Leeds Arts University Repository (CREST)
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Open Sesame: Dorothea Tanning’s Critical Writing
No full textThis book chapter repositions Dorothea Tanning's critical writing (her self-reflexive artist’s statements and letters to the editor) in the context of her broader œuvre as well as within the discursive framework of revisionary feminist perspectives on surrealism. I focus on two key texts by Tanning from the later twentieth century, ‘Some Parallels in Words and Pictures’ (1989) and ‘Statement’ (1991), as well as her experimental exhibition catalogue Ouvre-Toi (Open Sesame, 1971). These examples are revealing in terms of their author’s position on the text/image relationships, which recur throughout her practice. By realigning Tanning’s writings with her imagery, and by retrospectively drawing parallels with feminist theory and intellectual history, I argue for a re-reading of Tanning’s critical writings as a manifestation of the feminist cause in surrealism studies and beyond.
This chapter was first delivered as a paper at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Amsterdam (August 2017) by invitation of the editor
What Eliza and Jake did next: Learning beyond access to HE art and design?
No full textThis chapter considers the wider social impact an Access to Higher Education Diploma (AHED) has beyond those educational benefits gained by individual students. This is an example of an Access course, which are designed in the United Kingdom to give those older students without qualifications a means of going to university. It is argued that the altruistic motives of some of the students extend the sphere of influence of their education beyond themselves and their immediate families to other communities. In relation to the ‘possibility of hope’ within adult education as advocated by Raymond Williams (1989) it can be seen that the students aimed to share their skills and knowledge gleaned from their learning experiences that included their AHED course. It also appeared that they chose to undertake this activity on the margins of mainstream education
All You Have To Do
No full textThe output is a creative project, comprising of photographs and moving image gifs. This body of work was produced/curated in response to a call for artworks from Carleton University, Canada, as part of their ‘Food Matter and Materialities: Critical Understandings of Food Cultures’ conference.
Research process: “All You Have To Do” is an instructional heading taken from ‘Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook’, first published in 1950. The work responds to cookbook such as the above named, referencing the visual style and language of post-war Western cookbooks in general. The work attempts to contextualise these cookbook images through the prism of contemporary visual culture, by borrowing from the conventions of web-based image production, and presenting the work in an online format.
Research insights: This project continues my research into food in visual and popular culture, specifically cookbooks (historical and contemporary), and social media. The post-war period of cookbooks referenced in the title sees a proliferation of colour photography, the language of which is increasingly aspirational. This trend continues today, in printed media and on TV, and increasingly on social media, the latest shop window for aspirational domesticity. Online, we perform a carefully crafted and curated version of our lives. This work explores the anxieties generated by mainstream food images, and questions the nature of aspiration in relation to visual food practices. In visual culture, the depiction of food is often divorced from.
Dissemination: The work was included in an online exhibition managed by Carleton University, as part of the ‘Food Matters and Materialities’ conference, from 22 Sept - 31 Oct, 2021
Drawing the Embodied Mind: A Project Report on Research Into Interoception
No full textThis project report on the methodology used for drawing
based perceptual research, explores how drawing can be used
to interrogate the concept of the body as being the driving
force behind our perceptual experiences. It reflects on
drawing as a way to represent a non-linguistic experience of embodied consciousness. Drawn images are developed
by imaginative responses to the body’s somatic perceptual
input, and are used to communicate the sensory experience
of interoception. Images are also constructed in response
to a need to develop representations of sensations that
emanate both from within and without the body; something
that is essential if we are to coordinate a totality of
responses to various situations as they arise, situations
that it is argued, emerge both internally and externally
at the same time. The world we experience, it is argued, is
not an internal representation of an out there experience,
it is as Merleau-Ponty argues “inseparable from a person perceiving it, and can never be actually
in itself because its articulations are those of our very
existence.” The images that are now beginning to emerge
from this drawing led project, it is further proposed, can
be regarded as those ‘articulations of existence’ that are
required if we are to begin communicating to each other
about how we feel and how we sense our inner body is trying
to communicate with what we sometimes think of as our
rational conscious selves.
Using his own drawings as well as responses from
others, the artist, Garry Barker, explains how he has developed this drawing research out of his previous investigation into the use of votives, which was used to help others
overcome fears of illness and as an aid to their recovery.
Finally questions are asked as to whether or not the
drawings produced are purely representational or engaged in
what Karen Barad calls a performativity that emerges from a
“direct material engagement with the world”
Utilising mood boards as an image elicitation tool in qualitative research
No full textThe use of image elicitation methods has been recognised in qualitative research for some time however, the use of mood boards to prompt participant discussion is currently an under-researched area. This article explores the use of mood boards as a data collection method in qualitative research. Used in design disciplines mood boards allow designers to interpret and communicate complex or abstract aspects of a design brief. In this study I utilise mood boards as being part creative visual method and part image elicitation device. The use of mood boards is explained here in the context of a research project exploring masculinity and men's reflexivity. In this article I consider the benefits of utilising this method in researching reflexivity and gender before offering a critical appraisal of this method and inviting colleagues to explore how mood boards might enhance research projects involving elicitation
Re-touched
No full textRe-touched is a collaborative project by collage artist Eyre and fashion photographer Ellis. Both artists share an interest in the female body, particularly the notion of pleasure in display and gaze between women and the body. The body of work that forms ‘Re-touched’ combines photographic and collage methods in order to embody a sense of sensuality through the opening up and enfolding of the female form, on set and through the process of collage. The artists position their work within a framework of feminist theory that questions the binary
thinking around the gaze. They draw on the writing of Laura U. Marks to bring a haptic quality to their photographic and collage interventions to the image, and
in inviting the viewer to be touched by their images. Through this series of photographic collages, they have established a visual and tactile approach that utilizes
the body, is collaborative and re-figures the power structures between model, photographer and viewer. Their images offer a way of rethinking and reshaping representations of the female nude
Chernobyl: Thirty Years On
No full textThe output is an exhibition of 12 photographs taken by Young in Chernobyl 30 years after the nuclear devastation.
Research process: In May 2016, exactly 30 years after the disaster, Young visited the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station and the nearby abandoned city of Pripyat. The experience affected him in ways he did not expect. What was previously alien was now also eerily familiar. The city of Pripyat reminded him in so many ways of the city he grew up in. The utilitarian architecture and uniform paint schemes reminded Young of the 1980s’ council estates of the Halewood and Speke areas of Liverpool where his grandparents lived. The concrete pipes and iron frames of the children’s playgrounds in Pripyat looked just like the swings in Greenbank Park where he would play as a child. A disaster, that happened far away, felt uncomfortably close to home. Young took a number of photographs during his visit. But it has taken him five years to be able to really look at them.
Research Insights: Through the course of his research, Young has developed a methodology he calls ‘reductionism’. He defines reductionism as ‘storytelling through absence’. By deciding what to leave out of a story one can allow the audience to place themselves in it making it more meaningful for them. There is a lot of ‘absence’ in the story of the Chernobyl disaster. First there was an absence of truth in what the residents of Pripyat were told. And now there is an absence of people from the exclusion zone. The images of buildings taken in a Soviet Union that no longer exists. But still stand today. The council blocks of south Liverpool have, mostly, been knocked down.
Dissemination: A collection of 12 photographs exhibited at Cafe Blah in Manchester from 16th - 30th October 2021
The Distressed Look
No full text‘The Distressed Look’ is a series of 21 mixed media sculptures by Dale, each resembling a masked head impaled on a spike.
Research process: The challenge of the works was to find variation within strict technical parameters: starting each time with a flat, linear template, a range of 21 masks were created that sought to reflect a range of human experience.
Research insights: The work conveyed a variety of individual moods, despite the repetitive base form. The different approaches to ‘masking’ resulted in sculptures that expressed discomfort, beauty, eccentricity, aggression and inscrutability. The sculptures are part of an on-going collaboration with Prof. Adam Smyth exploring the visualisation of a grangerised edition of Ovid’s Art of Love (1813).
Dissemination: The work was commissioned and exhibited as part of the group exhibition ‘Remote Work’ at The Grundy, Blackpool, 27 March – 19 June 2021. Seven of the sculptures have been acquired for The Grundy’s collection
Shape Shifters
No full textThis Creative Project by Eyre is a series of photographic collages exhibited as prints and three digital animated videos presented on screens.
Research Process: the dissemination was an exhibition that questioned historical depictions of women in photography, all the artists used strategies that disrupt, frustrate and challenge the camera’s gaze; a gaze historically associated with an objectifying male perspective. Eyre’s response derived from a previous project (Twitch, shift, jerk, slip, repeat 2020) and used collage and animated GIFs. The work started with photographs culled from fashion magazines, and the collage (digital and analogue) methods entwined and enfolded the images to create irregular and changeable representations of the female body. Visual fissures breached and intruded on both the depicted images and on the photographic surface, making both strange.
Research Insights: Eyre’s wider research explores the way that women participate in the ongoing labour of maintaining and controlling our bodily surfaces, which can be a fruitless task because the corporeal body is changeable, porous, leaky and ages. The methods used to produce the new work - ‘Shape Shifters’ draw attention to this and the ways that the practices of photography are implicit in this process. We use the photograph to try and fix our appearance, to still our slipping surfaces. Yet, the photograph can also contradict our assumptions about stability, as its own material surface can be slippery and unstable. Shape Shifters makes these slippages tangible through the combination of different digital and analogue materials, textures and effects, and drawing comparisons between the physical upkeep of our physical surfaces and the disruptive buffering, freezing and glitching of our digital selves.
Dissemination: The work was exhibited at Home Gallery and the Waterside Lauriston Gallery in Manchester 16 September – 7 November 2021
Pea Green Surprise
No full textThe output is a single photograph taken by Robinson, commissioned for the ‘Curious Colour’ exhibition at Linden Mill Galleries.
Research Process:
Participants were invited to respond a single colour of their choice from the British Colour Council’s ‘Dictionary of Colour Standards’, published in 1951. Robinson's work responds directly to colour 172 ‘Pea Green'. It explores the language of commercial colour photography, referencing cookbooks and recipe cards made popular in the 1950s and 1960s, in keeping with the era in which the ‘Dictionary of Colour Standards’ was produced. Many colours in the ‘Dictionary of Colour Standards’ are named after foods, suggesting the connection between the two topics.
Research Insights:
This project continues my research into mid-20th century cookbooks, exploring the lavish and colourful imagery which appears in these volumes. Major advancements in colour photographic processes in this period contributed to a huge increase in the use of full-page colour photographs in cookbooks, and mark a shift towards photographs which are aspirational rather than instructional. These carefully crafted images perpetuate an idealised version of domesticity, presenting food as a visual spectacle, often in the context of entertainment and social advancement.
Dissemination:
The work was exhibited as part of the ‘Curious Colour’ group exhibition at Linden Mill Galleries 1-31 August 2021. The exhibition was organised and curated by artist Heather Boxhall