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Deflecting risk, increasing citizenship: JPD Debate Club at two FE colleges, exploring the potential impact of critical thinking strategies
Get PDFThis is a Joint Project Development (JPD) (Fielding et al (2005) is situated at two FE Colleges in the North of England. Vocational students at FE colleges often demonstrate low levels of literacy diminished self-confidence. (Burke 2001) states a Neoliberal education agenda has caused a ‘literacy crisis’. Many vocational students are resistant to literacy strategies preferring practical engagement. This study explores how literacy proficiency, increase citizenship, community and mental health well-being might be improved via pedagogical interventions in critical thinking (CT). In particular this research takes the position that introducing participants to philosophical debate may deflect issues (Beck 2013) that polarize society. For example, the rise in fake news, far-Right extremists and the demonisation of immigration. By discussing these concerns, in Critical Thinking interventions including Lipman;s (2003) Community of Enquiry and a Debate Club, the study identifies how students develop skills in CT and citizenship by listening to each others’ stories, sharing ideas. The small-scale study explores the extent to which CT interventions which begin in oracy can impact on the development of literacy. The research population consists of 34 volunteers meeting over five weeks. Emerging findings suggest that CT interventions can help students, lecturers, technicians and support staff find voice as they find connection. Tentative findings show that CT interventions increased engagement and enjoyment of literacy. Emerging findings also indicate that the Debate Club creates a safe space, a non-judgemental arena for points of view; it develops a social conscience, concept of self-restraint, the development of a moral compass, and an internalised citizenship. Early findings also point to how participation in these interventions encourages a culture in which students are decent, kind, caring, considerate, creative, towards each other, aware of individual contributions and of contributions to the community as a whole
Consumed: stilled lives
Get PDFThis body of artwork, comprises photographs, artist books, pop-up display banners, lenticular images, and site-specific artworks made for commercial advertising spaces in cities and social networking sites. 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. Consumed: Still Lives presents ‘an adroit reprisal of the still life genre, creating artificial and fictive scenarios involving and centring on our relationship to food. Food allows her to address matters at the heart of consumer culture— a primary relationship that allows her to refigure our conception of the body and in doing so confront us with our desires and wants, our phobias and fears.’ (Durden, Consumed: Still Lives Exhibition Catalogue, p. 31). 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. This exhibition has been presented at; Blyth Gallery, Imperial College, London (26th September – 2nd November 2018); Ruskin Gallery, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge (21st September – 14th October 2017); Ffotogallery, Cardiff, (13th Jan – 3rd Feb 2018); and Dyson Gallery, Royal College of Art, London, (14th – 18th December 2016). In addition, works from this exhibition have formed part of the Imagining History exhibition at Oriel y Bont, University of South Wales, Cardiff (1st Nov – 17th Dec 2021)
Photography and war
Get PDFThere are countless books on war photography, but most focus on dramatic images made by photojournalists in combat zones. Photography and War instead proposes a radically expanded notion of war photography: one that encompasses a far broader terrain of geographies, chronologies, practices, and viewpoints. Thematic chapters consider photography’s fundamental role in military reconnaissance, propaganda and protest, exposure of war crimes, and the memorialisation of war, among many others. Iconic images by well-known names such as Roger Fenton and Robert Capa are considered alongside overlooked artefacts such as photo-albums made by First World War nurses, or placards protesting the Argentine military dictatorship. The historical scope ranges from 19th century surveys carried out by Persian military photographers, to digital images of Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi shared globally on Twitter and recent artworks by ‘aftermath’ photographers. The author takes a feminist and postcolonial stance, ensuring that viewpoints from people who have historically been overlooked—women and photographers from diasporic and non-Western backgrounds—are forcefully present. As a result, Photography and War offers a nuanced and more inclusive understanding of war as a far-reaching undertaking in which anyone might be implicated and affected. Richly illustrated with 120 images, some of which are published for the first time, Photography and War offers an accessible and comprehensive introduction to photography’s perhaps most contested, complex, and emotive subject
Regenring …visual lives
Get PDFWriting for visual arts students remains a current dilemma. Academic essays frequently form assessment requirements in awards that are studio practice based. This series of images illustrates a project created for fine art undergraduates, drawing upon the research-led practice experiences of the academic leaders. The Academic Poster Project regenred a model commonly used in science to accommodate both the individual interests and methods used by visual learners, which in turn become the participating student’s plan for narrating argument, knowledge and criticality. Writing in the visual arts can be difficult territory [...] students (and indeed staff) are often uncomfortable with the role of writing and theory within the subject: it is often seen as separate and unrelated. (Shreeve et al. 1999: 345–57)
You and I are discontinuous beings
Get PDF'You and I are discontinuous beings’ was an exhibition designed to celebrate the launch of the book, ‘Collective and Collaborative drawing in contemporary practice’. The exhibition was an opportunity to exhibit two large allegorical drawings that were also used as illustrations to Chapter 8 of the book ‘Drawing as a tool for shaping community experience into collective allegory’. The book, ‘Collective and Collaborative drawing in contemporary practice’, also used a detail from one of Barker's other drawings as the illustration for the front cover. The two drawings exhibited demonstrate an important aspect of Barker's practice’s process and that is the development of complex allegorical images that are designed to explore the movement from everyday encounters towards the construction of fabled or mythic images that have the ability to communicate beyond the local community from within which they emerge. By exhibiting alongside a book launch, the audience was able to contextualise the images and answer questions as to how the process of their making emerged from various types of approaches to drawing within a specific community
Still life: things devouring time
Get PDFThe output is a curated exhibition, co-curated by Dr Dawn Woolley and Dr Katie Herrington. It comprises a series of photographs and objects by Nicole Keeley, Caroline McCarthy, Simon Ward and Dawn Woolley. Research process: The exhibition focuses on the visual representation of vanitas, symbolic objects that warn against excess and the shortness of time. It explores how those ideas inform the practice of contemporary artists, working in diverse media, who respond to consumer culture and the social, environmental and sustainability issues it produces today. The evolution and enduring relevance of the genre of still life is highlighted in this exhibition by the variety of contemporary art displayed alongside Still Life with Drinking Horn by Willem Kalf, an example of Dutch still life painting from the 17th century. Research insights: Things made from non-biodegradable materials and the human inclination to collect possessions contradict the concept of tempus edax rerum, time as devourer of all things. Today, issues of sustainability are at the forefront of discussions about consumer practices, environmental concerns and social inequality. However, we continue to rely on and desire cheap disposable commodities, fossil fuels and plastic packaging. This exhibition presents artworks that contribute to the discussion about consumption and also express sense of urgency for action. The artworks challenge the values championed in consumer culture. Dissemination: The exhibition was shown at The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, 21st November 2018 – 23rd March 2019
Making the familiar unfamiliar
Get PDFThe output is a creative project. Blagg used key terminology from texts on the uncanny and attempted to apply them in a practical manner in the manufacture of familiar objects, investigating whether uncanny objects can be made using a recognisable systematic process. Research process: Blagg ran a series of workshops and exhibitions exploring audience interaction with and responses to the artefacts. Blagg tested ideas about how different audiences interacted with the work, developing activities, questioning and discussion techniques. He was interested in how audiences passing through the exhibition responded to the artefacts in comparison to focus group participants. Research insights: Blagg’s work focuses on everyday objects and how they have the potential to become uncanny. How familiar, seemingly innocuous, mundane and trivial pieces of design are able to alienate, frustrate or simply evoke uncertainty within their audiences. The participants did not require an in-depth knowledge of the uncanny to partake in this session. Blagg was able to gain user insight through interaction, play and discussion. This research added to his proposed understanding of certain concepts within the uncanny such as intellectual uncertainty and the doppelgänger, the evaluation and discussion of these notions suggested a more complex view of links between uncertainty and interactions with objects. Blagg was interested in applying a more pragmatic approach using hand held objects to explore the vagaries of ideas surrounding the uncanny, could intellectual uncertainty be felt or described by participants through a more measured approach. Dissemination: The output was disseminated through a series of workshops and exhibitions including: • Making the familiar unfamiliar, Leeds City Art Gallery. 12 May 2018. • Playtime, Leeds City Art Gallery. 5 December 2017
Superhumanism 3
Get PDFOn November 29th 2018, The Nicholas Treadwell Gallery published the book Superhumanism 3. This large monograph of the gallery’s history is the third volume in a trilogy of publications that chronicles the artists and artworks represented and purchased for the private collection of the international gallerist Nicholas Treadwell. The book selects 200 art works from the collection’s 600 pieces which also includes works by artists such as Joe Tilson and the collaborative partnership of Sue Webster and Tim Noble. My selected paintings feature in the chapter entitled ‘The Nineties’. Included are three paintings shown at several exhibitions from 1995 – 2014 on pages p79, p85, p89. The first volume of the three books, Superhumanism, A British Art Movement (Treadwell, N. Foster, P) was published in 1979 and the second volume, Superhumanism 2 (Treadwell, N) was published in 1982. The latest volume, Superhumanism 3 (Treadwell, N), is seen as the final book in this series and is structured as a chronology of the gallery’s past to its present location in Vienna. The book’s format presents the work of the artists by means of the decade in which the works were first exhibited. My work is featured in the chapter entitled ‘The Nineties’. Included are three paintings shown at several national and international exhibitions between 1995 – 2014. All of these particular works were executed in the 1990’s, subsequently purchased by the gallery and have been exhibited in many shows in London, Switzerland and Austria.
My paintings, ‘David Bowie Came for Tea, again’ 1998, ‘Breaking’ 1990 and ‘The Non – Smokers’ 1995 are reproduced in the chapter ‘The Nineties’. EXHIBITION: To accompany the launch of the book these paintings were curated in the exhibition called ‘Superhumanism 3 – The Nicholas Treadwell Collection’, which was held at The Nicholas Treadwell Gallery, Grosse Neugasse 18, 1040 Vienna, and ran from November 29th 2018 – January 31st 2019. Four of my paintings were exhibited, three of which appear in the book
Uncanny valley
Get PDFUncanny Valley is a series of images, which collages photographs of the Gleadless Valley estate. Research process: Whilst other estates have been canonised and redeveloped, Gleadless Valley, on the other hand, is backgrounded in critical consideration. Still without regeneration, it has been described as the city’s worst area to live. The Uncanny Valley images are a collection of collages, using photographs taken by a series of photographers. The compositions repeat the lyrics of the estate — concrete, hand rails, tv aerials, windows, balconies, satellite dishes — and reinterprets them as a reality of fictions. The work is not concerned with the exhaustible knowledge of the estate. Instead, it is interested in the “withdrawn” twilight qualities of the estate. As such, it is not a panoptic fact file, but an oblique indirect approach to an otherwise under-imagined object. It reveals an aspect to the estate previously unconsidered when it has been approached exclusively from an architectural, socio-historical, or geographical perspective. Research insights: The work interrogates both the structure of imagery and the potential of co-authorship. It reveals how graphic design can sit between a long form essay and a fiction in communicating experiences of place. This exhibition furthers research considering the emergent qualities in encountering images situated in the mundanity of an everyday realism. The work also considers that the collage maker’s job has not been to find something mystical in the mundane. Instead, it is to destabilise habits of perception and reveal their materials to always already be collage-like. These lines of enquiry are rare for graphic designers in considering the ambiguous, confusing, unfixed, and processual nature of images, signs and interpretation. Dissemination: Uncanny Valley was exhibited at Temporary Contemporary, Market Gallery, Huddersfield. The exhibition was accompanied by a limited-edition artist’s book
Boat at sea
Get PDFThe output is an artefact, a hand-drawn animation produced in response to conversations with migrants that had had to travel across the Mediterranean. Research process: The research extends from Barker making drawings in his local community, having conversations with the people he met on the streets as he did so. In this case, the drawings Barker had previously made of a tower block in Leeds that migrants now occupy, were a focal point around which stories were told to him. The drawings were based on the narratives of the terrible hardships suffered as people struggled to find their way to Leeds. These were turned into a short-animated film. Research insights: Barker’s research is a practical exploration as to how the elements of narrative are first of all refined into significant images through drawing and how these images can be used within various appropriate visual arts practices, including ceramics, animation, large scale allegorical drawing, textiles and printmaking. It allows Barker to explore the contemporary relevance of allegory within fine art practice. It also provides an avenue for contemporary political and social issues to become part of an ongoing dialogue, between both art practitioners and wider audiences, on the possible role of art as a means of facilitating political and social awareness within a poetic framework. Dissemination: The animation was selected for and exhibited at the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, Trinity Buoy Wharf, London and touring exhibition. 29 September 2018 – 6 July 2019