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Imagined Mappings of Geopolitical Power: Liquid Borders, Military Infrastructures and Ecological destruction in the South China Sea
No full textThis essay analyses installations by the architectural research practice Map Office concerning the geopolitical status and border complexity of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Control of the Spratly Islands, as well as maritime rights of way and resources in the South China Sea, is contested by a number of nation-states, including Malaysia, the Republic of China (ROC, Taiwan), the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In recent years the PRC has sought to project an imagined historical sovereignty over the Spratly Islands by building an extensive network of military bases there and by resisting the international community’s recognition of the South China Sea as an international waterway. It is argued with regard to installations by Map Office’s that the continuing liminal liquidity of the South China Sea plays critically against arbitrary impositions of national identity as well as to related struggles over ownership of rights of way and material resources.
The research was initiated as part of a curatorial project - a collaboration with architectural research practice Map Office that resulted in an exhibition and catalogue. It involved conversations, interviews and an in-depth understanding of the history, geopolitical and geo-economic significance of the territorial dispute as well as the ecological ramifications of the conflict.
The research contributed to a deeper understanding of MAP Office’s practice, informed the curatorial approach and was consolidated in the essay. In terms of knowledge production, through employing visual culture research methodologies it offers an analysis of the multi-layered complexities (geopolitical, cultural and ecological) in the area. It highlights the role of architecture and visual art in providing an interdisciplinary account of the historical conflict
Toile Rei Kawakubo mixed media on paper
No full textThe Artefact is a pencil, and acrylic painting of a toile (a calico practice garment) produced by the Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo circa 1996.
Research Process: Research was undertaken in museums and archives into Kawakubo’s fashion design processes. The resulting artefact is a painting on paper created in a way which reflects Kawakubo’s toile process.
Kawakubo’s toiles are never finished items, they are drafts of garments which you can work back into. This artefact was created by building up layers of acrylic paint in a manner which reflects this process. Each layer was added to gradually, carefully considering pattern cutting and sculptural silhouettes.
Research Insights: The painting was created to celebrate toiles, focussing on the unfinished / work in progress qualities of the garment rather than a garment being inhabited by a body. In doing so the work disrupts expected norms of fashion illustration, inhabiting a space between the disciplines of fashion design and fashion artistry.
The painting appears to be unfinished, but is a finished object in its own right -- much alike a toile.
Dissemination: The painting won the Still Life award at the Fida Worldwide Awards, Conde Nast College of Fashion, London, November 2022.
The painting was also published in Patrick, M. (2023). The Fible Triptych V.03. FIDA Worldwide, pg 132-133
At the Centre of the Storm Arts Writing and the Industrialised Curriculum
No full textThis chapter explores some ideas about arts and industrialisation through the lens of creative writing and arts writing practice. When Tobias-Green was asked to contribute to the symposium The Industrialisation of Arts Education in March 2021 she began by imagining what the title of the contribution would look like visually—a dark, machinic entity, monolithic and yet clearly built by human hands. This image in her mind led her to consider representations of writing and art in general
Insert Yourself
No full textThe output is a solo exhibition by Dale titled ‘Insert Yourself’. The exhibition is comprised of a series of freestanding and wall-based sculptures, with an accompanying soundtrack composed by Jia Lee.
Research Process: The sculptures act as standalone works, but also have the capacity to be activated by the physical interaction of the audience (under the artist’s instruction). They are thus both sculptures and performative objects. Recalling either specific body parts, or poses, or built to the proportions of the human body, the works present openings and positions through which a body, or part of a body, might enter. They are constructed of lightweight materials to be malleable, like the body itself.
Research Insights: The artworks surprise and provoke. They are serious and playful. Hovering between abstraction and figuration they reflect the artist’s concerns around ‘objecthood’ – what it is to be a ‘thing’ in a world increasingly turning to digital immateriality. The presentation of the works as 3 dimensional drawings allows for volume to be added via the audience, so that they take on both ‘full’ and ‘empty’ aspects. The use of music in the public presentation underlines the works’ moods (warm, pensive, amused, unsure) and allows the audience to establish a working rhythm.
Dissemination: The exhibition was open to the public at PINK, Manchester from 5-31 May 2022. It was supported by a series of performative tours for the general public, as well as specialist audiences (including learning disabled students via Venture Arts, Manchester); ‘We Are Sculpture’ workshops for 7-11 year olds, and a live set by Jia Lee presented within the exhibition itself
Accessing Art and Design Higher Education: A Comparative Study of Access Courses Delivered in Further and Higher Education
No full textFor many social, cultural and practical reasons some adults need to study their art and design careers later in life. Two routes into art and design higher education have evolved to enable adult learners to progress onto their chosen course of degree study without A-levels (in England) or in Scotland Higher and Advanced Higher qualifications. Described as ‘access’ courses, the first type are generally delivered in English further education (FE) and are referred to as Access to HE Diplomas (AHEDs). As a modularised qualification for students wishing to go to university, the AHEDs make the intended aim of Access education more explicit in its title. The AHEDs are specialised in, for example, law, medical sciences, education and social sciences. This study considers the effectiveness of AHED (art and design).
A second approach are Access Programmes delivered in higher education institutions (HEIs). These share a number of common features. They are situated within HEIs and facilitate internal progression to their own undergraduate degrees. They build on the students’ life experiences in order to develop study skills and preparedness for study but do not necessarily have the level of specialisation that AHEDs have. A case study of a ‘bespoke’ Access course from a Scottish university is compared with the English AHEDs to evaluate which better serves prospective adult arts students
Utilising mood boards as an image elicitation tool in qualitative research
Full text linkThe use of image elicitation methods has been recognised in qualitative research for some time however, the use of mood boards to prompt participant discussion is currently an under-researched area. This article explores the use of mood boards as a data collection method in qualitative research. Used in design disciplines mood boards allow designers to interpret and communicate complex or abstract aspects of a design brief. In this study I utilise mood boards as being part creative visual method and part image elicitation device. The use of mood boards is explained here in the context of a research project exploring masculinity and men's reflexivity. In this article I consider the benefits of utilising this method in researching reflexivity and gender before offering a critical appraisal of this method and inviting colleagues to explore how mood boards might enhance research projects involving elicitation
Kate MccGwire: Boundary Creatures
Full text linkThis chapter explores the last two decades of Kate MccGwire’s oeuvre in relation to the history of twentieth century soft sculpture, abstraction and surrealism, especially with regard to feminist aesthetic histories.
The grotesque and the uncanny have sustained a significant hold over MccGwire’s creative imagination, with interlocking thought-forms and otherworldly beings dominating her oeuvre. Critical readings of MccGwire’s work have tended to interpret such preoccupations as proof of her aesthetic allegiance to the curiosities revival, appealing to those interested in reactivating seventeenth-century historical artifice for contemporary purposes. Yet, given her shrewd attention to material and process coupled with an underlying conceptualism and emphasis on abstraction, MccGwire is clearly cognisant of much more historically recent art practices, an awareness which shifts any sense of artistic legacy elsewhere. This chapter unshackles MccGwire’s sculptures from existing critical limitations, towards a more liberated and revised understanding of how her work responds to a modernist aesthetic project, or, more specifically, how her work functions within a history of soft sculpture. To do this, it repositions key examples of MccGwire’s artworks through avant-garde abstraction, international surrealism, and American postminimalism. Indeed, it proposes after Mieke Bal (1999) we may even understand such artistic movements and provocations better through study of Kate MccGwire.
Here, the feminine grotesque is understood through Donna Haraway’s notion of a ‘boundary creature’, ‘something that creates meaning by prying open a gap’ (Connelly, 2012). Haraway’s boundary creatures are hybrid, mythological monsters and sci-fi specimens, such as the cyborg and the mermaid. In the domain of modernist art history, this chapter proposes that soft sculpture is another boundary creature, an unruly challenge to the existing order of things. MccGwire is likewise a maker of boundary creatures, those that dwell on the exquisite nature of deviancy, channelling a feminine grotesque through the lessons of counter-modernism
Nexus, veil: Robert Ryman and the equivocal spaces of abstraction
Full text linkThis article, published in the Journal of Contemporary Painting, focuses on the Surface Veil series of paintings by American abstract painter Robert Ryman (1930-2019) who defined his work as 'realist' and is generally discussed in materialist and literalist terms. This series of paintings mark a critical point in the relationship between his work and the gallery wall, as Ryman begins complicating and obscuring the definition of edge and the location of the picture’s surface. Their apparent simplicity belies a spatial complexity, and, Virgoe argues, Ryman’s matter-of-fact materialism produces an excess of painterly effect and illusion. Two texts, Hubert Damisch’s A Theory of /Cloud/, and Hanneke Grootenboer’s The Rhetoric of Perspective, are brought together to examine the complex and contradictory spaces in Ryman’s paintings
The Screen Will Not Fill the Void
Full text linkThe output is an artist’s book consisting of images drawn by Coleman with responding poetic texts by Barker.
Research process: The research consisted of a series of online exchanges, whereby conversations between two artists were developed as poetic texts written by Barker made in response to drawn images developed by Coleman. The arising artefact consists of a 40-page artist’s book, published online and in print.
Research insights: The object of the collaboration was to develop an understanding of how two individuals with very different world views could work together to produce a complex integrated art object.
Dissemination: This artist's book has been published and disseminated by Workshop Press
Revealing the invisible: The virus is looking at you
Full text linkAt the core of the various messages that have been sent out about the corona virus is how to deal with an invisible threat. Revealing the invisible is however an ancient issue,
one that goes back thousands of years and reoccurs throughout human history. This paper is an exploration of the complex interrelationship between several long-standing
visual tropes that over historical time have emerged from various cultures in response to a need to communicate invisible forces.
Beginning with reflections on the poster for the 1911 International Hygiene Exhibition held in Dresden, linking in images of an Egyptian sun god, via extramission theory and
thoughts about the first drawings done through a hand held, lens focused microscope by Robert Hooke, a series of links and interconnections are made that explore how the
invisible has been represented and how the invisible virus can be read as a type of ‘darkstar’ or anti-sun.
Christian traditions of the use of unnatural colour to signify both invisible power and demonic possession and the way the corona virus has itself been depicted are compared
to historical visual tropes such as the aureola and the mandorla as used in the Greek Orthodox Church to depict sacred moments which transcend time and space. From
Buddhist and Christian uses of halos via images of sea-mines, a complex series of interconnections are revealed that are now being tapped into by Government sanctioned
information leaflets relating to the corona virus outbreak