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‘Out of the mouths of babes’: mature students and horizontal discourse in the art and design studio
Get PDFThis paper is based on the narratives of students coming to art and design Higher Education (HE) with an Access to HE diploma. These students are sometime referred to as ‘second chance’ , ‘mature’ or ‘non-traditional’. The two case studies under discussion are drawn from those collected from a longitudinal study (2011-2014) that sought to investigate the experiences of ‘non-traditional students’ in art and design HE. The participants are studying on a range of creative degree programmes in various institutional contexts. Narrative inquiry is used to show the ways in which students’ stories run contrary to some metanarratives about class and education. Bernstein’s theories about horizontal and vertical discourse within educational settings are used to analyse the students’ accounts about their encounters in the art and design studio. It is argued that age can be used by educational institutions as a mythological discourse that constructs a particular horizontal solidarity within a particular cohort which in turn can marginalise some mature students. For example, within art and design ‘youth and creativity’ are closely aligned and this can be transmitted through the various pedagogic devises and practices employed by an institution. The signature pedagogies also associated with the subject area can position ‘non-traditional’ students as the ‘pedagogised other’
All coherence gone? historical currents in contemporary still life group exhibition
Get PDFThis exhibition curated by Frances Woodley, promotes an idea of several interwoven conversations across time and space, present and past. These conversations take place between artists and objects, objects and objects, and between a curator and artists of two nations, the Netherlands and the UK. The conversations are about still life, a modest genre with a magnificent history, and how its historical origins in seventeenth century Dutch painting enfold and flow through contemporary practices of painting and photography today.
Artists: Emma Bennett, Clare Chapman, Kenne Grégoire, David Gould, Piet Groenendijk, Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Jacco Hinke, Heather James, Alan Salisbury, Margriet Smulders, Krista van der Niet, Dawn Woolley
Beyond the book: an exhibition of artists who use books as their medium
Get PDFFollowing a call for submissions A Paraphrase on a Grecian Urn I & II by bookwork artist Richard Nash was selected for the group exhibition Beyond the Book. The exhibiting works were selected and co-curated by the Guild's curator Saffron Wynne and leading bookwork artist Su Blackwell. The exhibition toured from the Devon Guild of Craftsmen, Newton Abbot, 5 April – 8 June 2014, to the Long & Ryle Gallery, London, 12 June – 17 July 2014. The group exhibition of nine artists included; Su Blackwell, Ellen Bell, Jonathan Mathew Boyd, Yvette Hawkins, Samantha Y Huang, Alexander Korzer-Robinson, Jeremy May, and Davy & Kristin McGuire. The exhibition was also tied with a symposium of the same name organised by the Guild and the University of Exeter.
The exhibition initiated A Paraphrase on a Grecian Urn as an ongoing serial body of work for Nash. The first iterations, A Paraphrase on a Grecian Urn I and II (2013), were exhibited at the Devon Guild of Craftsman. A Paraphrase on a Grecian Urn III (2014) was created specifically for the Long & Ryle gallery space, and subsequently acquired by Thomas Heneage (Thomas Heneage Art Books)
Illustrations for A Clockwork Orange
Get PDFThe output is a series of illustration commissioned by the Folio Society in 2014 to illustrate Anthony Burgesses’ ‘A Clockwork Orange’. It includes the binding and seven internal illustrations. Research Process: The brief was to illustrate the book as the text intended rather than in the iconic style that was presented in Stanley Kubrick’s film from 1971. The cover took reference from Kubrick’s film with the use of a bowler hat. There is no reference to bowler hats in the book itself. The illustrations took influence from soviet and eastern European design and illustration as well as from the streets of Manchester. As Burgess quoted that the book takes place somewhere in-between Manchester (Burgess grew up in Manchester) and Moscow. Jones used collage to produce the works using contrasting elements of printmaking, drawing and found imagery. this was to mimic the slang language of Nadsat that is spoken by the characters in the book. Nadsat is a combination of UK slang and Russian. Research Insights: Stanley Kubrick’s film has played a big part in how audiences think about the novel. The use of the bowler hat is significant as part of the cover illustration even though no bowler hats are mentioned in the novel. There is a sense of illustrative works that were produced under the gaze of the iron curtain. By drawing upon cautionary fairy tales and the dystopian version of the city the work conveys a subtle, possible something that exists outside the frame of illustration, something that makes the viewer feel a bit jittery. Dissemination: The illustrations were published in the Folio Society edition of Anthony Burgesses’ ‘A Clockwork Orange’ in 2014
Embodied dreaming in the archive
Get PDFThis article accounts an artist’s project that questions, through practice, whether objects from the past, in archival conditions, can enable us to read the present. It employs a life writing method to evidence how my own idea of the psychic dimension of practice within the production of sculpture exists, but is as yet unaccounted for, in the historical overviews of making and teaching sculpture in Britain. The article interrogates a sculpture project using the psychoanalytical ideas of Christopher Bollas, and I use a sculpture project of my own as a case study to make this claim. Through writing, I retrieve the actions, methods and processes involved in making sculpture as I know it. I write through a personal project Others (Bradford Museums and Galleries, 2009), developed through an artist-in-residence commission, to analyse and interpret my sculptural practice as it was performed in, with and through an archive situation. I show how writing, which is not the moment of the production of art in this practice, is an appropriate form to record the complexity the project, that is not always accessible in the artefact at the moment of public exhibition. I acknowledge how a photographic record does satisfy as a method of observation, description, process and action, but propose that this particular reflective writing approach enables deeper and more detailed identification and articulation of the theory within the sculptural artefact
A parlay
Get PDFThe content of this artists’ book comes from a series of conversations held with individuals at Leeds Art Gallery. The conversations were based upon and departing from the sculpture ‘Atom Body Was Light’ by Liliane Lijn, from Leeds Sculpture Collection. The book is a three-pronged experiment. Firstly, aiming to discover the range of responses that may be elicited by a single artwork and how people’s interpretation is shaped by other aspects of their life. Secondly, playing with combination and manipulation of responses. Most of the words in the book are quoted direct from interviewees, but the artist’s voice comes to the fore in selection, editing and sequencing of content. Thirdly the book explores ways of presenting text visually, with a nod do concrete poetry. The relationship between the visual and verbal is an on-going interest in Crouch’s work, and graphically presenting words spoken about a visual artwork provided a fruitful challenge.
The work was produced with funding from Leeds Inspired and supported by Leeds Art Gallery
Labour exchange
Get PDFThis exhibition brings together works by painter Sarah Taylor and photography practitioner Magali Nougarède. ‘Labour Exchange’ was initially developed with Helen Sear who noticed similarities in Nougarède and Taylor’s practices. Research process: In their practice research, both artists use the domestic object as source material, especially soft furnishings re-appropriated from previous generations: fabrics, clothing, wallpaper, cloths, tea towels. These items are at the centre of the artists’ visual consciousness, both as objects of aesthetic fascination and as objects of historical and political significance. Taylor’s grandmother coveted objects to make her home look respectable, whilst Nougarède’s protestant family was entrenched in the production of linen, cottons and tea towels in the 19th and 20th century Normandy textile industry. Both artists see the domestic object as an opportunity to interrogate power relations, past and present, in terms of gender, class (especially in Taylor’s case) and political ideology, to address political inequities and reclaim histories. Research insights: Traditionally photography has been seen as inferior to painting, however it is the contemporary photographic discourse, defined by thinkers and writers such as Jo Spence, Annette Kuhn and John Tagg, that helps articulate some of the ideas for this exhibition. Both artists thrive on playing outside the boundaries of their own medium, contesting the parameters of both painting and photography. Conforming is not an option. Some of Taylor’s paintings made by direct application of paint laden fabric or cloth unto the canvass, at times adopt qualities of photographic exactness, whilst Nougarede’s high contrast enlarged tea towel grids printed on cotton rag paper may recall pencil marks on drawing paper. Dissemination: The exhibition was disseminated at BayArt Gallery, Bute Street, Cardiff Bay. Helen Sear led a pre-preview “In conversation” with artists Magali Nougarède and Sarah Taylor titled: A gendered perspective?
The Tetley feast
Get PDFThe Tetley Feast was a community-engaged, participatory design project between academics, students and local community organisations, that occurred within a host centre, The Tetley, which had just opened as a new contemporary arts centre in Leeds, North England. It involved 70 undergraduate BA (hons.) Visual Communication students from the University working with a range of local community organisations which were economically and culturally deprived, as well as being, in the main, excluded from design practices and education. As part of the conference Cumulus Johannesburg, Design with the Other 90%, the paper is regional in focus but framed against the context of current global inequality. This project sought to promote engagement between design students and communities that would lead to sustainable long-term relationships. It was important that these were dialogic and people created learning opportunities together, that is students learned from the communities and vice versa. Participating organisations included: schools and alternative education providers; an Asian health centre; a youth club; a group of adults with learning and physical disabilities; a single dads’ group and a mental health organisation working with women from the Polish and Bangladeshi communities. This paper reports on a case study that encompasses methods of design as social practice and participatory action research. The project culminated in a temporary exhibition at The Tetley with a range of work made by students with different levels of collaboration with community participants. These included films, photography, graphic design, craft, installations, outcomes of workshops run by students and interactive workshops. Over 200 participants from the community groups attended and took part in the event, inspired by the Hunslet Feast, a local community festival that took place over 100 years ago
Ogmore 74
Get PDFThis short life-writing piece explores the memory of being left behind on a beach in Wales with my brother in 1974 and is told from a child's perspective. It has been selected for the magazine as part of a collection of new writing and will be published in October 2015 alongside the work of renowned authors and poets including award winning Sheffield poet Helen Mort. An online version will be published at the same time. The publication will be launched at Waterstones Sheffield and The London Review of Books
There is nothing like a shave to make a pig feel like a man again
Get PDFThis solo exhibition concentrated on three large drawings that were designed to be read as part of a series, all of which were created as allegorical reflections on contemporary society. The drawings were the result of several years of walking and drawing and talking with people that live in the Chapeltown area of Leeds. By hanging three large narrative drawings in close proximity, Barker was able to assess the audience reaction to a narrative that flowed between drawings. The effect was similar to that of a series of comic book frames, people reading the drawings from left to right and the ‘gutter’ between frames acting as a time gap between images, this allowing for narratives to move both forwards and backwards in time between drawings. The associated catalogue kindly produced by the curator, Terry Hammill, gave me an opportunity to add a textual narrative alongside details from the drawings that he had himself selected and photographed. This was an opportunity that opened out a much deeper self-awareness and understanding of the personal histories behind drawings that had been predicated by listening to the stories of other people