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Haircut
No full textThis set of artworks comes from my picturebook project, 'My First Haircut' (2023), a practice-based response to my research on unflattened picturebook design. This unique book transforms the experience of a child’s first haircut into an engaging and playful moment. I created the artwork using a Riso machine in our illustration department, embracing the subtle textures and vibrant layers of risograph printing. A key focus of my design process was crafting a character that embodies simplicity and charm, appealing to young readers. My First Haircut received the prestigious 2022 Bologna Illustrators Exhibition Award and has since toured internationally
Some-where other
Get PDFExhibition essay for 'Julian Watts: Ash Swale', exhibition at Sarah Myerscough Gallery, June - September 2022
Putting Ourselves in the Picture
No full textIn 2021 Professor of Photography Anna Fox was awarded an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Engagement Fellowship by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of the UK Research Initiative. This Fellowship builds on the Fast Forward initiative and has enabled the pioneering project Putting Ourselves in the Picture supporting a community of marginalized women and non-binary people in collaboration with five organisations recognised for their influential endeavours:
Autograph ABP; Impressions Gallery, Bradford; National Galleries of Scotland; Women for Refugee Women and Work Show Grow.
Through a series of innovative workshops and mentorship activities organised by the partners this project has developed the skills, knowledge of photography and confidences of the participants. The resulting outputs are set to educate us all by increasing awareness of women’s unheard life stories using photography as a tool of empowerment and as a story-telling practice.
The project participants Ceecee, Rella, Rhody, Miya, Precious, Raolat, Phim, Leonelle, Linda, Nwanyi, Lovelin, Hannah, Grace, Maureen, Ana, Maryam, Sylvie, Taraneh, Elham, Manar, Vicky, and Josiane have all made work that opens our eyes, enthuses our ideas and crushes stereotypes. Putting Ourselves in the Picture confronts gender discrimination and the marginalisation of women in our societies.
Outcomes:
A book, Putting Ourselves In The Picture - published by Trolley Books, edited by Anna Fox and Maria Kapajeva, designed by Sarah Boris, an essay is written by Anna Fox and Maria Kapajeva and edited by Anne Lyden, Anne McNeill, Bindi Vora, Elizabeth Ransom and Natasha Caruana.
A series of podcasts - in collaboration with Social Broadcasts, Fast Forward have produced the Putting Ourselves in The Picture podcast series of 6 episodes, which was hosted by Anna Fox and Maria Kapajeva.
This series focuses on conversations around the Fast Forward Manifesto for increased involvement of women in photography concerned with improving inclusivity and diversity in photography. It also features discussions about the project Putting Ourselves in The Picture created with a group of partner organisations, participants and other photography professionals
Regeneration and heritage: considering static heritage narratives in housing-led regeneration
Get PDFHousing and regeneration are regularly assumed to go hand-in-hand. The conventional economic argument goes that, as a means of repurposing land in order to intensify use and support wider uses, housing can act as a catalyst for investment in cities, and in theory, can support existing communities. I argue that the benefits are rarely spread evenly, and that the carefully constructed narratives around regeneration, particularly around heritage and history, act to exclude rather than invite communities to benefit from regeneration.
This article will explore the notion that conservation practices in housing-led regeneration projects can be an exclusionary practice. This is an opportunity to explore how the practice of housing-led regeneration frequently relies on a singular reading of place in order to generate a sense that contemporary works are simply enabling a site to be returned to a true or authentic state.
I will argue that narratives of repair and protection in conservation practice can be used as a means of excluding the contemporary, living practices of use in regeneration areas. Drawing on material culture approaches to reading a site adjacent to London’s 2012 Olympic Park, I will argue that the selective assignment of the term „heritage asset” to Victorian-era buildings, at the exclusion of more recent but otherwise occupied buildings, presents a narrative that excludes non-economically dominant groups. This study will draw on Samuel’s (2012) reading of material culture and conservationism, Waterton’s (2010) work on Authorized Heritage Discourse, and on Pétursdóttir’s (2012) and Pendlebury’s (2008, 2013) work into contested static heritage narratives
The meaning of creativity through the ages: from inspiration to artificial intelligence
Get PDFGiven the relatively new pedagogic contexts of creative business education and creative industry business schools, this chapter aims to examine the complexity tied-up in the word ‘creativity’ through the cultural and historical narratives that have both influenced, and been influenced by, the modern study of creativity—and more recently computational creativity and artificial intelligence (AI). The chapter illustrates that despite creativity appearing in modern dictionaries only after Guilford’s inaugural speech as chair of the APA in 1950, its modern origins belie Western historic myths and cultural assumptions such as genius, intelligence and imagination that have endured into present day ‘confluence theories’ of creativity by social psychologists such as Amabile—models largely about creativity as intrinsic psychology and cognitive abilities. It is argued that along this historical journey towards an ontology of creativity ‘in the mind’, the creativity of the person in social systems (first outlined by Whitehead in the 1920s) has been overlooked, especially in the new field of AI. Rising to a call from Still and D’Inverno’s paper at an International Conference of Computational Creativity (2016), the chapter reviews the facets and features of what they term ‘G creative’ (perhaps God like) and ‘N creative’ (perhaps nature like)—and point to the problem of psychology’s hijacking of the subject of creativity from 1950s onwards with its adopted closed system intelligence in the development of AI programs and ‘thinking’ machines. The case is made for a place in the creative academy, therefore, to help the field of AI move beyond ‘closed system’ creativity AI by pointing to more ‘open system’ approaches, including a recent AI artwork algorithm employing Csikszentmihalyi’s sociocultural creativity model of external ‘rating’
Are you sitting comfortably?
No full textAn examination of how the history of chair design both constructs and is constructed by normalized concepts of gender
Putting Ourselves in the Picture
No full textThis new publication presents the project Putting Ourselves in the Picture, set up by Fast Forward: Women in Photography, designed to empower women to use photography in pertinent ways to tell stories about their own lives.
Working with five, progressive thinking partners, encountered through the Fast Forward network, Putting Ourselves in the Picture engages with groups of refugee and migrant women and nonbinary people whose stories are the focus of this striking book.
The partners: Autograph, Impressions Gallery, National Galleries of Scotland, Women for Refugee Women and Work Show Grow worked with the Fast Forward team to develop the project and designed a series of empowering skills development activities building confidence for the women participants. Each partner brought their own team of artists, mentors and workshop leaders to work with a group of participants in their own locations. The powerful narratives and inspiring images that emerge from the pages of this book have grown out of the pioneering photography workshops and mentorship activity, devised by our partners and delivered across the UK, and is designed by Sarah Boris.
The project participants Ceecee, Rella, Rhody, Miya, Precious, Raolat, Phim, Maniche, Linda, Nwaanyi Ka Aku, Lovelin, Hannah, Grace, Maureen, Ana, Maryam, Sylvie, Taraneh, Elham, Manar, Vicky, and Josiane have all made work that opens our eyes, enthuses our ideas and crushes stereotypes. Putting Ourselves in the Picture confronts gender discrimination and the marginalisation of women in our societies.
Fast Forward, based at University for the Creative Arts in the UK, is designed to promote and engage with women in photography across the globe. We provoke new debate and ensure, as women photographers and professionals, that we are in the news and in the history books. There are millions of women in the world of photography and we intend to arrest the process of forgetting that so frequently erases women from the burgeoning histories of photography and shed light on new ways of thinking, showing, discussing and distributing our work. Fast Forward has initiated the Manifesto for increased involvement of women in photography, which welcomes signatures from both: individuals and organisations to support the need for equality and diversity across all fields of photography.
In 2021 Professor of Photography Anna Fox was awarded an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Engagement Fellowship by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of the UK Research Initiative. This Fellowship builds on the Fast Forward initiative and has enabled the pioneering project Putting Ourselves in the Picture supporting a community of marginalized women in collaboration with five organisations recognised for their influential endeavours
Drawing the invisible in plain sight
Get PDFThis is a presentation about Pier dig. This is a durational drawing performance that took place on Portobello beach, Edinburgh, and was commissioned for the Arts Festival ArtwalkPorty.
The performance lasted 7 ¾ hours. It began with Burgoyne marking out an area of beach, relative to its original size 128 mtrs x 23 mtrs of a pier which once stood there, prior to it being washed away in a storm in the early part of the 1930’s.
This presentation seeks to propose that drawing in its engagement and immersion with a site may be one in where the memory of the place and the memories to come following that engagement oscillates akin to an event of perpetual forming and unforming.
To unpack this work, is to acknowledge drawing as a phenomenological field uniting site, memory and gesture. Further, drawing is an act of withdrawal, not application of mark, in this case between spade and sand. In the words of Jean-Lucy Nancy ‘drawing its mark from this withdrawing- The place that is estranged from all forms.’
To support this Burgoyne will explore key contexts including places being of elements and not productions of ‘things’ (Merleau-Ponty/Levinas), the concept of clearing as a means in which materials in this case energy and sand are absorbed in the making of the work ( the drawing), as it discloses an ontology of site beyond the exteriority and aesthetic appearance (Heidegger). In doing so, an intersubjectivity may emerge where upon as Merleau-Ponty states ‘the visible is pregnant with the invisible’ and in contrast to the functionality of material (Heidegger) memory makes the past available to me for my future (Levinas).
In referencing these contexts, pier dig will align the knowledge we bring to a site, and the experience of that site as one in which we co-create a pre-reflective situation as we immerse in the rich transformation and apprehension of drawings’ as a site of raw facticity. In this way indicative of what Levinas refers to as ‘the living contradiction’(2015:142). This is to say we strive in our actions as -in drawing upon a site between two trajectories. One that is casual and operates in past, present, future mode, and the other being pre-reflective which is ahead of itself as an intention. As such in reverse i.e. Aligned to future, as such followed by present, then past.
Within this phenomenon of contraction and expansion, the performance began at low tide, and sees Burgoyne enter a subsequent battle to maintain the space drawn out, by moving the ‘pier’ up the beach to prevent the site from impending erasure. Both absurd and tragic, as he attempts to maintain the site within site, the ongoing relocating of the ‘pier’ ultimately concludes with Burgoyne unable to distinguish the sand /site he is moving, from the sand and locality it is upon.
This paper proposes to suggest the pier being drawn is ultimately concealed in plain sight and as such to draw ‘place’ is to evolve an interspace between past and future that is present through its dispersal, indeed as Levinas suggests this ‘non representability is the surplus of the lived body over the representation of it.’ (2015:43)
This presentation will aim to unpack the paradoxical nature of drawings rapport with site and memory. In this, actions and strategies of erasure are in fact the means to reveal the concealment inherent within the site as one set of assemblage unforms and another is open and fluid in that reterritorialization and forming. This will be to suggest that the unity of labour and freedom as conceptual frameworks are symptomatic of labour in which we make futures. In this way we establish home. But what kind of home is this? if indeed it is an autonomy that is ungraspable.
This is to say, drawing is less an advancement into space but could well be a repetitive act of incessant withdrawal and removal, through that intertwining of vision and movement. As such that which is removed, the marks left is a site in itself, indicative of locating, that oscillates between the elemental, sensorial event and the thing it may be seeking to preserve that is in the process of been relocated.
In this way Pier dig is symptomatic of that being- in- its- self, between place and experience, akin to a habitation if temporal, akin to a duality of forming and unforming manifestation of memory. A visualisation of invisibility where proximity and physicality of distance is reversed, whereby what was at hand is now dispersed, while that drawings’ dasein is now ever closer.
In conclusion Pier dig will aim to emphasise drawings rapport with history and site, as ultimately a dragging and pushing of space and matter in a convergence between 2 points. Displacement of the memory origination of a site, and the extending of that spatiality through drawing toward alternate horizons and destinies that are uncontainable: ‘Drawing wants to show the truth, not what has appeared or its appearance, but of the coming into appearance… this is about showing what does not show itself. (2003:92)
In this it is paradoxical, where rules and process lead less to a greater unity of site and its history through drawing, but as shifting plates of sedimentation, revealing less their unity but indicative of the potential of separation instead
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