Leeds Arts University Repository
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Textile traditions and fashion education in Mexico
Get PDFMexico has a rich textile tradition that still has an impact on today’s art and design world. However, it can be challenging for young fashion design students to incorporate these traditions to their contemporary work without the risk of creating folkloric garments.
For indigenous communities in the south of the country textiles are an important source of income and at the same time a way to keep connected with their pre-Hispanic past.
In order to learn more about the weaving techniques of Zapotec textiles and reflect on design innovation, a workshop was organised in Universidad de Monterrey. An artisan from the Oaxaca region taught a small number of students and academics how to use frame looms creating traditional patterns.
After the workshop students had the opportunity to create their own designs based on the techniques they had learned. All of them felt very positive about the experience and stated that they would be interested to pursue further the application of textile traditions in their work
Critical clickbait: artist interventions in commercial visual culture
Get PDFIn my research I explore the relation between people and objects, and the impact that images have as producers and disseminators of social values. I examine commodity packaging and adverts to determine the ideologies they support and to understand how they shape the identity of the consumer. To intervene in this process, I produce site-specific art works for commercial advertising spaces on billboards and social networking sites. This article will present a selection of artworks that aim to visualize the how consumer culture informs and influences identities and gendered behaviours
Still life, vanitas and commodity culture
Get PDFSymposium paper prepared for Expanding Communities of Sustainable Practice at Leeds Arts University in Nov 2018. During the symposium delegates visited the exhibition Still Life: Things Devouring time. The paper forms an introduction to the themes and ideas in the exhibition, in relation to sustainability and engagement. Still Life: Things Devouring Time is a group exhibition that focuses on the visual representation of vanitas, symbolic objects that warn against excess and the shortness of time. The exhibition brings together a seventeenth-century painting by Willem Kalf and contemporary artists, working in diverse media, who respond to consumer culture and the social, environmental and sustainability issues it produces today. Objects 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
The new spectacle: how effective is mobile augmented reality as tool for the manifestation of dissent?
Get PDFHordes of Networked AR Creatives deploy Viral Virtual Media to overlay, then overwhelm closed Social Systems lodged in Physical Hierarchies (Manifest.AR 2011). The above quote taken from the Manifest.AR’s (2011) collective manifesto demonstrates the power its founders attributed to augmented reality technology (AR); in particular, its ability to disrupt closed physical hierarchies through a form of technologically induced ‘détournement’. Détournement is a stratagem devised, or at least, coined, by Debord (1967) as a method to resist and undermine the pervading spectacle of capitalist society “by challenging the meaning of something taken for granted”
Double vision
Get PDFThe output is an exhibition of paintings and drawings representing two contrasting environments. Together, these works seek to explore the potential for re-presentation to provoke new readings of place. The notion of ‘double vision’ examines the differences between space and place, the phenomenological (bodily and perceptual) experience of place, and the relationship between place and its re-emplacement through drawing and painting. Research Process: In gallery one there were graphite drawings presenting recently cultivated agricultural edge lands, made through the iterative layering of marks. They were made after extensive visits to site, documenting these visits through sketches and photographs. These pieces collectively entitled ‘Noema’ reference Husserl’s ideas on judgement, sense and meaning through the act of perception (1913). In relation to this, these drawings sought to investigate the real and perceived experience of being on site and making the work, with the perception of the work as both medium and image. In gallery two there were paintings of the Merrion Centre, a Brutalist inspired 1960s shopping precinct in Leeds. The Centre was of special cultural interest as the site of the first official synagogue in Leeds, opened in 1846 (Fraser, 2019). The paintings act to triangulate, archival research in the Centre (TCS archive), online forums and site visits with theoretical discourses regarding place, representation and memory. Research Insights: The findings of this research suggest that such places are ‘anthropological place’ (Auge, 2008). a multi-layered palimpsest of past and present constructed by those that inhabit them. Furthermore, it is suggested that through painting place, paintings can become “a place of presentation for this world” (Casey,2002). Dissemination: The research was disseminated through the exhibition at the Studio One Gallery, London, 2 – 11 March 2018
Untitled I and II, from A Brief Arrangement
No full textThis output is an artefact comprising two photograms. The photograms are taken from an ongoing body of work titled Casting Light, which explores the relationship between photography and sculpture through the projection and manipulation of light through the production of photograms, luminograms and installation pieces. Research process: Using a camera-less photographic technique, for A Brief Arrangement pieces of card were balanced temporarily on top of photographic paper and exposed briefly to light; the resulting prints play with the conventional visual language of photography, the translation of three dimensions into two, and the expectation that the photograph yield transparently to its subject. Research insights: Taking this experimental and process-driven approach disrupts the conventional distance between the photograph and its subject. Embracing chance, gesture and the unforeseen allows for the possibility of destabilising the authoritative eye of the photographer, disrupting their relationship to an identifiable ‘subject’. Dissemination: This output was disseminated as part of the Make Good exhibition at Leeds Arts University in September 2018
Helicopter Synths (or ‘Helisynths’)
No full textThe output is a fifth-order Ambisonic multi-channel music composition, exploring the concepts of spatial boundaries and perceived spatial depth and fidelity in Higher-Order Ambisonics (HOA).
Research Process: The work focused on creating a piece of music in Ambisonics on the Huddersfield Immersive Sound System (HISS) High Density Loudspeaker Array (HDLA) (Ledger, 2017) situated in Phipps Hall at the University of Huddersfield, using a series of experimental Ambisonic software synthesisers developed by software developer Oliver Larkin (2019). The room dimensions, acoustic properties and speaker setup played an integral role in the research inquiry. The synthesisers featured the ability to assign audio objects individual spatial trajectories, therefore integrally incorporating a consideration of how sounds exist and move spatially into the compositional process. Used in combination with the HISS, the software tools and physical compositional space provided a unique environment to generate and explore synthesised spatial sound materials.
Research Insights:
This Practice as Research output contributes new insights into the use of height space in HOA, by utilising both tools and space in the context of creating a site-specific composition. The findings show how spatialisation can be directly integrated into synthesis through native Ambisonic trajectory-based synthesis. The process directed the composition by drawing focus to height space, which created a soundscape-style acoustic setting. The trajectories of sound produced morphed into synthesised instrumentation of similar spatial morphologies. This was a key aspect of crafting and defining the immediate and external Ambisonic spaces, with a drawn focus to full-spectral, immersive envelopment, by means of both rhythmic and melodic representation.
Dissemination: this research was presented at IASPM/ASARP/ISMMS/Dancecult at University of Huddersfield on 4 September 2018, and won Silver Award in Europe's Fourth Student 3D Audio Production Competition in Ambisonics 2020 (October 9, 2020). It was programmed at CubeFest 2022, Virginia Tech, Washington USA (19-21 August 2022)
‘I thought I heard that up north whistle blow’: African American blues performance in the north of England
No full textMany narratives concerning the transatlantic cultural exchange which carried blues music and blues culture from the United States to the United Kingdom focus on the Southern cities of the UK, particularly London and the South East. This chapter argues that the music producers, consumers and cultural workers of the Northern United Kingdom, especially Manchester, but also Leeds, Newcastle and Liverpool, were equally significant as part of the cultural convection currents which precipitated and sustained the blues boom of the 1960s. Further, this chapter argues that the construction of blackness undertaken by performers, cultural workers and consumers during the 1950s and 1960s in the North of England was a fundamental strand in the discourse of authenticity which surrounded African American music, such as it was presented in the United Kingdom during the beat era and blues boom. Broadly, the presentation of early blues performers in the UK of singing guitarists Josh White and Big Bill Broonzy to secondary audiences in the United Kingdom during the early 1950s was at odds with the reality of blues music and blues culture as presented by Muddy Waters and Otis Spann at Leeds in 1958, and by the musicians who took part in the subsequent American Folk Blues Tours of the early 1960s. Additionally, the performances televised by Manchester-based Granada Television also problematized the understanding of blues music and blues culture, whilst contributing to its spread beyond the United States. Manchester’s Twisted Wheel Club and Free Trade Hall also provided an opportunity for a predominantly white British audience to engage first-hand with the live performance of African American artists. This chapter explores and indicates how the blues was developed from a music of the African American rural poor to a style which emphasised personal authenticity, providing a source of communion and creativity across racial barriers in circumstances geographically removed from the United States. With specific reference to Manchester’s Twisted Wheel club and Free Trade Hall, the American Folk and Blues Festival Tours (1962-1966), and the televised Granada performance at Chorlton Station, Manchester which featured leading lights of the American blues scene (1963), this chapter explores the enculturative and acculturative musical practices and sociological contexts that placed young, white musicians in the society and influence of blues music’s African American progenitors. The problematic issues of race and cultural dissonance are raised and contextualised against a system of demographic othering characterised as the North/South divide and a societal antipathy toward emerging youth culture, in order to illustrate diachronic processes of technological mediation and cultural development in both blues music and the emerging counterculture and blues revival of the 1960s
Stories we could tell: words to American popular music
No full textHow has the history of rock ‘n’ roll been told? Has it become formulaic? Or remained, like the music itself, open to outside influences? Who have been the genre’s primary historians? What common frameworks or sets of assumptions have music history narratives shared? And, most importantly, what is the cost of failing to question such assumptions? "Stories We Could Tell:Putting Words to American Popular Music" identifies eight typical strategies used when critics and historians write about American popular music, and subjects each to forensic analysis. This posthumous book is a unique work of cultural historiography that analyses, catalogues, and contextualizes music writing in order to afford the reader new perspectives on the field of cultural production, and offer new ways of thinking about, and writing about, popular music
Futensils
Get PDFThe output is a creative project, Futensils. It was a collaboration between Robinson and Griffiths. Robinson contributed the photography to the project. Research Process: Robinson’s practice explores the central position of food photography in contemporary culture, the conjuring of shared social fantasies and idealised accounts of domestic life through these images. This includes examining the fetishization of objects involved in domesticity and particularly in the kitchen, and the social anxieties which permeate these objects and images. This project unites their interest, and involves ‘playing’ with domestic objects and utensils to create ‘found’ sculptures. The resulting photographs are experiments into animating and re-contextualising these objects and sculptures. The resulting exhibition showcased some of the photographs from this series alongside sculpted objects. Research Insights: The research demonstrated that food photography in popular culture conjures shared social fantasies and perpetuates idealised accounts of domestic life. This includes an exploration of the ‘mythical’ – idealised representations of the home, affection and fetishization of objects involved in domesticity. Kitchen objects relate to individual and group identities. The research highlights the link between food, identity and representation, and the construction of authenticity and myth. It reveals the social anxieties which permeate objects and images, and influence the production of ‘consensual hallucinations’. Dissemination: The project was exhibited at Dye House Gallery, Bradford in September 2018