Leeds Arts University Repository (CREST)
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Antarctic circles
No full textThe output is a creative project comprising an exhibition of songs, photography and sculptural books inspired by the environment, wildlife and cultural heritage of Antarctica. It is a collaboration between visual artists Lucy Bergman and Adele Jackson. Bergman’s finished works are cycle of 5 songs, written in response to the Antarctic Treaty and the landscape and wildlife it protects. Research Process: The name of the project takes inspiration from the circular 60° southern line of latitude that defines the geographical extent of the Antarctic Treaty. The treaty, an international agreement, preserves Antarctica as a place of peace and scientific research where the natural environment is protected against exploitation. The artists have used the circular theme as a creative device to develop the form and the content of the work: the circle recurs in the song structures and rhythms. The sculptural books take on circular and spherical forms. The songs were recorded and performed alongside an exhibition of lyrics, photographic images and other handmade artefacts relating to the context of the project. The songs could also be heard through The Seafarer Listening Station (a converted antique radio). Research Insight: The works provide visual and sonic information on the subject of Antarctica. The project as a whole showcases how artists can employ several different approaches when engaging with a body of land in order to convey a sense of place. For Bergman the outputs provided a new model of collaborative exchange specifically exploring a visual approach to songwriting, which has engendered further research into songwriting methods and methodology. Dissemination: The project was disseminated through a peer reviewed exhibition at Barbican Library (2015), accompanied by a lecture including a live musical performance of the Antarctic songs. The project was also exhibited at The Artworks, Halifax (2016), alongside a public lecture and performance
OUTSIDE Collett Dickenson Pearce
No full textThe output is a curated project, which displayed the creative advertising work of Colin Millward (1924-2004) and Ron Collins (1939-2011), formerly of the London advertising agency, Collett Dickenson Pearce (CDP - 1960-2000). CDP was the first creatively-led agency in the UK, recognised through the D&AD awards.
Research Process: Works displayed in the project were obtained through archival research at the History of Advertising Trust and the National Art Education Archive (NAEA). The Trust holds the CDP archive which includes a range of ephemera and examples of 48-sheet and billboard adverts. A range of images were reproduced (with permission) from digital files supplied by the Trust. Directories such as the D&AD awards were also used to aid selections and interpretation of the award-winning works (By Ron Collins). Two of Millward’s artworks, one oil painting and one pencil-portrait, were displayed adjacent to advertisements created under Millward’s creative directorship publicly for the first time. The project explored the creative achievements of CDP by looking at the design of Millward’s creative directorship and beyond to the wider context in which the agency existed, including the developments in British art and design education. Research Insights: This retrospective project contextualises how CDP’s art direction and copywriting were clearly grounded in a British culture, characterised by satire and Millward’s uncompromising creative excellence. Parallels were drawn between the management and educational structures that nurture creative talent within and outside industry settings. Dissemination: The findings were disseminated through an exhibition at Leeds Arts University, 29 May – 13 July 2015. The project featured in local (Yorkshire Post, 30 May 2015) and national reviews Mail online (4 June 2015). Findings were shared internationally, in a conference paper, ‘Memorial’ at the International Journal of Art and Design Education (iJADE) Glasgow School of Art, 6th Nov (2015)
Tomorrow belongs to nobody
No full textThe output, Tomorrow belongs to nobody, is an artefact that explores our relationship with Coventry’s post-World War II architecture. It was commissioned by Coventry Artspace. Research process: Crouch’s research is primarily carried out through her artistic practice, the creation of exhibitions and site-responsive public artworks. The research explores meaning-making as an embodied and indeterminate process. The work combines research interests in site-specific art, artists moving image and narratives of subjectivity. Producing this work involves reading spanning art, cultural studies, cognitive linguistics and sociology. The research explores subjectivity, as an historical construct and a lived, phenomenological experience, and the relationship between visual and verbal modes of representation. Research insights: Referencing City Architect Donald Gibson’s aspiration to cultivate “a healthy body, a cultured mind and a radiant soul” (1943) Tomorrow belongs to nobody queries this idea of rational agency and considers the increasing individualisation of society over the years since the inception of modernist Coventry. Whilst we may now question modernist ideals of rationality and progress ought we still value the utopian social ideals embedded in Coventry’s buildings? Dissemination: The output was screened at the following: January 2019 Screening: Interruptions, Holden Gallery, Manchester. Programmed by Chris Paul Daniels. November 2016 Screening, Turning Point West Midlands re-launch event, Eaton House. Programmed by Ryan Hughes.
22 June–7 July 2016 Exhibition, ‘City Arcadia Festival,’ Arcadia Gallery, Coventry. June 2016 Launch screening, The Albany, Coventry with Coventry Artspace
#prank4offices
No full textThe output is a creative project, #pranks4offices, consisting of a series of
photographs. Research process: Over several years, Welding has regularly searched the hashtag ‘#officepranks’, and collected an archive of hundreds of vernacular images. This led him to make informal comparisons on an aesthetic and process level with the work of art photographers. Iamronjay42 and Iaminstapauli0 were the Instagram names of two fictional office workers that engaged in a fictional office prank war. These characters were created as a vehicle to make the project #prank4offices for FORMAT International Photography Festival in 2015. Their office desks were set up in the exhibition venue at either end of the room, positioned facing each other. Over a number of weekends in March 2015, a series of pranks were staged on their desks, photographed then dismantled. The photographs were shared on the Instagram accounts, with the characters commenting on each other’s posts and continuing the fictional narrative. In the final exhibition, the two desks remained; one was surrounded by 700 plastic cups filled with water, the other completely wrapped in cling film. The audience was directed to view the photographs of the previous pranks on their phones whilst they stood in the exhibition space, revealing evidence of the office prank war.
Research insights: The project raises questions about the role of creativity within the sphere of art practice and within everyday environments and the project playfully considers the merging of these two areas of production. The project also continues an ongoing critique of our relationships with daily working lives, where creative activities often run counter to the wider company aspirations of productivity. Dissemination: The project was disseminated at the FORMAT International Photography Festival, Derby, 13 March – 12 April 2015
Food & identity
No full textThe output is a creative project that explores the concept of food identity as an important cultural and social construct through photography. Research Process: The project is inspired by mainstream images of food in cookbooks, lifestyle magazines and on social media, particularly visual depictions of idealised lifestyles which conjures shared social fantasies, perpetuated by mainstream images and our own internalisation of them. This project spanned a number of years, producing an extensive final body of work. Participants in this project were sourced through word-of-mouth, social media, and an online questionnaire. Final photographs were produced though a collaborative process which involved
discussion and negotiation between the subject and photographer. Research Insights: The link between identity and food is cyclical. Food choice is informed by our time/space coordinates – age, nationality, regionality - and our cultural identity, including race, religion, and social class. We use food as an evolving representation of ideological and political identity, constructing ourselves through moral and ethical decisions. Identity can be established through choices such as meat free, dairy free, plant based, low fat, low carb, high protein, high welfare, big brand, small independent, local, international, familiar or exotic. Our relationship with food is complex; passionately held beliefs and values are often expressed through food choice. Food can possess emotional significance and invoke a range of human emotions from gratitude to guilt, from tearful reminiscences to joyful nostalgia. Intimate details and memories from one’s own life are often bound up in perpetuating food practices and rituals. Dissemination: The output was exhibited at Food & Identity, Food Photographer of the Year Finalists Exhibition (2015 & 2017),Mall Galleries, London. May 2015 and April 2017. Food & Identity, Dye House Gallery, Bradford. September 2015. Food & Identity, Bradford Brewery. July 2015. Food & Identity, Hothouse Conference. 21 March 2015
Printmaking in changing contexts
No full textA presentation exploring how shifts in technology and production have changed the meaning and value of printmaking, particularly with regard to traditional/craft processes
Reflections on The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
No full text"Reflections on The Good, The Bad & The Ugly" is creative project by Sheila Gaffney, which was disseminated simultaneously as an exhibition and published written narrative.
Research Process: In this project Gaffney demonstrates publicly the way in which life writing, as part of her methodological proposition “Embodied Dreaming as a sculptural practice informed by an idea in the psychoanalytical writings of Christopher Bollas”, reveals the interpretative approaches that she uses and the considerations she makes in her artistic research. The written element, which Gaffney considers to be a live backstory of her making process, uses particular psychoanalytical ideas of Christopher Bollas as a way to show her insight of the mental activity that is in play in when she is making sculpture. Gaffney also uses Bollas’s ideas within her written narrative to explore the formational learning experience of a sculpture student, in preparation for entering sculpture in Britain, in the English art school, in the period which she studied.
Research Insights: This creative project provides insights into the practice research question that asks: 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: This work was part of “Thought Positions in Sculpture”, an exhibition created and curated by academic Dr Rowan Bailey at Huddersfield Art Gallery. A one-day symposium also accompanied the exhibition called “Thought Positions: Between Sculpture and the Archive”, which included speakers from Sheffield Hallam University, Leeds Arts University, Henry Moore Institute and the Tate.
The written text has been published and disseminated through the University of Huddersfield, and there is a related video-recorded interview on Vimeo
Nostos
No full textThe output is an exhibition expanding on an earlier series of sculptures and drawings about place. Nostos is about the importance of key objects that we live with and is underpinned by the ongoing references in Cooke’s practice to site/place, object and history - and her experience as an Irish immigrant. The exhibition consists of 3 wall-based sculptures and a series of drawings that look at the most important objects that Cooke thinks are needed to make a living space function – a bed, table, car and books. Research Process: ‘Firmamental Product’ a wooden wall-based sculpture the size of a desk in Cooke’s studio, hangs from the wall by a 13m long crios [a traditional woven Irish belt]. Carved from walnut, it has a round protrusion butting out from one corner that pushes it out from the wall - begging a question of purpose. ‘Ignorant Brown’ in plywood, is the abstracted shadow of an Irish settle bed. The molten tin poured onto the surface is potentially an indicator of the internal state of suspension in sleep. ‘Un-English’ looks at European car design and cars that Cooke appreciates. ‘Stack 1-5’ are watercolours of texts that are a key part of Cooke’s creative practice and are visual notes of an intense internal world of exploration and discovery. Research Insights: The artworks are about embodying need rather than exploring function. The series of works deal with fracturing within issues based, in part, on Cooke’s status as an immigrant and her observations on the politics of movement within the modern world. Cooke also examines ideas around belonging, nostalgia and idealised homesteads. Dissemination: The output was exhibited at noshowspace, London, 25 September – 24 October 2014. An accompanying illustrated publication was printed by noshowspace with an interview between Cooke and Natalie Rudd
Where do I end and you begin
No full textFrom 1997 to 2016 I worked in collaboration with artist Emma Ruston exhibiting nationally and internationally. Projects with Ruston combined large-scale sculptural constructions or reconstructions of specific objects or spaces, that referred to historical and cultural events. In order to critically examine ideas of collaboration and participation, artists and cultural producers were invited to participate in projects. As part of the Glasgow 2014 Cultural Programme, Edinburgh Art Festival in partnership with City Art Centre presented Where do I end and you begin a major international exhibition of art selected by five curators from Commonwealth countries. Over 20 international artists were invited to explore and interrogate the ideas, ideals and myths which underpin notions of community, common-wealth, and the commons. The exhibition featured work by Amar Kanwar, Antonia Hirsch, Arpita Singh, Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater, Derek Sullivan, Gavin Hipkins, Kay Hassan, Kushana Bush, Mary Evans, Mary Sibande, Masooma Syed, Naeem Mohaiemen, Pascal Grandmaison, Rebecca Belmore, Shannon Te Ao, Shilpa Gupta, Steve Carr, Tam Joseph, Uriel Orlow, Yvonne Todd. My project with Ruston Stop Thief! (a new commission) included- a large tent like structure Flaghall made up of hundreds of hand-stitched imaginary national flags and formed the fulcrum for two further works: Conquest, Colonialism and the Commons, a 20 minute video lecture we commissioned by Edinburgh based writer and activist Andy Wightman. Presented inside the Flaghall the video explored the ‘historic interconnections’ between Britain’s colonial past and land ownership in contemporary Scotland; The second work Stop Thief! (readings), involved ‘collective readings’ compiled from texts which link ‘corporate financers, witches, scapegoats, stories of forests, and the commons. Performed simultaneously by eight actors occupying the four floors of Edinburgh’s Art Centre, the ‘readers’ words spilled out from Flaghall across the entire exhibition, as a metaphorical reference to land grabs and stolen commons. The exhibition was accompanied by a full colour catalogue with essays by the curators
Ogmore 74
No full textThis short life-writing piece explores the memory of being left behind on a beach in Wales with my brother in 1974 and is told from a child's perspective. It has been selected for the magazine as part of a collection of new writing and will be published in October 2015 alongside the work of renowned authors and poets including award winning Sheffield poet Helen Mort. An online version will be published at the same time. The publication will be launched at Waterstones Sheffield and The London Review of Books