Arts University Bournemouth
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342 research outputs found
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The Moving Canvas Project: exploring choreography and disobedient drawing
No full textThe Moving Canvas Project is a participatory research project with an adult community dance company where the dancers explore the act of drawing and moving simultaneously. The project offers new insights relating to the relationship between movement, drawing, textiles and choreography. This emergent knowledge is underpinned by theoretical frameworks, in drawing performance (Foà et, 2020), costume design (Barbieri, 2020), and movement improvisation (Buckwalter, 2010; Burrows, 2010; Doughty, 2019). The paper discusses a series of workshops where the process of creating textile design for costume and choreography for performance occurred concurrently. The authors present a balanced evaluation of the outcomes, sharing several observations regarding behaviour, performance, and overall aesthetic that emerged when dancers are asked to wear plain cream-coloured jumpsuits and draw on them whilst moving. It explores what influence the two disciplines had on each other and how dancers play with autonomy and collectivism as they draw on themselves and one another. The transient nature of movement creates a dissonance with the permanence of the drawing, which is left as a mark on the dancer’s disobedient bodies. It is within this dynamic interplay between movement and mark-making that a performance emerged
Microcultures of collaboration: entangled artistic pedagogies for students and educator
Full text linkThis research unearths insights into the entangled pedagogic processes that occurred between students and educator when co-creating during a contemporary art project called Sonic Camouflage. The off-campus project-based learning environment of Sonic Camouflage was shown to boost and intensify learning for all participants, with an integrated re-energising tri-role for the educator to partake in art, education, and research practice. The research discovered that Sonic Camouflage contained intertwined learning processes that I term ‘microcultures of collaboration’. These microcultures are unravelled to reveal new insights surrounding improvisational learning using a cultural instigator as provocation and around individual artistic development. Sonic Camouflage was also shown to react to pervasive segregating media and technology by generating an immersive sense of belonging to a co-supportive learning community that instilled an empowering resilience for participants’ future art practice. Dialogic and collaborative constructivist approaches were integral methods employed to undertake the research
Statue (2024)
No full textThree prints were exhibited as part of the 14th annual Loudest Whispers art exhibition, on display at St Pancras Hospital in Camden, London. On Friday 9 February 2024 the North London Mental Health Partnership hosted the launch of Loudest Whispers 2024. The exhibition addressed the historical challenges faced by the LGBTQIA+ community over the centuries with 42 artists sharing diverse perspectives on the theme. The work on display formed part of an ongoing exploration into body-image, physical impairment and queer perspectives on beauty, health and the art of antiquity
What is a studio, anyway?
No full textWhat is a Studio, Anyway? brings together artists, curators, designers, educators and arts professionals across the UK and further afield to share, question and contemplate the idea of the artist’s studio and the role of Higher Education in shaping it.
This new publication collates conversations, interviews and musings on the artists' studio, featuring contributions from Amelia Hawk, Andy Harper, Ben Sanderson, Eugenia Popesco, Georgia Gendall, Jane Darke, Joanne Masding, John Wood and Paul Harrison, Jordan Verdes, Leila Galloway, Maria Lalić, Marisol Malatesta, Professor Teal Triggs, Sarah Taylor-Silverwood, Simón Granell, Shen Xin, Stella Kajombo, Tarek Lakhrissi.
The project began in early 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when access to studio spaces for fine art students was prohibited. As researchers Professor Susan Orr and Dr Alison Shreeve have argued, the studio is central to fine art pedagogy, enabling an expanded means of knowledge production - rather than being, ‘delivered,’ it is, ‘forged’ (Orr and Shreeve, 2018:3) between students and educators. Successive lockdowns significantly disrupted the norm of studio-based practice which has underpinned Fine Art higher education in the UK for many decades. However, as artist and lecturer Kate McLeod has acknowledged, the lack of access to the studio during this time ‘created opportunities to experiment with different approaches, and to gain an appreciation of some of the limitations of the studio’ (McLeod, 2022).
One such limitation is the affordability and accessibility of artist studios post-education. Recent research published by ACME studios has found that long-term, secure and affordable artists’ studios are increasingly rare (Acme Studios, 2022:6) and therefore many artists are working outside of, or without a traditional artist’s studio space. These combined factors led us to initiate What is a Studio, Anway? with the central aim of offering students alternative insights, ideas and models, which would expand, challenge and disrupt dominant perceptions and representations of the artists’ studio (both within and beyond higher education).
We invited practitioners with a broad range of professional experiences to contribute to our research – from recent BA Fine Art graduates to established artists at the peak of their career. The research follows a qualitative narrative-based enquiry, and participants were asked four key questions:
What do you consider to be a studio?
Has this changed in the past year?
Across your career, have there been points where you have not had a physical space to work, and how have you navigated this?
What piece of advice would you give about studio practice?
What distinguishes our project from existing studies and research is the breadth of contributors and its specific response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The book sits in contrast to recent large scale survey publications, such as The Artist's Studio: A Century of the Artist's Studio 1920–2020 (Blazwick, 2022), which featured critically acclaimed artists; those often far removed from the experience of an emerging graduate or student – our intended audience.
This project offers a unique insight and contribution to the field of alternative ways of conceptualising and re-imagining the artist’s studio. The publication was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Grant from UCL, 2022
The Power of Collaboration as Practice-Based Learning
No full textThe Power of Collaboration as Practice-Based Learning investigates the rich entangled hierarchical processes that occur during a collaborative artistic project called Sonic Camouflage. The Sonic Camouflage project was conceived at a time of decreasing radical art school cultures in an attempt to re-radicalise and intensify periods of learning for both students and tutor through a flattening of power structures between students and tutor. The research unearths insights into the effects of hierarchical power sharing during Sonic Camouflage on its collaborative participants by asking How do participants negotiate an artistic learning collaboration individually and collectively? The enquiry reveals that themed collaborative projects can be used successfully to provoke and propose a levelling out of power dynamics as positive agency for participants learning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA5t0gYd08
Making it work in practice: how heads of quality negotiate the third space
Full text linkRecent decades have seen increasingly complex external regulation applied to higher education providers. This has accentuated the role of heads of quality, who require considerable specialist knowledge and insight to ensure that organisational practices align with regulatory expectations. However, while the existing literature recognises that heads of quality do not perform a uniform role, it does not typically discuss the key organisational features which explain the differences in the role or necessarily position of heads of quality as third space professionals. Drawing on a comparative case study of three universities, the article extends our understanding by confirming that heads of quality can legitimately be termed third space professionals and by showing that heads of quality must navigate their environment in different ways according to the degree of access to the third space offered by their organisation. A more structurally situated explanation of third space activity is thus required. The article also reflects on the tendency to discuss a particular group of third space professionals and to characterise their experience as though it were broadly common. It argues for a more nuanced explanation, taking account of organisational structure as a further variable which may help to explain the experience of the third space professional
Your flight has been cancelled: Stock vector landscape as a digital non-place
Full text linkThis article presents and analyses the results of a research workshop conducted during and after the 2022 Transitus symposium at Falmouth University. The article aims to explore our visions of physical space, travel and migration through stock landscape illustration. The workshop invited illustrators to draw a five-step sequence of images customising a stock landscape by turning it into a view out of their window, thus exploring how a visual digital ‘airport’, a utopian hub of a stock landscape, disintegrates into particularities of individual experiences. The resulting sequences of images were put together in an online magazine about illustration, slonvboa.ru, and are available here: http://slonvboa.ru/nonlandscape (Accessed 10 June 2023) This webpage collects 30-minute drawings from fourteen illustrators based in ten countries: Armenia, Dubai, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, with ten of the participants being based outside of their home country. Building upon the idea of the ‘nomadic illustration’ suggested by Catrin Morgan and Marc Augé’s notion of ‘non-place’, this article will explore further similarities between nomadism and the circulation of stock imagery. It will thus use the term ‘nomadic’ not only as a metaphor, but also as a direct link to migration studies and studies of digital nomadism, which often describes the precarious occupation of a migrating illustrator. This project will aim to highlight the unlikely possibilities that stock illustration may offer as a point of connection, rather than presenting stock landscapes an alienating utopian abstraction. It will also analyse how individual authorial strategies deal with the notion of space, and how artistic means shape our visions of private and public spaces
Reading is an Ecological Act
No full textIn this article I explore the embodied epistemic of the act of reading, arguing that it is an inherently ecological phenomenon. I draw upon Phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau Ponty, Abram) and Ecolinguistics (Naess, Stibbe)
Integrating Bespoke Avatars into Digital Fitting Methods to Improve Fit
Full text linkWith the increasing reliance on digital technology globally, the adoption of industry 4.0 within the fashion industry has accelerated. The full 3D digital production process is at the forefront of fashion innovation, however legacy issues such as traditional size charts persist.
Inclusivity of diverse body shapes is a major issue for the fashion industry. By adopting a new approach, this research introduces a new process that has the potential to improve customer satisfaction and reduce waste.
This study evaluates the traditional size chart by comparing the industry standard to 3D body scan data from participants, focusing on the use of avatars and body scanning to improve the fit process and challenge the existing sizing system implemented throughout the fashion industry. This provides the foundation for a pilot study of a novel virtual fitting room which explores digital process as an alternative to the traditional size charts.
The result of this research is a prototype for the avatar library 'fitting room', that contains the 'real women' avatars from body scans. 3D avatars can be beneficial in both improving fit and reducing waste within the fashion industry. Further development of the avatar fit library will be available for industry to utilise in the fit process from design through to sampling and production stages. This prototype demonstrates a means to disseminate this research in an innovative and engaging way
Planting the past: garden memorials as theatres of remembrance
No full textThis chapter explores the role of arboreal and natural ‘memorials’ in evoking memory and creating meaning. It examines how the planting of commemorative trees, plants and flowers to create garden memorials differentiates from more monumental forms because it requires wilful participation from those who wish to actively remember. Where the erection of a monument in stone and bronze might appear to bring about a moment of closure, a memorial garden usually offers only a start. Seeding, planting and nurturing is seen as a means not an end: gardening invokes collaboration rather than closure. In examining the specific heritage of the memorial garden and arboreta, both for military and civilian purpose, examples are drawn from sites of trauma in Europe and North America, as well as commemorative domains and roads of remembrance in Australasia and Asia. Distinctions are drawn between sites of vicarious remembering and those places where the theatre of war has been superseded by commemorative theatres of memory