Leeds Arts University Repository (CREST)
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Drawing as a tool for shaping community experience into collective allegory
No full textThis chapter offers an account of an artist using drawing to develop images of allegorical significance within an inner-city community. It highlights the ways in which a variety of drawing methodologies can be used to respond to different community concerns, considering drawings as a visualisation tool, analogy, invention, narrative and visual allegory. Barker believes that drawing can be used to develop a deeper understanding of difference and of mutual interests of various residents within a multi-cultural community. He also argues that drawing can act as a catalyst to help the wider community approach issues of contemporary urban life and associated political and social issues
SKETCH 2017
No full textA competition and touring exhibition SKETCH, aims to promote the diversity and importance of drawing and the role of the sketchbook in contemporary creative practice. SKETCH is the UK’s only art prize for artist’s sketchbooks with a dedicated touring sketchbook exhibition. This competition is only held once every four years and as first prize winner there should be an opportunity to hold a solo exhibition alongside the launch of the next exhibition in 2021. Sketchbooks are an integral part of my practice, both as a way of collecting observational information as Barker walks the streets and have conversations with people, and as a way of developing ideas back in the studio for allegorical drawings, installations and ceramics. The winning of first prize meant that Barker had the opportunity to open my work out into new material territories
Echoes of protest: untold stories of the 1984-1985 UK Miners' Strike
No full textThis journal article looks at a collaborative project by artist/filmmaker Esther Johnson and filmmaker/writer Debbie Ballin titled Echoes of Protest. This research investigates the legacy of being involved in significant protest movements from a child’s perspective and seeks to understand the role protest can play in the lives of children, and to explore its aftermath. This article will draw upon oral testimony transcriptions and photography undertaken for this project to highlight a perspective of the 1984-85 UK Miners’ Strike that has seldom been explored. The stories collected are from adults remembering what it was like to grow up as a child during the Strike. They articulate the experience with a maturity they may have been unable to express at the time. The text will follow the research methodology, findings, discuss the editing process and invite contributors to reflect on their participation
Forwards always – seasonal observations through image and word
No full textThe output is a creative project comprising twelve large scale printed banners, spreads from a poetry book, developmental sketchbook work and examples of broader contextual inputs. Research Process: The work exhibited was underpinned by Hodson’s ongoing research into open mode play and improvisation. The exhibit to sought to promote improvisation as a vital methodology within the practices of both drawing and writing. The drawings for these banners were made with pen & ink. It is during this process of drawing where I have implemented new models of abstraction and simplification to reduce each idea down to its bare minimum in an attempt to convey the specific mood or atmosphere observed at its point of conception. This has meant drawing roughs and sketches exhaustively across sketchbooks, in order to refine each design to its most immediate and impactful. In addition, further practices of iteration and modulation through drawing have allowed Hodson to refine the choreography of each drawing as a studio-based performance. The concept for the banners emerged from Hodson’s involvement in the Natives residency held in Swaledale, during spring 2016, led by Nicolas Burrows. Research Insight: Advocating improvisation as a means by which the poet or illustrator can identify, sustain and develop their own emerging tone of voice through performance and play. Hodson’s research is informed by Csíkszentmihályi’s writing around Flow Theory, Nachmanovitch’s discussions on improvisation and Gladwell’s writing on the Adaptive Subconscious. The underlying principle emerged from the work on the importance of open mode, uninhibited play and improvisation. Dissemination: The exhibition was held at the Vernon Street Gallery, Leeds Arts University during the Thought Bubble International Comics Festival, held Sept 18th -24th 2017
Bodies in light: Mediating states of presence
No full textBodies in Light investigates how the convergence of light, body and technology can evoke states of presence through creative practice in the context of both real world and technologically mediated environments. Throughout history the interwoven relationship between body and light has been a catalyst for discovery, technological innovation and creative expression. Light has been harnessed, measured, manipulated and investigated in order to expand knowledge and create experiences which abstract and re-frame our somatic perspectives. Whether mediated by technology or evolving cultural paradigms, light focuses our attention, frames our narratives and initiates states of presence which enable us to examine and reflect upon our embodied human condition. This chapter discusses a range of approaches and strategies artists use to elicit states of presence through the convergence of light, body and technology in response to specific artworks and immersive projection environments
Simple tools make the task easier
No full textAn artists’ book exploring the co-evolution of language and tool use. Commissioned by South Square Gallery, Thornton, and taking inspiration from the collections of Cliffe Castle, Keighley
Kerrang! magazine and the representation of heavy metal’s masculinity: A content analysis of Kerrang! cover images from 1981-1995.
No full textKerrang! magazine is Britain’s longest running and most popular alternative music publication. The weekly magazine serves the UK rock and metal community and encapsulates a broad collection of sub-genres within rock and metal. Rock and (especially) heavy metal culture has been cited (Walser, 1993; Coates, 1997; Hill, 2011; Vasan, 2011) as being overtly masculinised and patriarchal and as such sustaining the same gender inequalities as mainstream culture (Schippers, 2002) yet the ways in which this masculinity is expressed through style and image is in many ways different to that of the mainstream. This content analysis explores images featured on the cover pages (a cross section) of Kerrang! magazine from 1981-1995 identifying the stylistic and performative features of masculinity within heavy metal culture as represented in Kerrang! magazine. Further analysis compares and contrasts these features with those presented in “mainstream” lifestyle and music publications of the time. The data presented reflects what Brown (2007) described as “everything louder than everything else” as being an identifying principle of heavy metal culture. In this sense “everything louder than everything else” also becomes a characteristic if heavy metal masculinity. The concluding discussion situates Kerrang! as being an influential force in the rock and metal lifestyle and through the beginnings of its operation (at the end of the 20th Century) has provided and continually enforced a model for the expression of masculine practices within the scene
The commands of the sadistic capitalist
No full textWoolley’s research explores the relation between people and objects, and the impact that images have as producers and disseminators of social values. She interprets commodity packaging and adverts to determine the social ideologies they support and to understand how they shape the identity of the consumer. Her central argument is that commodity culture turns everything into adverts.
Her site-specific work on billboards and social networking sites examine how images are consumed, particularly how ideology is transmitted through commercial visual culture. Because contemporary social relations are mediated, and often dominated, by online social networks Woolley views the sites as the contemporary commercial space where commodity culture pervades social existence. They are spaces where dominant social values are disseminated and reinforced through advertising and celebrity product endorsements. Woolley’s works aim to function as activist interventions disrupting the repetitious order of consumerism and creating a space in which the viewer can critically consider some of the contradictions of capitalist consumption.
Under the pseudonym the sadistic capitalist Woolley posted tweets every day in May 2017 to coincide with Diffusion International Photography Festival in Cardiff. The Tweets bring attention to the sadistic commands of advertising on social networking sites by combining advertising and magazine layouts with by quotations from the works of Sade. In other posts film stills from Pasolini’s film adaptation of Sade’s story, Salo: 120 Days of Sodom are combined with advertising slogans. Hashtags draw attention to the similarity between popular culture texts and the cruel tortures of Sade’s heroes.
The project aims to appropriate commodities and adverts as wish images. In The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin said that by changing the social value of commodities consumers produce wish images that enable them to inhabit the objects and make them act abnormally. This project considers how social networking sites can be used disruptively. Woolley inhabits the space and acts abnormally.
https://twitter.com/sadisticcomman
Ulysses and I: Joyce as a catalyst for graphic practice
No full textThis article will focus on elements of my graphic design practice that consider how text can inspire, be used with and act as imagery. I discuss my master’s project, an investigation into a reader’s response to text and a traditional graphic application of that research. This second project was made in collaboration with Joseph Haigh, a fellow student at Manchester Metropolitan University whose research is concerned with typographic landscapes. I consider how my haptic perception of the book has influenced this later work and how it continues to inspire my recent image-based responses
Soft picture
No full textThe output is an artefact, a soft picture which is an embroidered wall piece,
created as a documentary response to a derelict site, its space and the industrial
Hattersley Loom within it. Research process: Lane embraced the post-industrial space at Sunnybank Mills as an opportunity for experimentation. The work relies on initial documentary photographic imagery, which is then digitally re-painted, printed onto cloth and embroidered. The resultant soft picture contains an image which is both tactile and visual at the same time and seeks to re-engage the audience with the pictorial re-imagining of industrial history from a contemporary perspective. Research insights: The work is a product of an exploration of thinking through practice. This has evolved around the relationship between textile practice and the subject matter which pre-occupies it – the transient nature of the derelict (both building and machine). This is investigated through a broader methodological prism of making, un-making and re-making, as a means of opening up a dialogue between textile and place. The soft, clean, crafted and domestically perceived medium of the embroidered textile runs counter to its hard, dirty, disordered and industrial subject and is raising questions about binary thinking, the either or and the other. Could the soft picture be used to open up debate around less binary and more inclusive thinking related to Michel Serres(2008) writings around ideas of ‘soft logic’? Dissemination: The output is disseminated as follows: • By exhibition: Make, Un-make, Re-make, Sunnybank Mills, West Yorkshire, 2017 • Through conference paper: Re-making the Derelict, Textile and Place Conference at Manchester Metropolitan University 2018 • Through conference proceedings: Soft pictures – Re-making the Hattersley,Futurescan 4: Valuing Practice 2019