the theoretical perspective, customer experience evolution in a fashion retail context is traced, considering the definition of customer experience, physical retail, the digitalisation of customer experience, omni-channel retail, in-store technologies and envisioning future retail CX
Painting and Performance
No full textTwenty years since the publication of Gustavo Fares’ influential essay ‘Painting in the Expanded Field’, the definition of what might constitute a painting has undergone significant developments. At periods throughout the 20th century painting expanded and contracted as a means of repositioning itself against a rich variety of new media entering artistic practice and discourse. High Modernism, technological advances and painting’s multiple identity crises led to a partial marginalisation of painting’s perceived ability to respond to the world in which we live. Painting was seen at times, by some, as almost antiquated and, at worst, indulgent.
However, in recent years, there has been a significant return to stretching the definition of painting through the central role it appears to play in many contemporary artistic practices. Arguably, the various degrees of ‘Painting in the Expanded Field’ could be seen as a point of return by many artists to address painting’s inherent ‘porousness’ and ways in which it can reimagine alterative worlds, reflect political events and social issues in novel ways.
Join us for this one day symposium with presentations from 12 artists and writers exploring the artistic, historical, theoretical and societal contexts and debates that underlie ‘Painting in the Expanded Field’ in all its various guises.
Keynotes: Dr. Sarah Kate Wilson and Prof. Craig Staff
Presentation from: Fiona Stirling, Dr. Donal Moloney, Prof. Andrew Bick, Mark O’Kelly, John Slyce, Prof. Alistair Payne, Dr. Cate Smith, Dr. Majella Clancy, Dr. Susan Connolly and Rose Davey
Now Play This
No full textBetween 6-14th April 2024 three Interactive artefacts by Collectarium and Peter Maloney will be exhibited as part of the NOW PLAY THIS exhibition at London's Somerset House New Wing Gallery.
Now Play This celebrates its first decade of exploring games and playfulness by highlighting the creative power and ubiquity of play. This year’s theme “Liminality: Playing between worlds” is an invitation to think of play as a place both for introspection and connection. It is a call to reconsider our understanding of play and games and their relationship to our everyday lives and to other art forms.
As part of the city-wide London Games Festival, this year’s Now Play This features games that ask players to think of the way they perceive the spaces around them, and about the way people relate to one another. Encouraging self-reflection, the interactive festival explores the transitory, borderless spaces between artist’s imaginations and audiences' inner worlds.
The Lockdown Space Collection was developed in 2021, a collaboration between Collectarium (Designers Sophie Beard and Alyson Waller) and Virtual World-builder and academic Peter Maloney. The project invited people to submit observations on how their home environment had changed during lockdown by sharing text and image or video through the Instagram social media application.
During lockdown domestic spaces became extraordinary through the way in which people had to rapidly re-imagine their homes. The Lockdown Space collection documents these unusual temporary and ‘in-between’ liminal spaces. The domestic home became the place where we work, socialise, exercise, learn, create, entertain, play, celebrate and escape.
Collectarium is a publishing platform co-founded by designers Allyson Waller and Sophie Beard that creates design activities, and documents how these engage audiences into new ways of seeing.
Now Play This is supported by the London Games Festival, Arts Council England and Goethe-Institute, London
Intimacy vs Property
Get PDFI’m annoyed by radical structures that reify the idea of property as THE way to think about our relations to each other and the world.
Property is such an infectious concept. In my practice, from looking at motherhood to book piracy to how we evaluate social art practice, it seems that the first thing I encounter is always a taken-for-granted, a postulate: that the path to change and thence liberation is just a matter of redistributing property rights to the RIGHT people and the enabling of “our" sovereignty.
I see this as a trap. One that makes it almost impossible to imagine a different way to think about ourselves and the world. We are terrified of what would happen if we didn’t own the things we care for.
But I think that it is the ‘we care for’ that matters. That there is a different form of relationality that can only exist once we refuse to play the property and sovereignty game and pay attention to the actual ways in which we exist with each other. I call this the intimacy of interdependency.
In this prompt, I propose that the Collective Conditions for Re-Use falls into the same trap. That in its attempts to solve the ‘problem’ of intersectionality and power imbalances in systems like copy-left or creative commons, it reifies the all too well established (mis)conception that property is the only way in which we can think ourselves and the world, expanding the market into every sphere of our lives — particularly those spheres which specifically sought to separate themselves of the market. That it attempts to improve what needs to be dismantled.
This is a prompt to imagine that we already have a much more sophisticated and interesting way to relate to what we all bring into being in the world. We do. We just need to stop makin
Shapes 2014-2017
No full textInspired by the pedagogy of early years pioneer Friedrich Fröbel and his influence on the Bauhaus movement, Francke and Dhillon worked with children, parents, carers and staff using Fröbel's 'gifts' as an open ended, non-gendered and inexpensive resource to support intergenerational play. Following on from their residency, Francke and Dhillon produced a number of Shapes kits for nurseries and families, each featuring geometric shapes adapted from Fröbel's seventh gift. The accompanying manual and poster draw attention to the mar-ginalisation of early-years practice within art and education, and highlight the importance of state-maintained nursery schools in the context of ongoing government cuts and austerity policies. Forty Family Kits have been shared with families from the Portman Early Childhood Centre and forty Nursery Kits have been distributed to nursery schools and early-years providers throughout the UK
Knitted textiles, Sportsclothes and the Development of London Wholesale Couture: 1920-1939
Get PDFThis paper considers the garments produced by two London Ready-to-Wear companies; Rose and Blairman and Matita, during the 1920s and 1930s. It centres on the sportsclothes produced by these two firms and questions why their output was primarily made from knitted textiles. Rose and Blairman and Matita later went on to become leading wholesale couture firms. The focus period of this paper largely represents the pre-history of the wholesale couture sector, the term first used in the mid 1930s. However, this paper establishes why knitted textiles and sportsclothes were central to Rose and Blairman and Matita’s output and how these ultimately helped to ensure the early success of the sector
Afterall at 25
Get PDFArticle looking at Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, launched in 1998-99, as it celebrates its 25th anniversary. Founded by curator Charles Esche and artist Mark Lewis at Central Saint Martins, Afterall has grown from a journal into a research center at the University of the Arts London. The journal promotes the idea of artists as critical intellectuals, challenging conventional norms and exploring post-utopian artistic practices. Afterall has shifted its focus over the years from criticality to decoloniality, forming partnerships with various global institutions to broaden contemporary art discourse beyond Western paradigms. Recent collaborations emphasize engagement with Southeast Asian art and pedagogy, including workshops for emerging writers and art professionals to foster diverse perspectives and knowledge production
