Leeds Arts University Repository (CREST)
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446 research outputs found
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At This Very Moment
No full textThe output is a children’s picture book illustrated and authored by Hodson which introduces notions of
mindfulness, presence and natural phenomena to early years readers.
Research process: Hodson engaged in rigorous and exhaustive iterations of artwork, exploring a range
of materials and applications in order to establish an appropriate visual language with which to
appropriately communicate the tone of the book writing to it’s intended age range.
Research insights: Hodson realised that though integral to his habitual approach to image making, hand
drawn lines were too visceral and carried too much visual signature to effectively convey the intended tone
of the book. In response, he employed a playful combination of shape, texture and composition to achieve a
more evocative and universal visual language.
Dissemination: Hodson has delivered lectures on the book to illustration students at Leeds Arts
University, Edinburgh, Camberwell, Falmouth and Norwich University of the Arts. The book was show
cased at Bologna International Book fair 2022 and is being published in Mexico, Italy and Korea
Urinary Leash
No full textThe output is a collaborative participatory public performance of Paula Chambers’ Urinary Leash. The piece was performed by six women including Chambers herself. Other performers include: Tanja Ostojić, Mad Kate, Hieu Hanh Hoanh Tran, Jelena Dinić, Lidija Antonović.
Research Process: Urinary Leash is a performance work about access to women’s public toilets. The research process included extensive primary research into the accessibility of public toilets across the UK and in Belgrade during the performance project including documentation of all women’s public toilet facilities accessed during the project.
Research Insights: As an older woman, Paula Chambers is currently researching how the material culture of femininity is accessed through a range of embodied performance and sculptural strategies, and how these change in relation to the aging female body.
Dissemination: this public performance of Chambers’ Urinary Leash took place in Pioneer’s Park, Belgrade as part of a two-day workshop project led by Tanja Ostojić as part of the Mis(s)placed Women? exhibition.
The whole Belgrade iteration of the Mis(s)placed Women? project including documentation of Urinary Leash is available in the form of a catalogue which is available in a paper-based format as a book, and as an open access free downloadable document on Academia.edu
What can critical thinking do for access to Higher Education adult learners at a Further Education arts institution? Reflections on a poetry group.
No full textThis chapter on developing critical thinking skills is likely to be of interest to further education lecturers, and those involved in the arts and pedagogy of widening participation, access and lifelong learning. This qualitative, practitioner research chapter discusses how a critical thinking intervention of a Poetry Group may benefit some students encouraging confidence in speaking, progression and social cohesion in a Community of Inquiry. The hypothesis asks what critical thinking can do for adult learners, and lifelong widening participation students. Early findings are that critical thinking nurtures a dialogic attitude, the confidence to question and problem solving skills
Women’s photography and the American Civil War: The case of Elizabeth Beachbard, ambrotypist
No full textDespite recent feminist scholarship on women’s roles in the American Civil War (1861–65), their photographic participation remains poorly understood. As a result, women’s wartime entrepreneurialism has not been recognised, and neither has their agency in shaping the image economy and visual history of a nation-defining conflict. This article presents the first dedicated research on Elizabeth Beachbard, an elusive figure who ran an ambrotype portrait business in Louisiana during the conflict. This article charts her trajectory from downtown New Orleans to a military camp in rural Louisiana where she photographed soldiers during the summer of 1861 until her death only months later. I consider the gendered constraints on women’s photography of the epoch and the methodological challenges for researching female photographers, examining the historical context for women’s entrepreneurialism and the circumstances that led to Beachbard’s business model. As well as analysing her practice as a female operator in a military camp, this article presents new evidence for an ambrotype hitherto unattributed to Beachbard, which constitutes only the third extant example of her work. I contend that Beachbard should be seen as a pioneering figure in the history of women’s photography, and might be considered America’s first identifiable female photographer of war
From Wooden Boards to Flip Flops: Depictions of Dining on Instagram
No full textThe output is creative project comprising of a short web article and images curated from the Instagram accounts of M&S food, Jamie Oliver, and We Want Plates.
Research process: This article explores how the concept of authenticity is mediated through popular food images on Instagram, offering a semiotic reading of photographs curated from various Instagram accounts, utilising images from professional and amateur image makers. The article explores the influence and scope of these images, drawing conclusions about the cyclical and participatory nature of image production on social media, and the relationship between visual myth-making and the perception of authenticity.
Research insights: In a social media age, we are no longer passive consumers of the aspirational image; we are content creators who participate in myth-making. This project continues my research into how food and dining are visually represented in popular culture, and the idealisation of domestic and social life. Where previous projects have focussed on cookbooks as the vehicle for communicating these images, this project focusses on social media as the platform.
Dissemination: The article was published by InMedia Res on 24th Sept 2021, as part of their ‘Authenticity’ series
After the Jugness of the Jug: a drawing to make sculpture from. Method: plan & elevation with a touch of embodied dreaming thrown in
No full textThe output is a drawing by Gaffney made using graphite and charcoal on paper.
Research Process: 'After The Jugness of the Jug' was made using plan and elevation drawing methods. Measurement was used to explore the relationships between surfaces, gaps and edges and was the process by which the material world was observed whilst stripping away the subject matter of the things looked at. Use of drawing systems enabled the artist to process their observations whilst making graphic marks on a paper surface, and turn touch into a register of thought through the conflation of mental and somatic activity.
Research Insights: The resulting drawing is an example of what a drawing system can offer an artist, that is, such methods enable holding information, both technical and psychological, for sourcing at another time.
Dissemination: The drawing was shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2021 and subsequently exhibited at Trinity Buoy Wharf (London, 18 November – 5 December 2021), Drawing Projects UK (Trowbridge, 8 January – 5 March 2022), and Cooper Gallery (Dundee, 19 March – 16 April 2022). There was also a book of artworks selected for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing prize 2021 published through Drawing Projects UK which features Gaffney’s drawing
Crossing the Line
No full textThe output is a performative artwork consisting of fifty meters of crime scene tape created from appliqued blue and white satin ribbon.
Research Process: Crossing the Line was made the during the Covid 19 summer of 2020 in response to escalating domestic violence incidents triggered by the pandemic restrictions. UK crime scene tape has the phrase ‘Police Line Do Not Cross’ printed in blue on white. This phrase is subverted by replacing the word police, with every other word that might precede the word line; coast line, waist line, straight line etc. With the addition of ‘Do Not Cross’, these textual interventions take on multiple layers of meaning. Coast Line Do Not Cross becomes a comment on immigration, Waist Line Do Not Cross a comment on sexual harassment, Straight Line Do Not Cross on transphobia.
Chambers performed with this tape walking in and around her home, climbing out of the living room window and returning through the front door. This work exists as a film of this performance and as a sculptural object.
Research Insights: Several new works were made during the Covid-19 pandemic as a response to the circumstances women found themselves confronted with: domestic violence, depression, loneliness, isolation and desire to escape from home. This was the first performance of an artwork which led to further investigation of embodied actions arising from sculptural works.
Dissemination: In addition to public performances, Mis(s)placed Women? concluded with an online event and discussion panel at the Centre for Cultural Decontamination, Belgrade, Chambers being an invited participant. Crossing the Line was performed live around the buildings in front of the audience, and streamed live to online participants. Crossing the Line was shown at a film screening event for House, Home and the Domestic Symposium at Coventry University, 22nd October 2021
Strike
No full text‘Strike’ is a 60 minute screen performance in which the artist strikes and holds 12 poses in response to the 12 positions of the clock’s hour hand (5 minutes per pose).
Research process: The performance responded to Begehungen Festival’s 2021 theme, ‘Leerzeit’ (idle time). The artist manifested the pressure of time as a physical effect on the body. Each pose presented its own physical challenge – the film records both successes and failures and as such is a record of physical research in progress.
Research insights: The work used performance as a way of thinking about sculpture - emphasising the relationship between time, form and change. In doing so, it also sought to highlight ‘failure’ as subject matter worthy of recording and dissemination.
Dissemination: The work was screened at Begehungen Festival, Germany and Islington Mill, Salford, UK (12-15 August), each of which included public tours, printed leaflets and a catalogue. The work was reviewed by Mike Pinnington in ‘The Double Negative’
Curtainz
No full textThe output is a Creative Project authored by Steans. ‘Curtainz’ is an original text commissioned for Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic (ed. Sutcliffe 2021). This project also includes a related film 'Puppy the Goblin' as well as a window display created by Steans (photographic documentation by Andy Keate).
Research Process:‘Curtainz’ is included in the third chapter of Magic, Ritual Media, which ‘looks to magic’s complex relationship to technology [... and] questions the intrusion of the magical into artists’ engagement with the digital’ (Sutcliffe 2021). Responding to this, Steans’ text performs a kind of ‘legend-tripping’ (Kinsella 2011), via a short fictional piece of writing.
‘Curtainz’ employs motifs including fictional cultural output (in this instance the eponymous children’s tv show) and the location of genre horror qualities in the processes, technologies and cultures of cultural production. In Steans’ work, practices and processes of cultural production and reception are ‘made strange’, rendered here as a ritual-like process, suggesting the text itself might function like a spell.
Research Insights: ‘Curtainz’ picks at and entangles the threads connecting ostensibly ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ modes of culture-making and knowledge-sharing. ‘Curtainz’ also riffs on the tropes of the ‘making of’ documentary, which Steans understands as a ‘micro-genre’, and has explored in the work Necrotic Biography Room (2019) and the conference paper ‘The Making of the making of the make-up scene' (2017).
Dissemination: ‘Curtainz’ was commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press for Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic (ed. Sutcliffe 2021). Steans also created a window display for the launch of Magic in the Whitechapel Gallery Bookshop, and screened his work Puppy the Goblin: ENGLISH SUBS (2020) (which was also screened at Tate Britain, 19 November 2022, as part of "Show and Share: Visions of the Occult") an online symposium launch event for Magic
Home Occupations
No full textThe output is a creative project, ‘Home Occupations’, comprising of a collection of photography, moving image and text-based works, to talk about the sometimes-absurd experience of ‘working from home’.
Research process: Welding searched social media for visual evidence of what Jean Burgess describes as ‘vernacular creativity’ (Burgess, J 2010) in the actions of people who are working from home, with a focus on how peoples’ behaviours and their interactions with everyday belongings are affected by the home working environment.
Research Insights: Welding found that working from home changes our relationship with the objects we own and the domestic spaces we inhabit. It results in inhabiting two personas; that of worker and homeowner. There is a contrast between the intangibility of virtual meetings and being surrounded by tangible household objects. Often, they serve as a reminder of something that needs doing. That shelf needs fixing. The lawn needs mowing. Other times, they are a welcome distraction from the work contained on the screen. In the US, zoning regulations have defined what is an acceptable home occupation. For Welding, the title speaks of becoming occupied with the home, its contents and the permeable divide between work and life. The photographs are humorous, but they also highlight a significant change in professional working lives, one that has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but is now most certainly endemic and here to stay.
Dissemination: The project was disseminated at the FORMAT International Photography Festival 2021, 12 March 2021 – 5 March 2023 as part of a virtual exhibition curated by Peter Bonnell. The exhibition can be found on the link below until the 5th March 2023. It was also published in the exhibition catalogue which has been distributed internationally through the Format Festival website