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Object
Full text linkThe output is an ‘artists’ book’ publication, conceptualised, designed and edited by Sheila Gaffney and Linda Schwab; comprising of written and visual material with contributions from the artist, photographer, critic, art historian and museum curator. Object was an element of the art intervention exhibition project Wunderkammer: the female gaze objectified at Leeds Art Gallery, 10th March – 16th April, 1994, which questioned the presence of female nudes made by male artists in our galleries. In the book form the beautiful ideal of woman signified by Antonio Canova’s Hope Venus (19th Century) is placed in close proximity the work of the two female artists, Gaffney and Schwab, who are working at the end of the 20th Century. Object retains the essential characteristics of a book, but is structured to encourage the reader’s choice in the seriality and sequence of the imagery it contains. Handling Object encourages an interplay of images of the female nude, both as it is authorised and staged within the politics of Museum exhibition and display cultures, and as it is represented by those who know it from lived experience. Object offers a curatorial strategy for the confrontation of the marble nude ideal with sculpture and painting practices that are informed by feminism and employed by Gaffney and Schwab.
Research insights: The practice-based conceptualisation and project management of Object, alongside its related gallery intervention Wunderkammer: the female gaze objectified, made an original contribution to ways in which the sculpture collections of Leeds Museums and Galleries could be viewed, displayed and understood. The intervention into the collection was the result of a curated interaction between original artworks by women artists Gaffney and Schwab with selected items from the collections. Whilst the exhibited display and the book design provided immediate encounters, embodying questions of gender and authorship in relation to representations of women, the intervention and dissemination provoked a wider interrogation of museum ideology. The intervention made an original contribution to ways that artistic methods can introduce civic and private collections to new audiences and present individual artworks as theoretical objects. Practice and theory were combined in this project in a way that gave material form to scholarly considerations of the following topics:
• female nudes in galleries and museums as made by male artists
• the presentation of works of art in galleries
• the objectivity of museum collections
• the male gaze in museum collections
• how contemporary art relates to the history of art
• feminism and figurative sculpture
Dissemination:
The output was disseminated via exhibition, press and broadcast coverage
Writing the Chronotope: Critical Analysis and Creative Action
No full textUsing Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the literary artistic chronotope, this paper explores the interplay between literary theory and creative writing, and how theories of literary criticism can offer provocation and insight into the creative act. The artistic chronotope is concerned with how time/space is rendered in a work of literature. With specific attention to the ‘aircraft chronotope’, how time/space is represented in prose fiction set aboard aircraft, the paper draws together acts of analysis, creativity and pedagogy, exploring the question of how writers can utilize the notion of time/space in their creative work. The paper focussing on the short stories ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad’ by Lucy Caldwell and Miranda July’s ‘Roy Spivey’, to identify the creative possibilities of the literary chronotope. The intention is to analyse how student writers can recognize and develop the quality of their own prose writing through engagement with literary theory. By bridging the gap between theory and practice, this paper seeks to support writers and educators to reimagine the role of literary theory in their pedagogy and craft
The sublime landscapes of Frankenstein
No full textMary Shelley uses the sublime natural environment as a vehicle to narrate the anguish, turmoil and triumph of the characters in Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus ([1818] 2010). This practical research investigates Shelley’s use of the sublime through distant reading, data visualization and abstraction to explore unseen narrative patterns in the text. It explores data collection and visualization to analyse the language in the text through distant reading, a method that seeks to map the text as data as opposed to understanding it as a piece of prose. The circle and triangle are used to infer what Burke identifies as the relationship between ‘the beautiful’ and ‘the sublime’ (1757). I am interested in mapping literature through unorthodox methods and to explore abstract narratives through data visualization. I believe that this mathematical and systematic methodology can illuminate the text in unforeseen ways