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Make it Happen: Developing Cultural Engagement through University and Charity Collaboration, Different Temporalities and Rhythms
Full text linkThis article reflects on a project, Make it Happen, that was a collaboration between a University and an Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation (NPO). NPOs are organisations that are funded as part of a People and Places Consortium in the UK that increases access to the arts in areas of low participation. Additional resources came from Knowledge Exchange funding awarded by Research
England via the University. The aim of the project was to create a curriculum that would be suitable for preparing local artists so they could have the skills to work in community arts or, as it is now known, socially-engaged
practice. It was hoped that this would address a problem where there was a lack of artists from the
local area who felt confident in applying for commissions for socially-engaged work. As a consequence, funding would go to arts practitioners from outside the area, and these people would not necessarily have the connections and insights to understand the needs and cultures of local
communities. The Make it Happen team included a coordinator and a researcher from the University and the NPO Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and a Creative Producer. A draft curriculum was then designed based on the knowledge and experience of the team’s members. This was then trialed with a group of local artists (participants) who were recruited to undertake a three-week short course. The feedback and reflections from the participants and the project researcher were then examined through a theoretical lens developed from Bernstein’s work on classification and framing in conjunction with Alhadeff-Jones’ work on the rhythms of educational time. This enabled the researcher to explore the tensions that arose in the project around the competing temporalities of organisations and individuals
Learning Returns: Experiences of mature students in art and design captured through YouTube
Full text linkLearning Returns is a practice-based project that aims to capture the experiences of mature students studying art and design. The research team is based in a small specialist arts institution in the North of England. Initially it was devised during 2020 as a response to the dramatic changes that occurred in people’s working, leisure and learning lives due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Online learning, fitness classes and crafting sessions were broadcast through free-to-access videos such as YouTube and these showed an increase in the six weeks after lockdown was introduced in March 2020 (Bakhshi, 2020). The research explores the possibility that a video-sharing website could be a fruitful space for developing the Learning Returns project. Broadhead’s (2021) interrogation of film-making as a method for researching mature graduates before the pandemic was a precursor to this work.
Learning Returns has an overall, long-term aim to demonstrate the benefits adult learning in the arts have for the individual, their community and for civic societies. However, in this phase of the project there were two objectives, firstly, to investigate the ways in which four people who had previously been art and design students spoke/connected with an audience of imaginary prospective students beyond institutions who were considering returning to education. The second was to evaluate YouTube as a means of conducting research with older people about their learning experiences.
At the time of writing the Learning Returns YouTube channel had been established containing four films made with four participants. There is an intention to make more and this project would continue over the next three years.
It was found that the participants were very confident telling their own stories to the camera. To some extent they took control of the content of their films and contributed to some of the aesthetic aspects. For example, they chose to wear certain kinds of clothes and drew upon their story-telling skills to make the films engaging. Themes that were identified in their films were, a reflection on their learning journeys, linking previous experiences with their learning, an understanding of their own positionality, encouraging others, and future projects outside of education.
When compared with accomplished ‘YouTubers’ (people who have grown large numbers of loyal subscribers) it was seen that the academics were unable to compete with the speed with which they could make and upload content. It was also challenging to grow an audience for the Learning Returns channel quickly. However, the YouTube format has the potential to give additional data through number of views, number of like and dislikes as well as constructive feedback in the chat. In order to exploit these aspects of YouTube fully, time to promote the channel is needed. Thus, the progress was and is much slower than anticipated.
Using YouTube as a research vehicle enables the stories told by the participants to be experienced by audiences asynchronously - possibly disrupting some of the pre-pandemic rhythms and episodes of adult learning (Alhadeff-Jones, 2016) and so it also disrupts the linear flow of the research process
Decade of the Damned: Notes on School of the Damned 2013 – 2023
No full textOne of the benefits of 'graduating' from an alternative art school is that you don't get Alumni emails from the Careers department. This is especially unlikely if you graduate from The School of the Damned - an unaccredited, student-led MA Fine Art programme that effectively resets every year, with each outgoing cohort passing pedagogical authority over to the next intake. Whatever the issues with this model, it has become a central feature of The School, founded in 2013 and still going strong in 2022. Such a radically amnesiac approach to institutional legacy might seem resistant to any kind of definitive history, and that is certainly not my intention with this essay.
I was part of the co-founding cohort of The School of the Damned, and will reflect on the 2013 program — in theory and in practice — as well as speculating about the School's interim past and soon-to-be-reset future, canvassing opinion, anecdote and analysis from all former and current students. Necessarily subjective, and a partial history in both senses of the former word, this discursive essay aims to capture some of the ambition and spirit of the ideas and positions that formed The School of the Damned, a project initially conceived in protest, using free labour exchange as its primary and exclusive means of funding and organisation. Whatever is remembered or forgotten, I hope this essay opens dialogue with past and future students, artists, educators and activist
Self-Supporting
No full text‘Self-Supporting’ is a performance by Nicola Dale commissioned by The Hepworth Wakefield for the survey exhibition ‘If Not Now When – Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain 1960-2022’
The exhibition project revisited research into women artists working in the expanding field of sculpture undertaken in the late 1980s by Griselda Pollock and Lorna Green as the basis for a present-day comparative study. It recruited a new cohort of contemporary sculptors working in Britain.
Research Process: Dale studied anonymised responses to The Hepworth Wakefield’s ‘Women in Sculpture’ survey. She noted that variations of particular actions appeared across the cohort – e.g. understanding, balancing, rewarding, struggling, labouring, adapting and self-supporting. These common experiences became Dale’s own actions for the performance, i.e. in ‘becoming’ a self-supporting sculpture, she had to perform these actions in order to visualise a shared understanding of what it feels like to be a female sculptor.
Research Insights: Dale’s insight was to understand how to ‘collaborate’ with anonymous artists. The focus on their stated actions informed a visual metaphor that stretched Dale’s own understanding of sculpture as performance. Although superficially ‘solo’ it gathered together in one place the actions of female sculptors across time and space. This may be understood as a feminist phenomenological approach.
Dissemination: ‘Self-supporting’ was performed on the opening night of ‘If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain, 1960-2022’, as well as at the closing event of its subsequent tour to the Saatchi Gallery, London. Moving image and photographic documentation was shared online via both gallery and artist, as well as being collected as part of the exhibition’s archive (Hepworth Wakefield)
The Quantified Self, the ideology of health and fat
No full textThis chapter examines the Quantified Self movement and the ideology of health in relation to The Productive Body to consider the body as a site of both discipline and dissent. Robert Crawford describes how the ideology of health, or healthism, supports a neoliberal agenda by situating health and illness as the personal responsibility of the individual. This notion of ‘health’ enables individuals to make moral and ideological judgements about the bodies of others, masking the sexism, racism, classism, and ableism inherent in these judgements. The ideology of health also conceals health's relation to social inequality. For people with the financial resources, leisure is transformed into a form of body-labour that complements their economic function and compels them to purchase equipment and services that optimize their ‘bodily capital.’ In contrast to this, fat bodies, that are more likely to be identified as female, working-class, poor or ethnic minorities, are signifiers of lack of self-control and a poor work ethic.
The Quantified Self movement exemplifies this process. It emerged with the development of wearable devices and apps designed to record detailed measurements relating to the users’ physical, psychological and social well-being. The movement is dominated by middle-class white men who have the time and financial resources to purchase and use tracking devices to optimise their bodies and minds. This chapter argues that this quantification creates ‘productive’ bodies and intensifies ideal neoliberal traits of competitiveness, individualism and self-control. It examines disordered eating behaviours as pathologies of quantification and considers eating for pleasure, rather than health and ‘fuel’, to be a potential disruption to the neoliberalisation of the body and its capacities
Desire Lines: Quantified-Self-Portraits Produced with a Fitness Tracking Watch
No full textI am an artist and researcher examining self-tracking practices to understand how these forms of measurement and judgement employ an ideology of health to produce particular (gendered) neoliberal subjects. My fitness tracking watch records bodily movements and presents data as indicators of health. The watch encourages self-optimisation and competition. In contrast, the performances I track do not focus on health or self-improvement but bring attention to hidden labour, often gendered and unpaid, such as admin, cleaning and care. In Desire Lines, the geolocation diagrams produced when working at home are reproduced in linocut prints. These prints, and my body of work on quantification, aim to contextualise self-tracking data within the personal, social and political environment, undoing the propensity of neoliberal capitalism to present health as a personal responsibility and consumer choice. This chapter discusses some positive and negative aspects of self-tracking practices and the Quantified Self movement to outline the position from which I appropriate self-tracking techniques as creative practice-based research methods. By viewing quantification through a queer, feminist lens I hope to draw attention to the inequalities that are concealed by neoliberal notions of health. Using a phenomenological approach, I describe some of the preliminary findings of this ongoing research, including the augmented and outsourced ways of looking and varying temporalities of self-tracking
Mum said you should always brush your hair
Full text linkThe output is bronze sculpture created by Gaffney, titled ‘Mum said you should always brush your hair’, measuring 29 x 17 x 13 cm.
Research process: Methods used are transcription; life modelling where it is the definition of life that is critical, combining material process with psychological and social behaviour to perform modelling-modelling; casting as part of the research project to construct a new definition of sculptural practice as Embodied Dreaming.
Research insights: The sculpture is one of a series of works made in response to the question ‘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: The output was included in ‘If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain, 1960 – 2022’, an exhibition that presents the outcomes of a significant research project, ‘Hepworth’s Progeny’ hosted by The Hepworth Wakefield (2021 – 23) and in collaboration with art historian Griselda Pollock and sculptor Lorna Green.
The work was exhibited at The Hepworth Wakefield (31 March – 15 October 2023) and Saatchi Gallery London (15 November 2023 – 22 January 2024), it was reviewed for the Guardian Online by Hannah Clugston (3 April 2023)
Citizens of Coventry
No full textThe output is a short poetry video created by filmmaker Chimiak along with poet Sebbie Mudhai. The research explores the experiences of those living in Citizen's supported housing, inspired by the stories of the residents and the staff who support them especially throughout the Covid experience.
Research Process: Eight workshops took place, some specifically for families and some for adults and were led by Mudhai and Chimiak while information gathering. Over 20 residents in total and five staff members of Frank Walsh House and the Gateway, Citizen’s temporary homeless accommodation, took part in a series of workshops to explore their experiences of lockdown and to create a poem.
The poem was then recorded with members of the group reading different sections. Chimiak produced an accompanying film which provided a scenic backdrop to the audio and captured those memories of connecting with nature during the pandemic.
Research insights: The project created a safe space to discuss issues that have arisen out of lockdown and to remember and reflect on individual experiences. The outcome was inspired by the locations the group members discussed during their workshops, creating a sense of place and time. The sound and images give a sense of authenticity and an emotional connection to the experiences of the participants. The human element of the outcome is through the voice, whereas the film presents a series of landscapes and places where people are mostly not present. The tension between word and image evokes the isolation and solitude remembered by the participants from their experiences of the pandemic.
The output shows how editing can become a poetic activity in itself.
Dissemination: The National Memorial Arboretum, Burton-on-Trent, Lockdown Landscapes exhibition, the Drum, 5 June 2023 – 9 October 2023 (72,704 visitors). Collected by the National Memorial Arboretum as part of their archive
An Encounter with Marternal Materiality: Cathy Wilkes and the Green Dress
No full textIn the British Pavilion for the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, sculptor Cathy Wilkes installed artwork and objects that were sparse, melancholic and materially resonant. Moving through the rooms of this understated exhibition of objects made and found; it was the materials themselves that invited closer consideration, materials resonant of the intimacies of the home and of the maternal body. In room three of the Untitled installation, one encountered a doll figure clothed in a green dress of the kind known in 1950s Britain as a ‘house dress’, the kind made at home and worn to cook, clean and care for children in, the kind of dress worn by women of small means, the kind of dress worn by women in images of poverty and deprivation, like those by Walker Evans (1941) and Dorothea Lange (1939). Wilkes’ work invokes reproductive labour and female affects of care (Sliwinska, 2020). The green dress is adorned with small paper images of children eating soup, yet the figure who wears the dress is isolated from the smaller child-like figures who stand apart in other rooms, the dress invoking Rozsika Parker’s (1995) maternal ambivalence. Materiality in Wilkes’ installation is resonant of the temporality and spatial uncertainty of the threshold (Meskimmon, 2019), the unstable materiality of objects at the boundaries (Boscagli, 2014). As a sculptural object, the green dress in Wilkes’ installation inhabited the room like a mother guarding the domestic realm, a materialisation of the history of working-class women’s ambivalent domestic experience
Belonging through assessment: Pipelines of compassion QAA Collaborative Enhancement Project 2021
Full text linkIn February 2021, colleagues from University of the Arts London (UAL), Leeds Arts University (LAU) and Glasgow School of Art (GSA) secured funding for the QAA Collaborative Enhancement Project – Belonging through assessment: Pipelines of compassion. The project began against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic and the team identified a shift in assessment practices across the three participating arts institutions. This offered an opportunity to further our work, in collaboration, to address social justice, belonging and inclusion through compassion.
This project aims to:
1. Identify areas of enhancement in assessment policies and practices to promote student sense of belonging and tackle issues of social justice.
2. Link this relational work with attainment gap/awarding differentials agendas in the creative arts.
3. Develop collaborative, dialogic, polyvocal and affective resources for staff development across the HE sector.
Three research strands emerged from themes relevant to our own institutional priorities, mutually informing the project and institutional practice and policy. These are pass/fail grading, trauma-informed policy and compassionate feedback. Initial cross-institutional research and evaluation into pass/fail assessment was taking place at UAL and at LAU in the wake of measures introduced during the pandemic. The trauma-informed policy strand developed from academic enhancement work on Fostering Belonging and Compassionate Pedagogy at UAL. The compassionate feedback research strand linked to enhancement work in progress at GSA around assessment policies and practice and with UAL work on formative feedback practices and assessment design.
The following sections introduce and then delve into each of the research strands in turn, providing both theory and practical advice. The final section of the resource outlines indicators for compassionate assessment across both higher education policy and practice