Leeds Arts University Repository (CREST)
Not a member yet
446 research outputs found
Sort by
Mummy Hood Nesting Forest
No full textThe output is a creative project. Mummy Hood Nesting Forest (Steans 2022) is a digital artwork that takes the form of a website incorporating text, sound, graphics and 3D animation.
Research Process: Steans was invited to produce a new work for online presentation by Primary, Nottingham. A macabre story about storytelling, preparedness, and packable techwear, Mummy Hood Nesting Forest uses the provisional scenario of a hiker getting lost in the woods to conjure, recur, rewrite, and exhume. The website functions both as a specific context informing the story and a contrived situation for engaging with it. Accompanied by 3D animation, graphics, and acousmatic music, the injunction to get lost – in the forest, in the narrative, in the text itself — is accentuated by the design of the site. The work develops Steans' ongoing practice-led research around hybrid narrative writing, genre (particularly horror) and media technologies.
Research Insights: Mummy Hood Nesting Forest is a work of hybrid writing that uses specific media processes (html, flash, 3d animation, graphic design) to accent, distort and "creatively obstruct" (Sutcliffe 2022) the audience's reading experience. Steans 'sites' the macabre story in the titular forest, which is conflated with the website itself. The central narrative stalls, stutters, and restarts like a struggling webpage, and the site is rigged with dead ends, trapdoors and "decaying 'user experience' tropes[, working] to absorb the reader by incorporating echoes of their browsing disorientations directly into the story". (Sutcliffe 2022)
Dissemination: The work was presented at www.mummyhoodnestingforest.com [accessible online as of Sep 2023]. An related expression of the work was commissioned by Primary on their plinth facade (March-August 2023). Steans discussed the work in a panel at the symposium a-n Assembly (Potter, Steans, Russell, 30-31 March 2023). It was reviewed in the Dec-Jan 22/23 issue of Art Monthly (Sutcliffe 2022
It Is Solved By Walking
No full text‘It Is Solved By Walking’ is a durational performance in which Dale, suspended in the air via a harness, attempts to go for a walk. Both Dale and the audience are able to see her (lack of) progress reflected in the large round mirror below her feet.
Research process: As well as reflecting on Begehungen Festival’s theme of ‘Leerzeit’ (idle time), the work was also informed by the philosophical tradition ‘solvitur ambulando’ – how a problem might be solved via practical experiment. The work re-framed Bruce Nauman’s walking performances (in particular, the contrapposto studies) for a contemporary setting.
Research insights: The work presented the impossibility of moving forward despite ‘walking’ as a visual metaphor for the imbalance between effort and reward that underpins contemporary labour.
Dissemination: The work was performed live at Islington Mill, Salford, UK and live-streamed at Begehungen Festival, Germany (12-15 August). These events included public tours, printed leaflets and a catalogue. The work was reviewed by Mike Pinnington in ‘The Double Negative’
Echo Chambers
No full text‘Echo Chambers’ is a short digital animation by Dale, with audio by John Unwin. Dale's head, seemingly impaled on a spike, is gradually tapped into the ground by an invisible force.
Research process: The work reflects the artist’s longstanding interest in the physical effects of ideology – in this case, visualising the notion of the ‘echo chamber’ (social or political polarisation) as a violence upon the body – as well as a continuing interest in where performance might be hosted. It is part of an on-going collaboration with Prof. Adam Smyth exploring the visualisation of a grangerised edition of Ovid’s Art of Love (1813).
Research insights: The work extended the artist’s practical knowledge through this first time use of animation, as well as exploring an alternative mode of performance through which movement was established via the editing process, rather than physical movement.
Dissemination: The work was commissioned and exhibited as part of the group exhibition ‘Remote Work’ at The Grundy, Blackpool, 27 March – 19 June 2021. It has been acquired for The Grundy’s collection
Arranged in Time and Space
No full text‘Arranged in Time and Space’ is an artist’s book by Dale (edition of 1) presented in a black wooden box and comprising 49 printed cards, a memory stick, a pair of white gloves and three lengths of wood, each of a different width.
Research process: The artist was commissioned – alongside other artists, writers and creatives - to respond to one or more of the ‘50 Jewish Objects’ in The University of Manchester’s collection. The work became an act of translation, seeking to convey both difficulties in understanding the archival items and recognising human experience from across its centuries.
Research insights: The work became an impossible quest for a personal language that might be shared, resulting in a work that resembles a puzzle. Across sculpture, photography, creative writing, video and audio, the work’s individual components are linked in their exploration of the human senses, with particular reference to touch.
Dissemination: The work was commissioned by the Centre for Jewish Thought, The University of Manchester. It has become part of the John Rylands library collection on 31 March 2021. The creative process was documented and reflected upon via a dedicated blog and the artist created a short online presentation discussing the work and its impetus
Is It To Feel Each Limb Grow Stiffer, Is It To Feel The full Potential Of A Life?
No full textThis output is a journal article, articulating issues that have emerged from an art practice now responding to ageing and memory, both as practice-based drawing research and as research undertaken as part of a community group that has been looking at how to manage the ageing process.
Research process: Barker’s practice as an artist revolves around making and drawing led conversations with people, whereby conversations held are translated into images using various making and drawing processes.
As an individual, Barker is getting older and, as this very natural process becomes more noticeable (more aches and pains, a growing awareness of mortality and, of course, more conversations with people of a similar age) his drawings, artwork, and community engagements have reflected these things. In particular, Barker’s recent work has begun to embody issues that have emerged from their research into ageing and memory, both as practice-based drawing research and as research undertaken as part of a community group that has been looking at how to manage the aging process.
This article documents and delves into Barker’s recent artistic engagements.
Research insights: Barker’s drawing practice is based on conversation with others and is, by its very nature, a constantly evolving one and one that follows the changing nature of conversations as they unfold. The process of aging is rarely the subject of fine art practice and this body of conversations, drawings and ceramics begins to establish the groundwork for further investigation into the area.
Dissemination: This article is published as part of volume 15 of Loughbrough University’s publication TRACEY. This work has also been shown in presentations to the Leeds Older People’s Forum, reflections on the work have been hosted in the Life Hacks for a Limited Future blog
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
No full textThe output is a comicbook by Penman and Reppion, created as an accessible introduction to the Middle English medieval poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight". The comic includes an essay to encourage further reading. Penman was the illustrator and designer for this project, Reppion was the writer and translated the poem into a comic script.
Research Process: Told and retold, re-translated, and re-imagined through the centuries, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was originally written in Middle English, circa 1350 CE, by an unnamed author.
In order to create this comicbook adaptation, Penman and Reppion undertook research into contemporary graphic novel storytelling and British medieval-period artwork, with emphasis on looking at ways in which the visual tropes of medieval artwork could be translated into a graphic storytelling format. The resulting artefact sits on the boundary of the two distinctly separate styles, creating a hybrid of the two aesthetics.
Research Insights: Through this research Penman and Reppion have contributed to the field of graphic storytelling by demonstrating a new way of presenting British mythology that reflects the spirit and themes of the original text whilst being engaging to a modern audience.
Dissemination: The work was disseminated on 13th November 2021 at the Thoughtbubble Comic Convention 2021 as well as through online stores
Kate MccGwire: Boundary Creatures
No full textThis chapter explores the last two decades of Kate MccGwire’s oeuvre in relation to the history of twentieth century soft sculpture, abstraction and surrealism, especially with regard to feminist aesthetic histories.
The grotesque and the uncanny have sustained a significant hold over MccGwire’s creative imagination, with interlocking thought-forms and otherworldly beings dominating her oeuvre. Critical readings of MccGwire’s work have tended to interpret such preoccupations as proof of her aesthetic allegiance to the curiosities revival, appealing to those interested in reactivating seventeenth-century historical artifice for contemporary purposes. Yet, given her shrewd attention to material and process coupled with an underlying conceptualism and emphasis on abstraction, MccGwire is clearly cognisant of much more historically recent art practices, an awareness which shifts any sense of artistic legacy elsewhere. This chapter unshackles MccGwire’s sculptures from existing critical limitations, towards a more liberated and revised understanding of how her work responds to a modernist aesthetic project, or, more specifically, how her work functions within a history of soft sculpture. To do this, it repositions key examples of MccGwire’s artworks through avant-garde abstraction, international surrealism, and American postminimalism. Indeed, it proposes after Mieke Bal (1999) we may even understand such artistic movements and provocations better through study of Kate MccGwire.
Here, the feminine grotesque is understood through Donna Haraway’s notion of a ‘boundary creature’, ‘something that creates meaning by prying open a gap’ (Connelly, 2012). Haraway’s boundary creatures are hybrid, mythological monsters and sci-fi specimens, such as the cyborg and the mermaid. In the domain of modernist art history, this chapter proposes that soft sculpture is another boundary creature, an unruly challenge to the existing order of things. MccGwire is likewise a maker of boundary creatures, those that dwell on the exquisite nature of deviancy, channelling a feminine grotesque through the lessons of counter-modernism
Three Graves
No full textThe output is a creative work, a novel called Three Graves. Research for the novel was that of a traditional literary biography or academic monograph. I researched the life and work of Anthony Burgess, particularly his fiction on the lives of other writers (Nothing Like the Sun, about William Shakespeare, for instance), spent time researching in the Burgess archive at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, and travelled to important places in his personal and creative life (most relevantly, Kuala Kangsar in Malaysia).The project aimed to explore how a work of fiction could offer more of a sense of the literary figure than a traditional literary biography.
The project was also developed in response to Hans Renders’ contention that ‘the misunderstanding behind almost every biography is that a theoretical basic assumption would not be necessary for a biographer’ (Ed. Renders & De Haan, 2014, p.136). The theoretical basis I employed was Bakhtin’s theory of Dialogism. The book seeks to add to a literary dialogue Burgee evokes in his own writing, as well as an internal dialogue, between four narrator focussed characters. The novel, Three Graves, was published by Bluemoose Books in September 2021
The Screen Will Not Fill the Void
No full textThe output is an artist’s book consisting of images drawn by Coleman with responding poetic texts by Barker.
Research process: The research consisted of a series of online exchanges, whereby conversations between two artists were developed as poetic texts written by Barker made in response to drawn images developed by Coleman. The arising artefact consists of a 40-page artist’s book, published online and in print.
Research insights: The object of the collaboration was to develop an understanding of how two individuals with very different world views could work together to produce a complex integrated art object.
Dissemination: This artist's book has been published and disseminated by Workshop Press
Consumed: Stilled lives - Perth
No full textThis body of artwork, comprises photographs, pop-up display banners, and site-specific artworks made for commercial advertising spaces in Perth.
Woolley’s artwork is a feminist critique of consumer culture. She examines contemporary consumerism and the commodified construction of ideal gendered bodies. Artworks employ the visual language of adverts, magazines, and tv programmes in order to examine representations of gender and expose the stereotypes they reproduce. Sculpted objects – made with a variety of materials including concrete, rubbish, blancmange, and rotting meat ¬– function as portraits of different types of consumer. We are what we consume.
Consumed: Stilled Lives plays with the traditional concept of still-life painting, which grew in popularity in the 16th and 17th centuries. Often featuring silver plates and expensive foodstuffs, still life paintings became a fashionable way for the Dutch and Flemish to illustrate their wealth. When interpreted using emblematic symbolism the paintings represent a conflicting relation with material wealth. By interpreting the paintings ironically and applying the method to her own practice, Woolley produces still-life objects that suggest contradictory relationships to contemporary consumer culture.
Drawing on her research into advertising on social networking sites, and her writing that hypothesises selfies to be adverts, Woolley examines the impact that adverts have as producers and disseminators of social values. The artworks explore social ideals, particularly gender norms, and how they are transmitted through commercial visual culture. In adverts, commodities are given human characteristics in order to make them more desirable. In turn, identities are commoditised and bodies become adverts for social ideals. Commodities are integrated into the consumer’s identity and their identity is shaped to a marketing demographic. We are what we consume. We are adverts for the commodities we consume. To reflect this, the artwork in Consumed blurs the boundary between portraiture and still-life, producing inanimate bodies and animate objects