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Ideas Are Easy - Artist tutorial
No full text‘Ideas Are Easy’ is a video artefact by Dale which explores idea generating processes, with a focus on ideas for artworks.
Research process: To create this work Dale considered her own idea generating processes and how these might be articulated through a participatory video. In particular she considered ideas around translation (how one mode of thinking might be transformed into another) and convention (how breaking habits can lead to new ways of thinking). The video focusses on providing text rather than images in order not to lead the viewer’s actions. This creates a space of reflection where the viewer can consider their own idea generation processes through the lens of Dale’s.
Research insights: Dale considered idea generation from multiple points of view in order to cater to different visual, linguistic, spatial and/or numerical aptitudes. She kept the video as simple as possible, so that it could be paused and taken at the viewer’s desired pace. The first half of the exercises provide detailed instructions, the second half are purposely more abstract and open to interpretation.
Dissemination: This video was shared through The University of Manchester’s Centre for Jewish Studies on their youtube channel. It was created to complement the creation of Dale’s commission ‘Arranged in Time and Space’ as part of the ‘50 Jewish Objects’ project at The University of Manchester
Exploring adult learning and its impact on wider communities through arts-based methods: an evaluation of narrative inquiry through filmmaking
Full text linkThis article reports on a project that employed narrative inquiry captured on film to explore the creative practices of five mature graduates. They had previously been mature students and continued to work within their various communities after they had left formal education. The participants were asked to describe their creative practice and its impact on other people through interviews and presentation. A researcher with help from a professional filmmaker carried out the project. From the initial footage, three polished, edited versions of the films were made. The participants could use the films to promote their own work if they so wished.
Narrative inquiry is a means of seeing the connections between significant incidents and longer-term impact beyond formal education. The film footage was able to capture the connectivity between formal education, the participants and the people who had been touched by their creative practices. It successfully gave a narrative coherence to the participants’ stories. Where appropriate, the visual aspects of creativity were captured, in this case, the participants all had a creative practice and the visual realm was an important part of their stories. The findings of the project were that the participants had some shared values about the importance of creative education. They all developed portfolio careers in order to carry on their creative work. All the participants were able to give examples of particular instances where their creative practice had had an impact on other people. In other words, adult learning does not just influence the individual but can have a wider and longer-term impact on others
MATURE GRADUATES AND VISUAL CULTURE LEARNING COMMUNITIES: WORKING THROUGH THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
Full text linkMature graduates (defined as people who enrolled on their first undergraduate degree when aged 21
or over) who have studied an arts degree in the United Kingdom and subsequently have set up Visual Culture Learning Communities share their stories through narrative inquiry. Some mature creative graduates establish spaces where intergenerational learning about the arts can occur. These learning spaces make a valuable contribution to sustaining individual creative practices during crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic. A more nuanced understanding of graduate outcomes is required where this contribution is recognised
Drawing the Embodied Mind: A Project Report on Research Into Interoception
Full text linkThis project report on the methodology used for drawing
based perceptual research, explores how drawing can be used
to interrogate the concept of the body as being the driving
force behind our perceptual experiences. It reflects on
drawing as a way to represent a non-linguistic experience of embodied consciousness. Drawn images are developed
by imaginative responses to the body’s somatic perceptual
input, and are used to communicate the sensory experience
of interoception. Images are also constructed in response
to a need to develop representations of sensations that
emanate both from within and without the body; something
that is essential if we are to coordinate a totality of
responses to various situations as they arise, situations
that it is argued, emerge both internally and externally
at the same time. The world we experience, it is argued, is
not an internal representation of an out there experience,
it is as Merleau-Ponty argues “inseparable from a person perceiving it, and can never be actually
in itself because its articulations are those of our very
existence.” The images that are now beginning to emerge
from this drawing led project, it is further proposed, can
be regarded as those ‘articulations of existence’ that are
required if we are to begin communicating to each other
about how we feel and how we sense our inner body is trying
to communicate with what we sometimes think of as our
rational conscious selves.
Using his own drawings as well as responses from
others, the artist, Garry Barker, explains how he has developed this drawing research out of his previous investigation into the use of votives, which was used to help others
overcome fears of illness and as an aid to their recovery.
Finally questions are asked as to whether or not the
drawings produced are purely representational or engaged in
what Karen Barad calls a performativity that emerges from a
“direct material engagement with the world”
Strike
No full text‘Strike’ is a 60 minute screen performance in which the artist strikes and holds 12 poses in response to the 12 positions of the clock’s hour hand (5 minutes per pose).
Research process: The performance responded to Begehungen Festival’s 2021 theme, ‘Leerzeit’ (idle time). The artist manifested the pressure of time as a physical effect on the body. Each pose presented its own physical challenge – the film records both successes and failures and as such is a record of physical research in progress.
Research insights: The work used performance as a way of thinking about sculpture - emphasising the relationship between time, form and change. In doing so, it also sought to highlight ‘failure’ as subject matter worthy of recording and dissemination.
Dissemination: The work was screened at Begehungen Festival, Germany and Islington Mill, Salford, UK (12-15 August), each of which included public tours, printed leaflets and a catalogue. The work was reviewed by Mike Pinnington in ‘The Double Negative’
The Distressed Look
No full text‘The Distressed Look’ is a series of 21 mixed media sculptures by Dale, each resembling a masked head impaled on a spike.
Research process: The challenge of the works was to find variation within strict technical parameters: starting each time with a flat, linear template, a range of 21 masks were created that sought to reflect a range of human experience.
Research insights: The work conveyed a variety of individual moods, despite the repetitive base form. The different approaches to ‘masking’ resulted in sculptures that expressed discomfort, beauty, eccentricity, aggression and inscrutability. The sculptures are part of an on-going collaboration with Prof. Adam Smyth exploring the visualisation of a grangerised edition of Ovid’s Art of Love (1813).
Dissemination: The work was commissioned and exhibited as part of the group exhibition ‘Remote Work’ at The Grundy, Blackpool, 27 March – 19 June 2021. Seven of the sculptures have been acquired for The Grundy’s collection
Consumed: Stilled lives - Perth
Full text linkThis body of artwork, comprises photographs, pop-up display banners, and site-specific artworks made for commercial advertising spaces in Perth.
Woolley’s artwork is a feminist critique of consumer culture. She examines contemporary consumerism and the commodified construction of ideal gendered bodies. Artworks employ the visual language of adverts, magazines, and tv programmes in order to examine representations of gender and expose the stereotypes they reproduce. Sculpted objects – made with a variety of materials including concrete, rubbish, blancmange, and rotting meat ¬– function as portraits of different types of consumer. We are what we consume.
Consumed: 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 and expensive foodstuffs, 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. By interpreting the paintings ironically and applying the method to her own practice, Woolley produces still-life objects that suggest contradictory relationships to contemporary consumer culture.
Drawing on her research into advertising on social networking sites, and her writing that hypothesises selfies to be adverts, Woolley examines the impact that adverts have as producers and disseminators of social values. The artworks explore social ideals, particularly gender norms, and how they are transmitted through commercial visual culture. In adverts, commodities are given human characteristics in order to make them more desirable. In turn, identities are commoditised and bodies become adverts for social ideals. Commodities are integrated into the consumer’s identity and their identity is shaped to a marketing demographic. We are what we consume. We are adverts for the commodities we consume. To reflect this, the artwork in Consumed blurs the boundary between portraiture and still-life, producing inanimate bodies and animate objects
At This Very Moment
Full text linkThe output is a children’s picture book illustrated and authored by Hodson which introduces notions of
mindfulness, presence and natural phenomena to early years readers.
Research process: Hodson engaged in rigorous and exhaustive iterations of artwork, exploring a range
of materials and applications in order to establish an appropriate visual language with which to
appropriately communicate the tone of the book writing to it’s intended age range.
Research insights: Hodson realised that though integral to his habitual approach to image making, hand
drawn lines were too visceral and carried too much visual signature to effectively convey the intended tone
of the book. In response, he employed a playful combination of shape, texture and composition to achieve a
more evocative and universal visual language.
Dissemination: Hodson has delivered lectures on the book to illustration students at Leeds Arts
University, Edinburgh, Camberwell, Falmouth and Norwich University of the Arts. The book was show
cased at Bologna International Book fair 2022 and is being published in Mexico, Italy and Korea
Home Occupations
Full text linkThe output is a creative project, ‘Home Occupations’, comprising of a collection of photography, moving image and text-based works, to talk about the sometimes-absurd experience of ‘working from home’.
Research process: Welding searched social media for visual evidence of what Jean Burgess describes as ‘vernacular creativity’ (Burgess, J 2010) in the actions of people who are working from home, with a focus on how peoples’ behaviours and their interactions with everyday belongings are affected by the home working environment.
Research Insights: Welding found that working from home changes our relationship with the objects we own and the domestic spaces we inhabit. It results in inhabiting two personas; that of worker and homeowner. There is a contrast between the intangibility of virtual meetings and being surrounded by tangible household objects. Often, they serve as a reminder of something that needs doing. That shelf needs fixing. The lawn needs mowing. Other times, they are a welcome distraction from the work contained on the screen. In the US, zoning regulations have defined what is an acceptable home occupation. For Welding, the title speaks of becoming occupied with the home, its contents and the permeable divide between work and life. The photographs are humorous, but they also highlight a significant change in professional working lives, one that has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but is now most certainly endemic and here to stay.
Dissemination: The project was disseminated at the FORMAT International Photography Festival 2021, 12 March 2021 – 5 March 2023 as part of a virtual exhibition curated by Peter Bonnell. The exhibition can be found on the link below until the 5th March 2023. It was also published in the exhibition catalogue which has been distributed internationally through the Format Festival website
All You Have To Do
Full text linkThe output is a creative project, comprising of photographs and moving image gifs. This body of work was produced/curated in response to a call for artworks from Carleton University, Canada, as part of their ‘Food Matter and Materialities: Critical Understandings of Food Cultures’ conference.
Research process: “All You Have To Do” is an instructional heading taken from ‘Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook’, first published in 1950. The work responds to cookbook such as the above named, referencing the visual style and language of post-war Western cookbooks in general. The work attempts to contextualise these cookbook images through the prism of contemporary visual culture, by borrowing from the conventions of web-based image production, and presenting the work in an online format.
Research insights: This project continues my research into food in visual and popular culture, specifically cookbooks (historical and contemporary), and social media. The post-war period of cookbooks referenced in the title sees a proliferation of colour photography, the language of which is increasingly aspirational. This trend continues today, in printed media and on TV, and increasingly on social media, the latest shop window for aspirational domesticity. Online, we perform a carefully crafted and curated version of our lives. This work explores the anxieties generated by mainstream food images, and questions the nature of aspiration in relation to visual food practices. In visual culture, the depiction of food is often divorced from.
Dissemination: The work was included in an online exhibition managed by Carleton University, as part of the ‘Food Matters and Materialities’ conference, from 22 Sept - 31 Oct, 2021