Leeds Arts University Repository
Not a member yet
463 research outputs found
Sort by
Trumps
No full textThe output is a creative project involving a light projection titled ‘Trumps’. It was a response to the concept and timing of the í Ljósi light festival in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, when the first sunlight in nine months falls onto the town. Research process: Using synchronised digital projectors inside the building, projecting onto screens set in the windows, balloons floated up to fill a detached domestic building. Synchronised to the soundtrack of Grieg’s Morning Mood from Peer Gynt, the black, purple, red, orange, yellow and finally white balloons eloquently created a spectacular sunrise inside the house with, at the musical climax, the balloons ‘farting’ off to return the building to darkness. To create the film of balloons floating up, Tansley designed a set; a clear Perspex box was set against a black background. The dimensions of the box front were calculated to match the proportions of the windows to be used in the specific building. The final film was edited and turned through 180 degrees to create the effect of the balloons floating up rather than falling down. There was then more intricate editing needed to be synchronised with the soundtrack. Research insights: Designing a piece of pre-programmed projection work to fit a building, without a site visit, is a complex exercise. However, it stimulated dialogue and debate while living and working with international light artists across a range of disciplines and created possible future collaborations. The intention and importance of ‘Trumps’ was to contrast sophisticated visual eloquence (nature) and childish humour (humankind). Dissemination: ‘Trumps’ was exhibited as part of the í Ljósi light festival in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland on 24-25 February 2017. The event attracted national media attention and was visited by over 2,500 people
Imagined realms
Get PDFAn exhibition of contemporary visionary landscape that was chosen by the artist and curator Clive Hicks-Jenkins for the Royal Cambrian Academy. (The Welsh equivalent to the English Royal Academy)
Hicks-Jenkins was looking to select artists that he considered continued an old animist or spiritual tradition of landscape that he wanted to present through the prism of chosen artists' imaginative lives.
Barker had three large drawings chosen, all of which were allegorical landscapes based on conversations with people he had engaged with on the streets of Chapeltown
Bodies in light: Mediating states of presence
Get PDFBodies in Light investigates how the convergence of light, body and technology can evoke states of presence through creative practice in the context of both real world and technologically mediated environments. Throughout history the interwoven relationship between body and light has been a catalyst for discovery, technological innovation and creative expression. Light has been harnessed, measured, manipulated and investigated in order to expand knowledge and create experiences which abstract and re-frame our somatic perspectives. Whether mediated by technology or evolving cultural paradigms, light focuses our attention, frames our narratives and initiates states of presence which enable us to examine and reflect upon our embodied human condition. This chapter discusses a range of approaches and strategies artists use to elicit states of presence through the convergence of light, body and technology in response to specific artworks and immersive projection environments
A surrealist stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning’s chasm
No full textThis is the first book-length study devoted to the American artist and writer Dorothea Tanning’s literary output, and how it operates in parallel to her visual oeuvre. As a visual reading of the artist’s one novel, it offers an innovative methodology, combining feminist and literary theory with specific reference to the ‘autotopography’ of Mieke Bal (2001) and spatial poetics of Susan Stewart (1984). It repositions Tanning’s writing at the centre of her entire creative practice and focuses on a little-known short story 'Abyss', a gothic-flavoured, desert adventure which Tanning worked on intermittently throughout her creative life, finally publishing it in 2004 as 'Chasm: A Weekend'. I conducted field work in Sedona, Arizona where the book was written, as well as in Portsmouth, France and Sweden which are geographically connected to the novel. I also worked closely with the artist’s estate to ensure the factual accuracy of my research. Susan Aberth, a renowned surrealism scholar, peer-reviewed my book. This publication is timely in terms of Tanning’s broader reception with a major exhibition surveys at Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, and Tate Modern, London. I advised curator Ann Coxon on the Tate iteration as a leading expert in the field, and contributed to a roundtable discussion ‘A Family Portrait’ (16 March 2019) where I shared an excerpt of my study. The book is included in the prestigious Studies in Surrealism series, and was reviewed positively by Anna Kérchy for Americana E-Journal (2017). The book is catalogued in a range of international libraries (e.g. Princeton), and appears on reading lists for students studying feminist-surrealism at the University of Edinburgh, among others
Soft picture
Get PDFThe output is an artefact, a soft picture which is an embroidered wall piece,
created as a documentary response to a derelict site, its space and the industrial
Hattersley Loom within it. Research process: Lane embraced the post-industrial space at Sunnybank Mills as an opportunity for experimentation. The work relies on initial documentary photographic imagery, which is then digitally re-painted, printed onto cloth and embroidered. The resultant soft picture contains an image which is both tactile and visual at the same time and seeks to re-engage the audience with the pictorial re-imagining of industrial history from a contemporary perspective. Research insights: The work is a product of an exploration of thinking through practice. This has evolved around the relationship between textile practice and the subject matter which pre-occupies it – the transient nature of the derelict (both building and machine). This is investigated through a broader methodological prism of making, un-making and re-making, as a means of opening up a dialogue between textile and place. The soft, clean, crafted and domestically perceived medium of the embroidered textile runs counter to its hard, dirty, disordered and industrial subject and is raising questions about binary thinking, the either or and the other. Could the soft picture be used to open up debate around less binary and more inclusive thinking related to Michel Serres(2008) writings around ideas of ‘soft logic’? Dissemination: The output is disseminated as follows: • By exhibition: Make, Un-make, Re-make, Sunnybank Mills, West Yorkshire, 2017 • Through conference paper: Re-making the Derelict, Textile and Place Conference at Manchester Metropolitan University 2018 • Through conference proceedings: Soft pictures – Re-making the Hattersley,Futurescan 4: Valuing Practice 2019
Running into each other: run! run! run! a festival and a collaboration
Get PDFartists and geographers frequently work together. the article explores one such ongoing collaboration. centering on a festival, RUN! RUN! RUN! International Festival of Running #r3fest organized by an artist and a geographer, it explores the productive antagonisms that working through and along disciplinary borders produces.
#r3fest was held at the Slade Research Centre. It was supported by UCL through a JFIGs grant. Further support was provided from the AHRC and Falmouth University
Echoes of protest: untold stories of the 1984-1985 UK Miners' Strike
Get PDFThis journal article looks at a collaborative project by artist/filmmaker Esther Johnson and filmmaker/writer Debbie Ballin titled Echoes of Protest. This research investigates the legacy of being involved in significant protest movements from a child’s perspective and seeks to understand the role protest can play in the lives of children, and to explore its aftermath. This article will draw upon oral testimony transcriptions and photography undertaken for this project to highlight a perspective of the 1984-85 UK Miners’ Strike that has seldom been explored. The stories collected are from adults remembering what it was like to grow up as a child during the Strike. They articulate the experience with a maturity they may have been unable to express at the time. The text will follow the research methodology, findings, discuss the editing process and invite contributors to reflect on their participation
SKETCH 2017
Get PDFA competition and touring exhibition SKETCH, aims to promote the diversity and importance of drawing and the role of the sketchbook in contemporary creative practice. SKETCH is the UK’s only art prize for artist’s sketchbooks with a dedicated touring sketchbook exhibition. This competition is only held once every four years and as first prize winner there should be an opportunity to hold a solo exhibition alongside the launch of the next exhibition in 2021. Sketchbooks are an integral part of my practice, both as a way of collecting observational information as Barker walks the streets and have conversations with people, and as a way of developing ideas back in the studio for allegorical drawings, installations and ceramics. The winning of first prize meant that Barker had the opportunity to open my work out into new material territories
Garry Barker: piscean promises - Workshop Press Gallery
Get PDFA solo exhibition of drawings and a ceramic installation. This solo exhibition focused on the development of allegorical narratives made in response to stories recently told to the artist of thousands of dead fish lining the English south coast seaside beaches due to pollution. This exhibition was used to test out audience reactions to a new body of work that was focused on responses to environmental damage caused by unthinking human activities and the idea that the Earth’s resources are things that are only there for humans to plunder. In particular a work was a response to reading around object orientated ontology and the possibilities a material turn could offer for an artist that wanted to reaffirm the value of making things
A nonagenarian virago: quoting Carrington in contemporary practice
Get PDFThis chapter explores long-term research on Leonora Carrington and contemporary art. A magpie for such “debris” herself, Carrington reaches us imbued with meaning, and it is striking how younger generations of artists have responded to her legacies. The chapter presents the findings of a related research exhibition curated by McAra at Leeds Arts University, Leonora Carrington/Lucy Skaer (15 July-2 September 2016). Here experimental media and performance objects were juxtaposed with Carrington’s primary material of paintings and etchings. In the hands of this subsequent artistic generation, “Carrington” was summoned through the metaphor of a curated, collective séance. For example, her novel The Hearing Trumpet (1976) became the starting point for a dialogic performance by Lynn Lu and Samantha Sweeting (2011) in which secret stories are gathered and whispered. Their version of the “antique” hearing trumpet was displayed as a conceptual heirloom. In 2006 Lucy Skaer embarked on a trip to Mexico City where she encountered the elderly Carrington. Their coexistence caused Skaer to make a body of work in and through “Carrington,” including a 16mm film homage Leonora: The Joker (2006). After Carrington passed away, Skaer returned to Mexico and took a series of photographs of Carrington’s front door, Harlequin is as Harlequin Does (2012). The exhibition was reviewed by Corridor 8, Art Monthly, and State of the Arts. McAra’s research on the quotation of “Carrington” as a medium occurred at a timely moment around the centenary of Carrington’s birth. McAra was invited to Mexico City to present on this research, and subsequently as keynote speaker at Edge Hill University. The essay collection McAra co-edited with Jonathan Eburne has been reviewed by Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, The Burlington Magazine and Woman’s Art Journal. It is used on courses including senior honours “Wanton Women Dada/Surrealism” at Royal Holloway University