Leeds Arts University Repository (CREST)
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446 research outputs found
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Fully awake (Garry Barker)
No full textAn exhibition that was focused on the legacy of Fine Art painting teaching. Although this exhibition was painting focused, because Barker's work has for many years been centred on image development he was chosen for his contribution to an understanding of the processes behind image generation, in particular his contribution to an understanding of how narrative can be moved from a sequential storyline into a visual simultaneity. In this exhibition Barker was represented as one of an older generation of art tutors. He was chosen by Steve Carrick, now Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Chester, as an important influence on his own practice, he in turn chose one of his students, Samantha Cordery, as someone he would single out that could carry the baton onwards
Creation and application of curve blend tool
No full textThe output is a device, a tool within Maya that enables transition between multiple selected non-uniform rational basis spline (NURBS) curves. Research process: In response to the identification of manual and time-consuming methods when transforming curves using blendshape deformers, Clark developed a tool that enables the automation of this process across multiple curves. The tool was developed using Maya Embedded Language (MEL) scripting, translating the functionality of multiple toolsets into a single application, enabling a more efficient workflow. Clark developed understanding of scripting through the application of existing tools, which encouraged further development through research (arrays, loops, interface design). Following the development of the tool, Clark undertook a process of continual testing, resulting in the ‘room transition’ and ‘CBT people’ proof of concept. Research insight: The project led to the development of an innovative new tool for artists to use within Maya when creating animation with NURBS curves, enabling a more efficient workflow. It also demonstrated the role of creative agency in repurposing and enhancing an existing workflow into a single tool. The process integrates dynamics and also enables the curves to be rendered using paint effects. Dissemination: The tool is openly available for use in Maya
Leisure
No full textThe output is an exhibition which addresses the transience, or rather, permanence of pop-ephemera. Blakeley’s artistic practice explores contemporary culture through painted collage. She attempts to blur the past and present, suspending the image in time, making the past more immediate and accessible. By drawing together disparate cultural reference from the 1950s until the present day, she pieces together fragments of history, forming spaces of living nostalgia. The painting process makes something concrete out of the pop-ephemera, the opposite of how the images would otherwise exist, and the end result challenging the expectation versus the reality. Leisure, curated by Sarah Taylor, presented a new body of work by Blakeley, developing ongoing interests in subversive and playful directions. An interpretation text by Professor Derek Horton accompanied the exhibition
Re-making the Hattersley
No full textThese artefacts are a site-specific investigation of the Old Weaving Shed (now demolished) at Sunnybank Mills, West Yorkshire (2014-2019). In embracing the space at Sunnybank Mills, Lane has used it as an opportunity for experimental re- interpretation, re-contextualisation and re-imagination.
Research process: The artefacts explore the intersection between contemporary textile practice and the transient nature of derelict buildings and machines of the industrial north. Derelict buildings are deconstructed spaces in a state of entropic transformation and open to many interpretations. Through site specific reactivation of both space and artefacts, processes of making, un-making and re-making are explored. Lane casts, repaints and wraps remnant machine parts to re-engage the audience with the post-industrial form, questioning the object. Research insights:
Exploring the post-industrial landscape, engaging directly with remnant objects, provides insight into the materiality of the space and what it contains. Making casts from found objects, re-positioning materials, weight, and wrapping a structure within the space engaged touch, repetition, time and reformed shape. This in turn has directed research towards newer questions of “what is?” “what exists?” and even “Is time a thing?” The latter expands on ideas of decay and entropy, not of time “taking its toll” but of simply one object or space moving to being another object or space (Rovelli, 2015). The object can be used by the audience to engage conversation and explore new narratives. Dissemination: The output was disseminated as follows: • By exhibition: ‘Make, Un-make, Re-make’, Sunnybank Mills, West Yorkshire (2017). • Through a 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
The bridge: experiments in science and art
No full textThe output is a creative project co-authored with volcanologist, Jill Shipman. Chalmers’ contribution comprises the visual design of the creatures and environments. Research process: The SciArt Center provided a virtual space to record and showcase the process and products of the collaboration. The work was facilitated by bi-weekly Skype calls and documented in weekly blog posts. The approach was based on speculative biology, for example by asking how echolocation would work in fish-based creatures and how can these adaptations be made external to create a more visually interesting creature design while still remaining believable? These were explored through playing with the idea of setting the narrative around planetary exploration and therefore a speculative world and its flora and fauna will need to be visualised through concept art. Chalmers researched other Creature Designers that have created believable worlds, including Terryl Whitlatch, Bobby Rebholz and Brynn Metheney. Research insights:
Through testing ways to synthesize volcanic phenomena and creatures it was discovered that there were four approaches for incorporating volcanic features into creature design: volcanic phenomena can be directly applied to a part of the creature’s body, volcanic phenomena patterns can be overlaid on the creature creating unexpected forms on the surface, volcanic phenomena can provide inspiration for heat resistant adaptations from real-world animals and, finally, more imaginative and surreal methods can be used to personify the volcanic phenomena. Further insights gained addressed the cyclical process of collaboration; the art-science interface as a method to stimulate the mind, stir the emotions, and promote action in geoscience stewardship; and the experience of an artistic approach to science communication to create immersive, interactive worlds that engage wider audiences. Dissemination: The project was developed through ‘The Bridge’ four-month virtual residency with SciArt, September - December 2017, and was disseminated via conference paper and online
Echoes of protest: conference presentation.
No full textThis paper looks at the research methodology and findings of the collaborative project ’Echoes of Protest’ by Sheffield Hallam University academic, Esther Johnson, Professor of Film and Media Arts, and Leeds Arts University academic Debbie Ballin, Senior Lecturer in Filmmaking.
'Echoes of Protest’ aims to understand the role protest can play in the politicisation of children and the long-term impact of its aftermath on their lives. The initial phase of this research draws on oral testimony and photography to highlight a seldom-explored perspective of the 1984-1985 UK Miners’ Strike. The stories collected are from adults remembering what it was like to grow up during the strike
Challenging the cult of normalcy: art education and transdisciplinary practices
No full textI am interested in art education as a transdisciplinary practice which embraces a variety of mediums and world views and in how, through transdisciplinarity, art education challenges the cult of normalcy. The normalisation of the individual is, I suggest here, a limiting, destructive and pedagogically unsound basis from which to pursue any kind of education and particularly one where the contribution of the individual is as central as it is in art education. I argue here that the adoption of a transdisciplinary practice can be liberating on a personal, an artistic and pedagogic level.
This notion of not normal or abnormal suggests that the mind and body I live in (and that you live in) are not ‘good enough’ because they may not fit the confines created for them. Foucault (1977) would argue in fact that the discourse around normalcy causes the internalisation of the concept of normalcy. This ‘normalizing judgement’ (Foucault 1977: 117) brings about not only obedience but adaptation. The internalisation of normalcy inflicts macro and micro penalties. The confines of normalcy imprison us and disability becomes pathologised.
Goodley describes Disability Studies as
A broad area of theory research and practice…antagonistic to the popular view that disability equates with personal tragedy (Goodly 2011: xi)
Instead, he says, it is
A paradigm shift; from disability as personal predicament to disability as social pathology [and] it places problems of disability in society (ibid).
The body is a contested space. It is where disability and education take place. ‘There is an intimate and necessary relation’, says Dewey ‘between the processes of actual experience and education’ (Dewey 1938: 20). My research uses narrative inquiry which allows for the voice of the interviewee to interpret their education. Milchalko (2002) and Titchkosky (2011) talk about binary opposites. Like process and experience, ‘blindness and sightedness rather than existing as binary opposites, act together to achieve a sense of reality’ (Milchalko 2002: 27). Art education and disability studies can provide a space for manifesting this, a way of breaking down mind/ body; able /disabled ways of thinking, for challenging what Titchkosky (2011) calls the absent presence of disability.
As a Senior Lecturer in Language Development and Research Methods at Leeds College of Art, a specialist visual arts institution in the north of England, I initially and primarily worked with students who are dyslexic. I now work across undergraduate and post graduate programmes with a wide range of visual arts students, developing writing as part of a creative practice. My PhD studies use narrative inquiry to examine the writing lives of art students with dyslexia and I am now interrogating how transdisciplinarity can promote inclusivity, as well as holding notions of inclusivity up to question if its binary opposite is exclusivity
Imagined realms
No full textAn exhibition of contemporary visionary landscape that was chosen by the artist and curator Clive Hicks-Jenkins for the Royal Cambrian Academy. (The Welsh equivalent to the English Royal Academy)
Hicks-Jenkins was looking to select artists that he considered continued an old animist or spiritual tradition of landscape that he wanted to present through the prism of chosen artists' imaginative lives.
Barker had three large drawings chosen, all of which were allegorical landscapes based on conversations with people he had engaged with on the streets of Chapeltown
A surrealist stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning’s chasm
No full textThis is the first book-length study devoted to the American artist and writer Dorothea Tanning’s literary output, and how it operates in parallel to her visual oeuvre. As a visual reading of the artist’s one novel, it offers an innovative methodology, combining feminist and literary theory with specific reference to the ‘autotopography’ of Mieke Bal (2001) and spatial poetics of Susan Stewart (1984). It repositions Tanning’s writing at the centre of her entire creative practice and focuses on a little-known short story 'Abyss', a gothic-flavoured, desert adventure which Tanning worked on intermittently throughout her creative life, finally publishing it in 2004 as 'Chasm: A Weekend'. I conducted field work in Sedona, Arizona where the book was written, as well as in Portsmouth, France and Sweden which are geographically connected to the novel. I also worked closely with the artist’s estate to ensure the factual accuracy of my research. Susan Aberth, a renowned surrealism scholar, peer-reviewed my book. This publication is timely in terms of Tanning’s broader reception with a major exhibition surveys at Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, and Tate Modern, London. I advised curator Ann Coxon on the Tate iteration as a leading expert in the field, and contributed to a roundtable discussion ‘A Family Portrait’ (16 March 2019) where I shared an excerpt of my study. The book is included in the prestigious Studies in Surrealism series, and was reviewed positively by Anna Kérchy for Americana E-Journal (2017). The book is catalogued in a range of international libraries (e.g. Princeton), and appears on reading lists for students studying feminist-surrealism at the University of Edinburgh, among others
Print stuff – independent print & publishing fair
No full textPrint Stuff is an independent print & publishing fair held, for the past three years at the De Grey Rooms, York. Crossing between illustration, textiles, graphic design, photography, poetry and comics, the curated event champions the interdisciplinary space that printmaking and self-publishing provides. The fair functions as an affordable space for artists and publishers to exhibit and sell their work, start conversations and promote an authorial approach to contemporary print. The event was started in 2017, with over 50 exhibitors showing work and free monoprint workshops on-site run by Leeds Print Workshop with approximately 900 visitors throughout the day. The 2018 event also included a series of exhibitions held across York in the lead-up to the fair itself (at Fossgate Social, Kiosk Project Space and Random Encounter) and welcomed around 1200 visitors on the day. The 2019 event was held over 2 days, with talks and workshops across the weekend from exhibitors and academics in the field of print and self-publishing, as well as featuring over 50 exhibitors and an exhibition of artists' work held at York College. The Print Stuff project has sought to provide a platform for contemporary, self-authored work in order to seek connections between disciplines and explore the potential of printed matter as a unifying factor of creative practice. Over the past three years, we have been able to situate photobooks alongside comic artists and more traditional printmakers in order to establish a dialogue about the value, role and future of the printed form. http://www.print-stuff.co.u