Leeds Arts University Repository (CREST)
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446 research outputs found
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Toile Rei Kawakubo mixed media on paper
No full textThe Artefact is a pencil, and acrylic painting of a toile (a calico practice garment) produced by the Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo circa 1996.
Research Process: Research was undertaken in museums and archives into Kawakubo’s fashion design processes. The resulting artefact is a painting on paper created in a way which reflects Kawakubo’s toile process.
Kawakubo’s toiles are never finished items, they are drafts of garments which you can work back into. This artefact was created by building up layers of acrylic paint in a manner which reflects this process. Each layer was added to gradually, carefully considering pattern cutting and sculptural silhouettes.
Research Insights: The painting was created to celebrate toiles, focussing on the unfinished / work in progress qualities of the garment rather than a garment being inhabited by a body. In doing so the work disrupts expected norms of fashion illustration, inhabiting a space between the disciplines of fashion design and fashion artistry.
The painting appears to be unfinished, but is a finished object in its own right -- much alike a toile.
Dissemination: The painting won the Still Life award at the Fida Worldwide Awards, Conde Nast College of Fashion, London, November 2022.
The painting was also published in Patrick, M. (2023). The Fible Triptych V.03. FIDA Worldwide, pg 132-133
At the Centre of the Storm Arts Writing and the Industrialised Curriculum
No full textThis chapter explores some ideas about arts and industrialisation through the lens of creative writing and arts writing practice. When Tobias-Green was asked to contribute to the symposium The Industrialisation of Arts Education in March 2021 she began by imagining what the title of the contribution would look like visually—a dark, machinic entity, monolithic and yet clearly built by human hands. This image in her mind led her to consider representations of writing and art in general
Unknown Fields Division – Rare Earthenware
No full textThis Photo Essay contemplates on the creative practice of Unknown Fields Division to reflect on the planetary geopolitics of rare earth elements. Knots interlace points, trajectories, and networks in their moment of becoming. In 2014, Unknown Fields Division developed an expedition in East Asia to follow the unmaking of electronics and reveal information and landscapes that are in principle absent from or unseen in urban societies’ everyday life. The group focuses on the raw materials of our global capitalist societies, their extraction, and refining. It investigates the production and distribution of a globalised commodity through container loads via ports in Shanghai, Singapore, and Busan. The group’s interest in industrial ecologies and precarious labour led them to carry out an exploration of global maritime trade by tracing large container ships routes, supply chains, factories, and working conditions. The project aims at revealing a tremendous ecological catastrophe as a consequence of global capitalism. Intensification of mining operations, loose regulations, small illegal refineries, combined with the environmental impact of the production of rare-earth elements (REE), have caused unprecedented ecological destruction in the Bayan Obo mining district
The Lost and the Found: Stories for the After-Life (of Objects)
No full textIn 2004 Liverpool-based artist Tabitha Moses undertook a residency at Bolton Museum and Art Gallery in Greater Manchester. Responding to the small mummy of a young girl in the museum’s Egyptology collection, Moses created a series of nine carefully wrapped and bound dolls that she had previously found in charity shops. She exhibited The Dolls in the museum display cases alongside the Egyptian artefacts already in residence "for the girl to take with her to the after-life" (Moses, 2004). This museum intervention titled The Lost and The Found, is analysed as uncanny in the Jentschian sense, for dolls are anxiety provoking; they are neither dead nor alive, yet both dead and alive simultaneously. X-ray images of The Dolls, where the pins with which Moses had held the swaddling fabric in place are visible, are considered here within the context of Steryerl’s (2010) identification of object forensics as a practice whereby ‘the bruises of things are deciphered, and then subjected to interpretation’ (Steyerl, 2010). Conceptual links are made between The Dolls as x-rayed images and the bodily fragility of the original mummified girl whose desiccated remains have undergone forensic investigation by Egyptology specialists in their quest for heuristic interpretation. The Dolls as museum intervention tell multiple stories; they have become witnesses to their former lives as little girls’ toys, and of their journey from desired object to disposal and reclamation by Moses. As objects for the after-life for the mummified Egyptian girl Moses’ artwork prompts questions as to the identity of the girl, of how she died, and of how she ultimately came to rest in Bolton
Halston and Pat Cleveland mixed media on paper
No full textThe artefact is a mixed media painting on paper representing the fashion designer Halston with model Pat Cleveland in his Olympic tower studio in New York, 1977.
Research Process: The painting was created in layers, using a black and white photograph from the Halston Archives as a reference. Further research was undertaken in museums and archives with a focus on Halston’s design process and the fabrics that he used. This was done in order to accurately represent the colour and texture of the garment in the black and white photograph, and to inform the application of paint to capture the fluidity and movement of the material.
Research Insights: Through the process of interpreting this historical image through a contemporary lens, insights and greater understanding has been attained into the design drawing process.
Contemporary fashion illustration generally represents a designers finished garments statically modelled. This painting shows that figurative drawing in fashion within a studio setting can represent a deeper narrative about a sense of time and place.
Images of designers such as Halston are quite often taken in social settings -- this painting shows Halston at work in his studio surrounded by his designs on the floor. This was a key (but unseen) stage in Halston’s design process, which often occurred before a fashion show or presentation.
Dissemination: The research was exhibited at the National Arts Club, New York, 22 April 2022, as part of a collection of 10 artworks from artists around the world selected by the Halston team in celebration of what would have been Halston’s 90th Birthday.
The artefact has been published in Patrick, M. (2023). The Fible Triptych V.03. FIDA Worldwide, pg 50
They Play
No full textThe output is a book section in which Bottomley investigates queer and feminist perspectives in the communication design of football. The writing focuses on the role of non-professional designers and DIY design within grassroots football spaces. The essay sits amongst a broad range of essays by designers, architects and academics who each explore how design has shaped the story of football. The research methods employed include interviewing football fans and DIY designers and visual analysis of archival material. Due to the broad intended audience of the book, a history of women’s football was introduced to contextualise the writing, before weaving interviews, and contemporary design with the limited amount of archival material available in this area. New knowledge created in this output sits within the cross-disciplinarity of design and football. This is the first book of its kind to explore the design story of the sport. My contribution provides new knowledge by investigating the communication design of football through queer and feminist lenses. This book is published by the Design Museum and is sold online and available in the gift shop to the accompanying exhibition of the same name
Post-War Design Education and the Jewellery Industry in Yorkshire: Drawing on the Experience of Designer-Maker Ann O’Donnell
No full textAnn O’Donnell, a designer-maker of jewellery, was educated at Leeds College of Art and the Royal College of Art during the 1950s. Her experiences of undertaking her work placement at Charles Horner Ltd are analysed to discover how successful ‘educating designers for industry’ was in practice. O’Donnell’s story reveals a disconnect between her creative education and the conservative jewellery manufacturing context. In the 1970s O’Donnell started her own small jewellery making, retailing and exhibiting business. She also taught the jewellers in her locality of Leeds. It is argued she created curricula that were responsive to the needs of the local industries, whose workers needed training in skills. She also encouraged her students to be creative and imaginative, giving opportunities to those who could not access full-time education
‘Performance’ Measures as Neoliberal Industrialisation of Higher Education: A Policy Archaeology of the Teaching Excellence Framework and Implication for the Marginalisation of Music Education
No full textInstrumental measures pledging to assess the ‘quality’ of education represent the latest turn in the unabating neoliberalisation of the UK education sector. As the proliferation of league tables, accountancy measures and ‘common-sense’ rhetoric around ‘value for money’ become normalised, the education sector continues to transform into a site of battle; a hierarchical competition of economic Darwinism. Higher education has not been immune to this seemingly irresistible cultural hegemony, embracing its own system of valuation, validation and competition through adoption of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). Conducting a Policy Archaeology (Scheurich, 1994), I seek to show that the TEF embeds a neoliberal governmentality, aimed at entrenching marketisation and industrialisation at the expense of teaching excellence. Through exploration of the policy’s inception, the TEF can be viewed as an apparatus of industrialisation and represents one within a consort of educational policies which seek to devalue music education
Consuming the Body: Capitalism, social media and commodification
No full textConsuming the Body: Capitalism, Social Media and Commodification examines contemporary consumerism and the commodified construction of ideal gendered bodies, paying particular attention to the new forms of interaction produced by social networking sites. The book describes the behaviours of an ideal neoliberal subject: modes of discipline, forms of pleasure, and opportunities for subversion are identified in an examination of how individuals are addressed and the ways in which they are expected to respond. Key modes of address that compel the consumer to consume are: sadistic commands communicated in adverts, TV programmes and magazine articles; a fetishistic gaze that dissects the body into parts to be improved through commodification; and a hystericized insistent presence that compels the consumer to present their body for critique and appreciation that is exemplified in the selfie.
Woolley interprets the visual characteristics of different types of selfies, including #fitspiration, #thinspiration, #fatspiration, and #bodypositivity to understand how they relate to current body ideals. Fat acceptance selfies suggest there is a fourth mode of address, empowering presence, that has the potential to liberate consumers from the ‘trap of visibleness’ produced by the other three modes of address. In conclusion, the book identifies some creative methods for producing selfies that evade commoditisation and discipline
Graphic Events: A Realist Account of Graphic Design
No full textGraphics have a way of living that is often awkward and unplanned. We see it when they are ripped from walls, littered on streets and faded in shop windows. We wouldn’t say they are that way by design, however this everyday difference between graphics and their designs is underimagined in critical discourses. Graphic Events intensifies this difference in a montage of original essays and interviews that coax graphics into unfamiliar dialogues