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Designing experiences: friendship and practical wisdom in the art and design higher education
No full textThe national policy of widening participation for students exists within a competitive and uncertain higher education culture. The impact of this on those who want to become artists and designers and are at the same time labelled as ‘second chance’ or ‘untraditional’ students needs to be examined. This paper analyses the narratives constructed by and between Chad, a post-Access to HE student, and myself, the inquirer, that represent some of her experiences during her BA (Hons) Surface Pattern course. Surface pattern designers are concerned with designing for surfaces and embellishments which could include wallpapers, fabrics, flooring, and packaging. This case study was part of a longitudinal study (2011-14) that sought to investigate the experiences of post-Access students in art and design higher education. The participants were studying on a range of creative degree programmes in various institutional contexts. Narrative inquiry was used to show the ways in which students reflected on and took stock of their educational journeys. The analysis draws upon some of the notions concerned with phronesis (prudence or practical wisdom). Aristotle claimed that only a person of experience can practice practical wisdom, and a young person is unlikely to have extensive life experience, (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, Chapter 8). This discussion recounts some of the critical incidents within Chad’s story where I have noticed evidence of phronesis or at some points the absence of wise judgement. It is suggested that within the context of higher education mature adults sometimes make poor decisions leading them to act in ways that continue their sufferings. This is because they do not exercise their potential to act with prudence, (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, Chapter 5). Chad offers an explanation of why this maybe so at the end of her story where she describes the culture of her course as being very competitive and not conducive to her thinking and acting well for herself and others
Lightworks
No full textThe output is a curated project called ‘Lightworks’ culminating in a show in 2016. The project was funded by Arts Council England, North East Lincs Council, Shoreline Housing Association and local businesses. The premise of the event was to reclaim the unloved and dangerous parts of Grimsby Town for local people. Holley, with his business partner Chris Lillywhite, organised and curated the event.
Research process: The project started as a local event but became an international one. A series of landmark buildings in the centre of Grimsby were chosen to create an immersive environment of carefully curating sound art, film projection, digital mapping, physical 2 and 3 d works and performance. The 2016 event centred around a group of brutalist tower blocks that were condemned for demolition the following year. The event featured art by established and emerging practitioners. Work was commissioned and selected from local, national and international artists and filmmakers. Research insights: The project was created with these values and insights: art is for everyone; events should be for the senses as well as the brain; art can make you feel differently about where you live; location is important; more is sometimes better; ambition, soul and teamwork are everything. Holley found that one does not have to know about art to enjoy the work. Dissemination: The project was disseminated via exhibition at ‘Lightworks’ in Grimsby town centre, 16 October – 13 November 2016
The people's echo: memories of the 1984-8 miners' strike. Christmas 2016.
No full text12-page Newspaper published to accompany A share of a pensioner’s Christmas ‘Bonus’ exhibition at the National Coal Mining Museum for England 12 November 2016 — 18 January 201
Emma’s navel: Dorothea Tanning’s narrative sculpture
No full textIn her critical essay, ‘Some Parallels in Words and Pictures’ (1989), the American artist and writer Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) noted a literary dimension to her enigmatic soft sculpture ‘Emma’ (1970). With explicit reference to Gustave Flaubert’s protagonist Madame Bovary (1857), Tanning, a voracious reader, fabricated her own Emma. I use ‘Emma’ to tug at the late surrealist/postminimalist crux in order to reposition Tanning in a more theoretical context. In particular, ‘Emma’ can be read through Mieke Bal’s intertextual notion of the “navel of the text” (2001). Tanning, in turn, can be said to embody Flaubert’s contradictory character as a form of “autotopographical” critique (Bal, 2002). This chapter, therefore, presents a methodological model for art historical and literary analysis, contributing to the growing body of research on underrepresented feminist-surrealist artists. The essay volume, edited by Patricia Allmer, was reviewed favourably by Dr Christine Conley in Racar 42 and mentions this chapter specifically: “Catriona McAra’s criss-cross reading of Dorothea Tanning’s soft sculpture Emma, 1970, with the literary character Emma Bovary positions the sculpture as an intermedial visual object that evokes, in its material specificity, the fetishization of the female character in Gustave Flaubert’s novel and the navel as (maternal) signifier. As an example of Mieke Bal’s “theoretical object” or an art “that thinks,” Tanning’s Emma disrupts modernist and surrealist codes of femininity and art making” (2017, 91)
Manual v.2.1
No full textThe output is an artist’s book, or ‘printed exhibition’, that reflects Cumberland’s on-going engagement with artists and gallerists in Palma de Mallorca. Research process: Central to Cumberland’s research practice is an investigation into the nature of a serial body of work, the complex relationships between repetition, reproduction and difference and its manifestations as expanded drawing practice. The process of making and documenting exhibitions leads to the development of strategies of dissemination, extending the reach of a body of work, and making new connections. Research insights: The on-going project with artists and gallerists in Palma de Mallorca involving a series of exhibitions and publications enables Cumberland to continue to explore what a drawing could be when it is reproduced, reformatted and remade. Experimentation and investigation with the documentation and representation of Cumberland’s expanded drawing practices, explores a series of works through the print and the publishing field. Thus, the boundary between art piece and catalogue begins to collapse. The printed exhibition in its design, layout and image selection, co-exist to provide relevant exhibition information whilst also contributing as an artwork in its own right. The exhibition is an immediate experience whilst the printed exhibition exists as a longstanding memory over time. This episodic process enables the artist to renew, re-consider, rework and re-engage with the possibilities of expanded drawing practices as part of the cycle of making. Dissemination: The publication was disseminated via Aba Art Lab Gallery as part of Art Palma Brunch, April 2016
Luxury brands and their role in eco-innovation diffusion
No full textPurpose: The purpose of this research is to understand the role of luxury brands in the diffusion of eco-innovations through the fashion industry, and whether the trickle-down theory applies.
Methodology: Structured qualitative interviews were carried out with 13 individuals working in luxury, mass and value market fashion brands to understand the perceptions of how innovation and eco-innovation were generated and diffused through the fashion industry. Rogers’ theory of innovation diffusion was used to analyse and explore interview responses.
Findings: The results of the research suggest the interviewees perceived the trickle-down effect as less relevant for eco-innovations than for aesthetic innovations (newness in style, design or colour). It was found that suppliers, competitors and senior management play a more important role in diffusion of eco-innovation. A five point model for successful eco-innovation diffusion within a fashion business was established from the research.
Limitations: As the first stage of a larger project, this research focused on one interviewee from the product design and development team within each brand. Further research will be carried out to explore the perceptions of eco-innovations for other functions within the brands.
Implications: Fashion brands wishing to adopt eco-innovations can use the five point model to help them establish the right conditions for successful adoption within their business.
Originality/value: This research extends existing work on the adoption of sustainability within the fashion industry by exploring the adoption routes for eco-innovation and using Rogers’ framework to create a five point model for innovation
The scientific method
No full textHow do we make sense of today's information overload, from post-truth politics to mind-boggling quantum physics and neuroscience? The Scientific Method showed how artists have revealed the structures and systems of knowledge that we consume daily, subverting the accepted and confounding the expected.
This exhibition brought together recent moving image works by artists such as Amelia Crouch, Patricia Esquivias, Sîan Robinson Davies, Liz Magic Laser, Kate Liston and Yuri Pattison, alongside drawings by KP Brehmer and works by John Latham, Semiconductor and John Smith presented in association with LUX.
Some artworks appropriated a faux-scientific rhetoric, others highlighted the potentially unanswerable questions of contemporary science, or employed humour and irreverence to puncture conventional wisdom. Departing from the objective knowledge sought by the classical scientific method, these artists often foreground the bodily, the personal or anecdotal
KALEID 2016 Oslo: artists who do books
No full textFollowing an international call for submissions, On Innards | Publication, by artists Richard Nash, Amanda Couch, Mindy Lee, and Andrew Hladky, was selected for KALEID 2016 Oslo. Thirty-five artists from Belgium, Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and the United Kingdom were selected from over two-hundred and fifty submissions.
KALEID 2016 Oslo took place at Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo, Norway’s leading National Academy for the Arts; as an artists’ book exhibition, seminar and networking event. An exhibition of the selected artists’ books was curated in KHiO’s library between 10th – 12th May to launch KALEID editions’ annual collection. The collection was promoted to an international audience at Tate Modern’s Offprint London in the Turbine Hall, and subsequent tour of venues throughout the US.
KALEID editions represented European-based bookwork artists between 2009-2017; disseminating an annual curated selection of artists’ books, for leading arts institutions supporting academic research and future public access. The founder of KALEID editions, Victoria Browne, has since established an academic framework to foster publishing as artistic practice at Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo. KALEID editions distributed artists’ books to the following institutions and universities:
Europe:
Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo, Norway; MACBA, Spain; Saison Poetry Library, UK
Chelsea College of Arts Library, UK; V&A Museum, National Art Library, UK
USA:
Boston Athenaeum; Brooklyn Museum; Clarke Art Institute;
Layfayette College; Metropolitan Museum of Art; MoMA; Newberry Library;
School of Art Institute Chicago, Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection;
Swarthmore College Library; Yale Center for British Art; Yale Universit
The trial of Roger Casement
No full textMy first graphic novel, The Trial of Roger Casement, examines the last 18 months in the life of (the former) Sir Roger Casement, who was hung for treason in 1916 after the failed Irish Easter Rising. It combines fiction and non-fiction- in parallel to how he recorded his own life in his public-facing ‘white’ diaries (intended for publica- tion) and his private, intimate ‘black’ diaries. I do not want to simply replay the known facts (as much as they can be known) of his last years. Casement is an opportunity to explore our (or my) inability to truly know the inner life of another person (or oneself). The comic form is perfect for exploring the different levels of self- the inner life as perceived by others (such as a biographer), the observable outer life, the inner life as perceived by oneself (in a diary) and the actual, lived experience of one’s own life. I explore this through what is drawn and how it is drawn. The same sentence can be said by the same (named) person, but when coming from a figure drawn in two different ways the effect of those words will be different. The Trial of Roger Casement is as much about the failure of biography as it is a biography. Casement rose to prominence from a civil servant of the British Empire to expose the grotesque human rights abuses committed by the regime of King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo Free State. His 1904 report for the British Parliament was the first expose published from within an institution of European colonial power to detail the brutality and horror inflicted for profit in the aftermath of Europe’s Scramble for Africa. His first-hand reporting showed the hollowness and hypocrisy of European colonial expansion and capitalist exploitation, the legacy of which still resonates today. Casement’s work with exploited people in the Congo and Peru radicalised him against imperialism, at home and abroad. He returned to Ireland to join the campaign for Home Rule and-when that became frustrated by politi- cal manoeuvering not dissimilar to contemporary British politics-he began to work on what would become the 1916 Easter Rising alongside other seminal figures of Irish and socialist history such as Countess Markievicz and James Connolly. Among the Irish revolutionaries, he was also an outsider. He did not believe in pressing ahead with the Easter Rising plans, knowing that the rebels were outnumbered and outgunned compared to the British army. He argued passionately against the loss of lives that action would cause. Casement was also a gay man who had mul- tiple intimate and sexual relationships at a time of public revulsion against homosexuality. His trial for treason and hanging were a direct consequence of his sexual identity. A gay man was not seen as worthy of a military tribunal and execution by firing squad. While the bodies of the other 1916 Rising leaders were returned to their families, Casement’s was thrown into a lime pit outside of Pentonville Prison. The diaries he kept chronicling his sex-partners and gay cruising were circulated to his former friends and allies, such as Arther Conan Doyle, who might otherwise have pleaded for clemency. His public outing caused him to be written out of both Irish and British history, and even today he is a problematic figure, refusing to fit into any pre-defined conceptions of masculinity and heroism often applied to early 20th Century narratives. Casement’s life touches on issues still relevant today: European exploitation, the inner and outer lives of individuals, the right to demand a society for all, and the quixotic dream of freedom
When the past overhauls the present, you will forget that you can't remember
No full textA solo exhibition of drawings, textiles, animations and ceramics.
This solo exhibition focused on the development of allegorical narratives including drawings made in response to stories told to the artist by recent migrants to Chapeltown in Leeds. The exhibition also included textiles, ceramics and animations, all of which were designed to open out the allegorical possibilities of recent stories told to the artist.
The exhibition was an opportunity to show a much more extensive range of approaches to making work than previous exhibitions, as it included an opportunity to take over other spaces as well as the large gallery space itself.
The exhibition was also used to showcase a second new set of specially designed cards and a board game that were used to help audience members generate their own narratives.
Two artist’s talks were held during the time of the exhibition, one in the gallery itself and the other at Edinburgh Printmakers.
A catalogue including a dedicated text by Angela Kingston and a short story by Ray French, accompanied by maps made by the artist, was produced for the exhibition