Leeds Arts University Repository (CREST)
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446 research outputs found
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A Conversation about Ethics: A Deliberative and Practice-Based Approach to Ethics in Arts Education
No full textThis article reports on a practice-based research project that examined the various orientations of practice to ethical deliberation. The aim was to produce a film that captured ethical debate between two creative practitioners as they walked through their local streets. The film would be a catalyst for staff and students at an arts institution to think about their own ethical practices. The approach taken was based on Aristotelian notions of phronesis or practical wisdom, which is concerned with making ethical judgments based on deliberation. Issues were raised by the project, such as the tensions between policy and practice and the tensions between aesthetic considerations and ethical practice. Questions about the value of narrative, representation, and learning through doing were raised by the work
Head On
No full textThe output is a series of sculptural headpieces by Nicola Dale premiered via a solo exhibition at Bobinska Brownlee, London.
Research Process: ‘Head On’ focussed on sculpture as live experience, with audiences invited to complete the work. Visitors to the exhibition held, wore & moved with the pieces through bespoke artist-led participatory tours. This was done as an exploration of the ways in which sculptural volume can be both implied and mutable. By inhabiting a sculpture, an audience member becomes it, no longer able to see it from a distance. Each becomes the viewed as well as the viewer. Within the collapsed distance, a horizon of touch can be repeatedly established, reached and mediated anew. The tours were tailored to particular groups - including emerging performers (visual art/dance), wider creative communities (art/design), and learning-disabled young people.
Research Insights: By involving the audience directly in the work, ‘Head On’ provided a way into contemporary performance/sculpture for audiences without specialist knowledge. It fostered an appreciation of touch and shared experience. The audience-driven approach promoted contemporary art as something made with audiences, rather than merely for them. It provided opportunity for experiential learning alongside the traditionally passively viewed solo exhibition model.
Dissemination: The research was shared through the solo exhibition (9 - 21st May 2023) at Bobinska Brownlee, and publication with text by critic Cherry Smyth (edition of 50 and as PDF), as well as through five participatory tours for the public over the duration of the exhibition. Documentation from this was archived on the gallery’s and artist’s websites, as well as attendees’ social media and visual art news websites
Make it Happen Summer School: Experiential Learning to Develop Novice Socially-Engaged Artists
No full textThis article evaluates Make it Happen Summer School according to Bernstein’s writing on classification, framing, and recontextualisation. The project was a collaboration between a university and an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) that aimed to develop a curriculum for creative practitioners so they could learn to propose successful socially-engaged arts projects for funding and commissions. NPOs are arts organisations that are funded by the UK Government and the UK’s National Lottery via the Arts Council England.
This article draws upon quantitative and qualitative data collected in relation to this project to evaluate the curriculum and pedagogy. In order to do this, models developed from Bernstein’s work guide the analysis of the findings. It was found that while many gained powerful knowledge from the project, some did not. The processes of recontextualisation demonstrated how ideologies based on accountability and performativity shaped the curriculum reflecting the depoliticisation of socially-engaged practice
Developing critical thinking skills with adult learners in an art school: might a critical thinking manifesto be one way to visualise findings?
No full textThis qualitative study is set in a UK art school where participants are adult-learners on a postgraduate course. A 'critical thinking club' is described at work in a constructivist classroom where meaning is built through experiential teaching and learning. Three themes of: barriers in education for adult-learners; scaffolded stages to develop thinking skills; and how practice-focused research could contextualise participants' art-practice are considered and discussed. Adult-learners articulate their thoughts about developing critical thinking in a 'community of inquiry' and results are visualised in a five-point manifesto, leading to a discussion on possible practical ways of operationalising and developing critical thinking with students
Inconvenient Bodies
No full textInconvenient Bodies was an exhibition conceived and created specifically for Hošek Contemporary, a gallery in a converted goods barge.
Research Process: The work consisted of three large chiffon panels printed with images of disused ladies’ public toilets from Manchester, Brighouse and Scarborough. The panels were held up by wooden washing poles on satin rope, and accompanied by thirty small plywood and copper cut-outs of the ‘ladies’ symbol often found on toilet doors.
The research develops Chambers’ interest in the accessibility (or not) of public toilets explored in her performance work Urinary Leash – materialising the precarity of bodies that transgress categorisation. This work has been conceptualised in relation to the feminisation of migratory labour and to the labour of the woman artist.
Research Insights: Inconvenient Bodies is an example of a strategy for producing sculptural works small or compact enough so that they can be transported in the hold of a plane, as a nomadic feral art practice. This strategy highlights the work that artists do beyond the confines of the white cube gallery space.
The production of this series of works prompted Chambers’ further enquiry into the history of women’s public toilets in the UK, and has led into ongoing documentation of public toilet facilities across the UK and in Europe. The findings of this investigation are that women’s public toilets in the UK (established nearly a century after similar facilities for men) have been in steep decline for several decades, unlike their European counterparts. Currently, Chambers has documented 47 women’s public toilets.
Dissemination: The work was exhibited at Hošek Contemporary, Berlin, Germany, 5 – 9 April 2023
Self-Supporting
No full text‘Self-Supporting’ is a performance by Nicola Dale commissioned by The Hepworth Wakefield for the survey exhibition ‘If Not Now When – Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain 1960-2022’
The exhibition project revisited research into women artists working in the expanding field of sculpture undertaken in the late 1980s by Griselda Pollock and Lorna Green as the basis for a present-day comparative study. It recruited a new cohort of contemporary sculptors working in Britain.
Research Process: Dale studied anonymised responses to The Hepworth Wakefield’s ‘Women in Sculpture’ survey. She noted that variations of particular actions appeared across the cohort – e.g. understanding, balancing, rewarding, struggling, labouring, adapting and self-supporting. These common experiences became Dale’s own actions for the performance, i.e. in ‘becoming’ a self-supporting sculpture, she had to perform these actions in order to visualise a shared understanding of what it feels like to be a female sculptor.
Research Insights: Dale’s insight was to understand how to ‘collaborate’ with anonymous artists. The focus on their stated actions informed a visual metaphor that stretched Dale’s own understanding of sculpture as performance. Although superficially ‘solo’ it gathered together in one place the actions of female sculptors across time and space. This may be understood as a feminist phenomenological approach.
Dissemination: ‘Self-supporting’ was performed on the opening night of ‘If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain, 1960-2022’, as well as at the closing event of its subsequent tour to the Saatchi Gallery, London. Moving image and photographic documentation was shared online via both gallery and artist, as well as being collected as part of the exhibition’s archive (Hepworth Wakefield)
"Bois of Isolation": Queering place, gender binaries and the 'self' through selfies in pandemic lockdown
No full textWhat happens to queer and gender-non-conforming community, bodily expression and identity when many queer spaces are closed and communities move to online spaces? In this article we critically reflect on our collaborative project bois of isolation (boi) - a platform within Instagram for people to share selfies of the spaces and processes through which they queer gender binaries during the COVID-19 pandemic. We ask to what extent online social media spaces can disrupt normative, binarised gender identity and provide ways of reimagining the selfie. Operating within digital capitalism, selfies often serve to circulate and reproduce dominant ‘desirable’ subjectivities in ‘gender appropriate’ places. However, we argue through interventions like boi young people carve out small spaces of dissent and respite in/from social media platforms and create forms of community during lockdown. By queering the visual representations of binarised gender and questioning the neoliberal individualised ‘self’ in ‘selfies’, young people construct communal aesthetic spaces in which gender plurality and fluidity are expressed and celebrated
Breathless
No full textThe output consists of 17 digital prints designed to explore various ways of visualizing the artist’s interoceptual experiences when suffering from breathing difficulties brought on by the Covid 19 virus.
Research Process: Notebook drawings were made during a period of illness that was brought on due to a covid 19 infection. In particular, various visualisations were made of the state of breathlessness that had been induced by the covid virus. Initial notebook drawings were developed further by both drawing and printmaking processes as Barker recovered from the covid19 virus attack. As these images emerged from the various processes of visualisation, two distinct stages of image formulation were developed. Images from both stages were finally then scanned, processed and developed as digital prints, so that more control could be made over colour variations and to cohere handmade marks with monoprinted and collaged elements. Final digitisation allowed these images to be disseminated online as well as in printed formats.
Research Insights: The research revealed a particular approach to the process of image development, in relation to the visualisation of an experience that had no existing associated images available for reference. Working from very ‘sketchy’ visual notes, the images produced in the first stage of development, were more figurative, relying on memories of analogous experiences of particular places, objects and situations. During the second stage of image development, the imagery became more abstracted, emerging from the processes of materials investigation and more universal in their metaphorical associations.
Dissemination:
The artefacts were exhibited at Workshop Press Gallery, England, 16-30 June 2023. They were also presented at two interoception workshops on 27 July 2023 at the Institute for Health Research and Innovation, University of Porto, Portugal. Additionally, the artefacts were published by i2ADS on 15 December 2023 as part of an article for PSIAX 7
Halting Implosion
No full textThe output is a set of 50 cards created by Barker and Oben in response to a Frances Woodley’s collaborative project ‘At Cross Purposes (2021-23)’.
Research Process: Barker and Oben corresponded both visually and in poetic text over two years, their ideas bouncing back and forth as they each created 25 printed cards with an image on their face and text on their reverse. The research was conducted via email and post, which were used as communication systems that allowed for both textual interchange and visual juxtaposition.
Research Insights: The nature of collaboration as a vehicle for sustained invention and the development of insights into other people’s motivation and conceptual frameworks was understood far deeper than previously. Both artists had previously worked in collaboration with other people, but neither had examined the actual process of collaboration with the depth and sustained processes of joint thinking that this project allowed.
Dissemination: The texts and images of the cards, as well as the processes that lay behind their evolution were used as a focus for a book section authored by Barker and Oben in ‘At Cross Purposes ‘, which was published in 2023 by Aberystwyth University School of Art.
The cards as well as framed prints of them formed part of a group exhibition, ‘At Cross Purposes‘ which will tour several galleries: Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries, 14 February - 21 April 2023; Oriel Môn, Llangefni, Anglesey - 29 April to 11 June 2023; Queen Street Studios Gallery, Belfast, - 7 to 28 September 2023; Elysium Gallery Swansea - November 7 to December 23 2023
Mum said you should always brush your hair
No full textThe output is bronze sculpture created by Gaffney, titled ‘Mum said you should always brush your hair’, measuring 29 x 17 x 13 cm.
Research process: Methods used are transcription; life modelling where it is the definition of life that is critical, combining material process with psychological and social behaviour to perform modelling-modelling; casting as part of the research project to construct a new definition of sculptural practice as Embodied Dreaming.
Research insights: The sculpture is one of a series of works made in response to the question ‘how can sculpture convey what it is like to inhabit a woman’s body as the researcher knows it?’ Which is differently positioned from the masculine contributions to the history of figuration that constitute the European and British sculptural canon from Rodin to the present day.
Dissemination: The output was included in ‘If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain, 1960 – 2022’, an exhibition that presents the outcomes of a significant research project, ‘Hepworth’s Progeny’ hosted by The Hepworth Wakefield (2021 – 23) and in collaboration with art historian Griselda Pollock and sculptor Lorna Green.
The work was exhibited at The Hepworth Wakefield (31 March – 15 October 2023) and Saatchi Gallery London (15 November 2023 – 22 January 2024), it was reviewed for the Guardian Online by Hannah Clugston (3 April 2023)