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It would be a pleasure: augmented reality and engagement in a heritage context
Get PDFThe interchangeability, confusion and conflict of what constitutes audience engagement has a long history, with much disagreement concerning boundaries and definitions. Dewey states that it is a mistake to see the artist as active and the audience as purely passive, and argues that “the active engagement of the audience is required to fully realise any work” (Dewey 1934). This predates the notions of “interactive” or “participatory” as understood today, but highlights the longstanding appreciation of the role the audience plays in the consumption of artworks. A sentiment echoed by Duchamp (1957) stating that “the spectator adds his contribution to the creative act”.
The research project presented at EVA 2017 seeks to offer a model for engagement, that of pleasure, which explores methods to motivate active participation
A closed loop model for 3D printing fashion
No full textThis paper discusses the 2 Way Closed Loop Model using recycled polyester (PET polyethylene terephthalate) developed by the author (in 2014) and its relativity to the development of sustainable practices in fashion and 3D printing in fashion. Bringing together sustainability and innovative technology, the focus of this practice based study aims to evaluate the early possibilities of such a model through design and exploring manufacturing methods as well as interviewing Fashion and Technical experts from academia and industry for their views on the model, methods, final usability, constraints and opportunities
Consumed: stilled lives - Ruskin Gallery
Get PDFConsumed: 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, ornate glassware and expensive foodstuffs such as shellfish and exotic fruit, 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. In response to this reading Woolley produces still-life artworks that suggest contradictory relationships to contemporary consumer culture. Drawing on both definitions of the term ‘consume’ (to ingest and to purchase) she uses food still life photography to represent different characters and positions in relation to capitalist society. What we eat and how we eat are symbols of our wider consumer habits. We are what we consume. In her art work photography is both subject and medium: she produces photographs in response to adverts. Some of the artworks in the exhibition are produced using commercial methods. For example, ‘Hysterical Selfies’, is a series of pop-up promotional banners. Site specific works are also produced for commercial advertising spaces on billboards and social networking sites. Consumed: Stilled Lives comprises 6 series of mounted and framed still-life photographs and a sound piece. The exhibition at the Ruskin Gallery included a new series of work Relics made for the exhibition. The exhibition was accompanied by a symposium, Animate Objects: Encounters Between People and Things, that brought together academics from diverse disciplines to discuss commodity culture and our varied relations to objects. The symposium was organised and co-conveyed by Dr Ellen Sampson and Dr Dawn Woolley. (13th October 2017)
Forwards always – seasonal observations through image and word
Get PDFThe output is a creative project comprising twelve large scale printed banners, spreads from a poetry book, developmental sketchbook work and examples of broader contextual inputs. Research Process: The work exhibited was underpinned by Hodson’s ongoing research into open mode play and improvisation. The exhibit to sought to promote improvisation as a vital methodology within the practices of both drawing and writing. The drawings for these banners were made with pen & ink. It is during this process of drawing where I have implemented new models of abstraction and simplification to reduce each idea down to its bare minimum in an attempt to convey the specific mood or atmosphere observed at its point of conception. This has meant drawing roughs and sketches exhaustively across sketchbooks, in order to refine each design to its most immediate and impactful. In addition, further practices of iteration and modulation through drawing have allowed Hodson to refine the choreography of each drawing as a studio-based performance. The concept for the banners emerged from Hodson’s involvement in the Natives residency held in Swaledale, during spring 2016, led by Nicolas Burrows. Research Insight: Advocating improvisation as a means by which the poet or illustrator can identify, sustain and develop their own emerging tone of voice through performance and play. Hodson’s research is informed by Csíkszentmihályi’s writing around Flow Theory, Nachmanovitch’s discussions on improvisation and Gladwell’s writing on the Adaptive Subconscious. The underlying principle emerged from the work on the importance of open mode, uninhibited play and improvisation. Dissemination: The exhibition was held at the Vernon Street Gallery, Leeds Arts University during the Thought Bubble International Comics Festival, held Sept 18th -24th 2017
Stories from the sculpture city
Get PDFResponses to ‘City Sculpture Projects 1972’ Henry Moore Institute 24th Nov 2016 – 19th Feb 2017 and ‘The King and I’ at The &Model Gallery Leeds 26th Jan – 18th Feb 2017. Stories from the Sculpture City 8th Feb. 2017, was a peer reviewed selected series of performances made in response to the Henry Moore Institute ‘City Sculpture Projects 1972’. The text piece ‘Two sculptures of our time: remembering 1972’ was written specifically for the exhibition, ‘The King and I’ at the &Model Gallery, Leeds. The book ‘Art and Fiction’ was exhibited by the Henry Moore Institute library in conjunction with the exhibition Savage Messiah: The Creation of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, curated by Dr Jon Wood. The exhibition was designed to coincide with the film of the same name and one particular theme was the portrayal of the artist as a mythic figure in fiction. Barker had developed this theme and interest in narrative for the Leeds College of Art ‘Library Interventions’ program and for the ‘City Sculpture Projects 1972’ wrote a text that was performed in the Victoria Hotel on the evening of the 8th Feb 2017. The &Model Gallery put on an exhibition directly in response to the Henry Moore Institute’s exhibiting of Nicholas Munroe’s ‘King Kong’ sculpture. Barker submitted a text work for this and it was used as a central focus for the exhibition as it involved an imaginative reconstruction of the mythic voyage that Munroe’s sculpture had been on since first exhibited in Birmingham. Both these responses further cemented the idea that fictional narratives could be developed out of real experiences, and that in doing this more effective communication could be developed with both specialist and non art audiences
26:86 Collective Pripyat Exhibition
Get PDFIn April 2016 to mark the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. A group of artists called the 26:86 Collective, including photographers and graphic designers, spent a week in the Chernobyl Exclusion zone visiting the abandoned town of Pripyat as well as the power station itself. On returning to the UK, a body of work was created in response to our visit. This work was exhibited in Middlesbrough in The House of BLAH BLAH between 2nd December 2016 and 12th January 2017, and Hartlepool Art Gallery between 9th September 2017 and 11th November 2017. The Work produced by Nicholas Young as part of the 26:86 Collective used the methodology of his Reductionist Manifesto to tell the story of the Chernobyl disaster. To make the story more relevant to a 21st century UK audience, he used a map of Great Britain showing all the working nuclear power stations on the 26th April 1986. And the 50 mile exclusion zones that would have taken effect in the aftermath of a meltdown like the one at Chernobyl. In the Manifesto, Rectuctionism is defined as ‘story telling through absence’. What is absent in this story are the large part of the country that would become ‘absent’. On the 7th April 2017 the 26:86 Collective staged a guerrilla exhibition at the ‘Palace of Culture’ in the abandoned city of Pripyat in Ukraine. The exhibition includes images of mixed media, photography, photomontage and collage. The exhibition was taken back into the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the place that inspired the artwork
Garry Barker: tree listening: a ceramic installation
Get PDFTree listening is a ceramic installation that is designed to provide an entry point for conversations with museum visitors.
Based on the idea that art can become a focal point for conversations, this body of work (19 ceramic pieces, located at various points within a garden) was designed with the York city art gallery garden in mind. The ears were made from local clay sources, including the same terracotta clay source that was used for the bricks that line the edges of the museum’s garden.
The work furthers Barker’s concern to use conversations with people to both instigate new work and to provide starting points for new audiences to engage with art as a way to extend their appreciation of the world and how issues such as politics, global warming and emigration impact on everyday experiences.
This installation was installed twice, the second time in spring 2017 because of the popularity with which it was received the year before. A planned walk was added to the piece in 2017 and the artist led a walking tour that was scripted in response to conversations with the museum head gardener
Re-making the Hattersley
Get PDFThese artefacts are a site-specific investigation of the Old Weaving Shed (now demolished) at Sunnybank Mills, West Yorkshire (2014-2019). In embracing the space at Sunnybank Mills, Lane has used it as an opportunity for experimental re- interpretation, re-contextualisation and re-imagination.
Research process: The artefacts explore the intersection between contemporary textile practice and the transient nature of derelict buildings and machines of the industrial north. Derelict buildings are deconstructed spaces in a state of entropic transformation and open to many interpretations. Through site specific reactivation of both space and artefacts, processes of making, un-making and re-making are explored. Lane casts, repaints and wraps remnant machine parts to re-engage the audience with the post-industrial form, questioning the object. Research insights:
Exploring the post-industrial landscape, engaging directly with remnant objects, provides insight into the materiality of the space and what it contains. Making casts from found objects, re-positioning materials, weight, and wrapping a structure within the space engaged touch, repetition, time and reformed shape. This in turn has directed research towards newer questions of “what is?” “what exists?” and even “Is time a thing?” The latter expands on ideas of decay and entropy, not of time “taking its toll” but of simply one object or space moving to being another object or space (Rovelli, 2015). The object can be used by the audience to engage conversation and explore new narratives. Dissemination: The output was disseminated as follows: • By exhibition: ‘Make, Un-make, Re-make’, Sunnybank Mills, West Yorkshire (2017). • Through a 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
Veins
Get PDFThe output, Veins, is an exhibition comprising a series of photographs. Research process: The photographs within the series present a view of mega cities within the Far East. Examining the relationships between images of the familiar utopian city skyline to those captured on the ground at close range. The series highlights the infrastructures that ensure a city has services to function. Often hidden from view, these essential city veins of wires and pipes expand as the city evolves and strangely mimic the organic growth of nature. The series shows a city in development that is not a part of an architectural design for urban utopia. It reflects on global connectivity through photographs being made within a number of mega cities within the far east. The edit and scale of images selected is an important aspect, as multiple images are used to highlight connections between cities within a number of countries. Research insights: The series comments on the wider themes of globalisation and homogenisation. A photograph depicting a model of a city is included within the series, but is not instantly recognisable as such within the exhibition. This helps to raise the question of pre-perceived visions and altered realities of the city environment. Exploring approaches to photographic practice is considered and the relationship of travel photography to the personal experience of being in a specific location to photograph is reflected upon. Dissemination: The work was selected for the theme ‘Cities of Exchange’ for the Liverpool Look International Photography Festival and was disseminated at Cities of Exchange: a small view gallery, as part of the festival
Challenging the cult of normalcy: art education and transdisciplinary practices
Get PDFI am interested in art education as a transdisciplinary practice which embraces a variety of mediums and world views and in how, through transdisciplinarity, art education challenges the cult of normalcy. The normalisation of the individual is, I suggest here, a limiting, destructive and pedagogically unsound basis from which to pursue any kind of education and particularly one where the contribution of the individual is as central as it is in art education. I argue here that the adoption of a transdisciplinary practice can be liberating on a personal, an artistic and pedagogic level.
This notion of not normal or abnormal suggests that the mind and body I live in (and that you live in) are not ‘good enough’ because they may not fit the confines created for them. Foucault (1977) would argue in fact that the discourse around normalcy causes the internalisation of the concept of normalcy. This ‘normalizing judgement’ (Foucault 1977: 117) brings about not only obedience but adaptation. The internalisation of normalcy inflicts macro and micro penalties. The confines of normalcy imprison us and disability becomes pathologised.
Goodley describes Disability Studies as
A broad area of theory research and practice…antagonistic to the popular view that disability equates with personal tragedy (Goodly 2011: xi)
Instead, he says, it is
A paradigm shift; from disability as personal predicament to disability as social pathology [and] it places problems of disability in society (ibid).
The body is a contested space. It is where disability and education take place. ‘There is an intimate and necessary relation’, says Dewey ‘between the processes of actual experience and education’ (Dewey 1938: 20). My research uses narrative inquiry which allows for the voice of the interviewee to interpret their education. Milchalko (2002) and Titchkosky (2011) talk about binary opposites. Like process and experience, ‘blindness and sightedness rather than existing as binary opposites, act together to achieve a sense of reality’ (Milchalko 2002: 27). Art education and disability studies can provide a space for manifesting this, a way of breaking down mind/ body; able /disabled ways of thinking, for challenging what Titchkosky (2011) calls the absent presence of disability.
As a Senior Lecturer in Language Development and Research Methods at Leeds College of Art, a specialist visual arts institution in the north of England, I initially and primarily worked with students who are dyslexic. I now work across undergraduate and post graduate programmes with a wide range of visual arts students, developing writing as part of a creative practice. My PhD studies use narrative inquiry to examine the writing lives of art students with dyslexia and I am now interrogating how transdisciplinarity can promote inclusivity, as well as holding notions of inclusivity up to question if its binary opposite is exclusivity