Arts University Bournemouth
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Topographies of Remembrance across the former British Empire
Get PDFWhere once geographers could argue that the ideological and aesthetic issues surrounding the military cemeteries created by the British Empire had drawn little comment, there is now a considerable literature exploring the spaces and places of remembrance. Increasing attention has been paid during the past decade to the value of ‘situation’ in the discourse of death, grieving and commemoration. In this respect, ‘situation’ should be understood to be a focus on ‘place’, ‘space’ and the geopolitical. The emerging discipline of cultural geography in the late 1990s created the tools necessary to elaborate ‘space’ in the abstract, to regard ‘place’ as a site where an individual might negotiate definitively social relations, and give voice, as Sara Blair argued, to ‘the effects of dislocation, disembodiment, and localisation that constitute contemporary social disorder’. Almost a century after Sigmund Freud’s treatise Mourning and Melancholia, our understanding of how memory and mourning function continues to be challenged, revised and refined. Issues of place have become important to this debate. Once a marginal topic for academic investigation, there is now a body of scholarly work – including deep research in landscape and garden design – that explores the complex interrelationship between memory, mourning and ‘death-scapes’ (or ‘memory-scapes’), a portmanteau term that fuses an appreciation of once-violated landscapes with personal and discursive memories
Re-animating the Past: An Irish Animation History
Get PDFIn the late 1980s and early 1990s the presence of a large American animation studio in Ireland, under the stewardship of ex-Disney animation director Don Bluth, played a pivotal role in the development of the indigenous Irish animation industry, and constituted a colonial moment in Irish animation history. This paper aims to discuss the nascent Irish animation industry prior to the arrival of the Don Bluth studio, and to consider aspects of indigenous production onto which a global North American industrial model was imposed. Aspects of postcolonial theory are used as a method of describing the historical circumstances that have determined the emergence of an indigenous Irish animation industry in the late 20th century, and also deployed to illustrate how the social and historical aspects of animation production in Ireland reflect the postcolonial conditions of Irish society itself. In considering the pre- Bluth period of animation production in Ireland this paper offers insights into models of production, aesthetic expression and processes of cultural transmission, and provides commentaries on work of Irish animators overlooked by Irish film studies
TRANSMISSION
No full textTransmission was a live contemporary artwork commissioned by Arts Council England to help celebrate the 25th anniversary of 'Sea Music’, an immense multi-platform sculpture by Anthony Caro, which has stood on Poole Quay, Dorset since 1991 and is renowned as the artist’s only site-specific artwork.
Working with invited sonic artist Sian Hutchings, Waring conducted extensive research into the material, weight, mass, volume, colour and locational positioning of the sculpture, so as to help
identify methods for making an interpretive and performative artwork comprising simultaneous light projection, sound and moving human bodies. Working within the context of contemporary research into visual and sonic perception, they re-interpreted ‘Sea Music’ as a dynamic catalyst to inspire Transmission, with the performance taking place in the dark and within the actual large-scale structure of Sea Music.
Contemporary dancers improvised to the amplified noise of steel, hearing this for the first time live on the night. This gave the performance a vulnerability, echoing that of the location of the sculpture itself which is perched precariously on the edge of the quayside. Drawing on Steyerl’s treatise on the dramatic impact of new technologies of surveillance, tracking and targeting our spatial and temporal orientation, the performance required that dancers respond to the sound, whilst a horizon of white light swept up and down, simulating the smooth progression of a scanner as it collects data.
Transmission had an active engagement programme, with full video documentation for Poole Museum, including two public lectures by the director of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Peter Murray, and by Alistair Sooke, art critic and TV presenter. Waring’s subsequent research projects for ITV and the 2019 exhibition commission for Dazzle: Disguise and Disruption owed much to the collaborative learning from Transmission.
Transmission (8.5 mins)
https://vimeo.com/247467411
password:
transmission15121
Weaving Lighthouses and Stitching Stories: Blind and Visually Impaired People Designing E-textiles
Get PDFWe describe our experience of working with blind and visually impaired people to create interactive art objects that are personal to them, through a participatory making process using electronic textiles (e-textiles) and hands-on crafting
techniques. The research addresses both the practical considerations about how to structure hands-on making workshops in a way which is accessible to participants of varying experience and abilities, and how effective the approach was in enabling participants to tell their own stories and feel in control of the design and making process. The results of our analysis is the offering of insights in how to run e-textile making sessions in such a way for them to be more accessible and inclusive to a wider community of participants
Revisioning Australia’s War Art: Four Painters as Citizens of the ‘Global South’
Get PDFThis essay discusses the recent artistic depictions of contemporary war by four artist-academics based in Australia. The families of all four have served in some of the twentieth century’s major conflicts and, more recently, each has been commissioned in Australia or the UK to serve as war artists. Collaboratively and individually they produce artwork (placed in national collections) and then, as academics, have come to reflect deeply on the heritage of conflict and war by interrogating contemporary art’s representations of war, conflict and terror. This essay reflects on their collaborations and suggests how Australia’s war-aware, even war-like heritage, might now be re-interpreted not simply as a struggle to safeguard our shores, but as part of a complex, deeply connected global discourse where painters must re-cast themselves as citizens of the ‘global South’
The Knowing: A Fantasy an epistemological enquiry into creative process, form, and genre
Get PDFThis creative writing PhD thesis consists of a novel and a critical reflective essay. Both articulate a distinctive approach to the challenges of writing genre fiction in the 21st Century that I define as ‘Goldendark’ – one that actively engages with the ethical and political implications of the field via the specific aesthetic choices made about methodology, content, and form. The Knowing: A Fantasy is a novel written in the High Mimetic style that, through the story of Janey McEttrick, a Scottish-Cherokee musician descended from the Reverend Robert Kirk, a 17th Century Episcopalian minister from Aberfoyle (author of the 1691 monograph, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies), fictionalises the diasporic translocation of song- and tale-cultures between the Scottish Lowlands and the Southern Appalachians, and is a dramatisation of the creative process. In the accompanying critical reflective essay, ‘An Epistemological Enquiry into Creative Process, Form and Genre’, I chart the development of my novel: its initial inspiration, my practice-based research, its composition and completion, all informed both by my practice as a storyteller/poet and by my archival discoveries. In the section ‘Walking Between Worlds’ I articulate my methodology and seek to defend experiential research as a multi-modal approach – one that included long-distance walking, illustration, spoken word performance, ballad-singing and learning an instrument. In ‘Framing the Narrative’ I discuss matters of form – how I engaged with hyperfictionality and digital technology in destabilising traditional conventions of linear narrative and generic expectation. Finally, in ‘Defining Goldendark’ I articulate in detail my approach to a new ethical aesthetics of the fantasy genre
Flowers of War
Get PDFTo mark the centenary of the signing of the armistice and the end of the First World War, the Shrine Trustees are pleased to present Flowers of War. Artists and jewellers Kirsten Haydon, Elizabeth Turrell and Neal Haslem have created this beautiful and reflective commemorative wreath using hundreds of floral emblems from battlefields around the world. Inspired by those found on those same battlefields and the native flowers of those countries and all of the Allied nations who fought alongside Britain in that war. Our guest speaker Professor Paul Gough, will speak to us about his presentation, ‘Seeds, soil, saplings, Reflections on the Flowers of War and Peace’. (Introduction by Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne CEO Dean Lee
Dead ground. War and peace: Remembrance and recovery. A cultural reading of memoryscapes from the Great War, 1914-1918
Get PDFExceptional design in an Iconic Landscape? Interpretations of landscape and residential architecture in Dartmoor National Park
No full textIn England’s national parks, architecture represents an important and contested part of landscape planning, inseparable from park conservation ideologies and policies. This paper investigates the competing landscape interpretations surrounding the design and planning of an unrealized dwelling in Dartmoor National Park. In a landscape revered for its ‘iconic’ status, and on a site constrained by local planning policy, planning permission hinged on satisfying the conditions of a clause in national policy whereby a recognized ‘exceptional’ new dwelling might be permitted to override local planning restrictions. This research considers how different constructions of landscape identity influenced the conception and regulation of Dartmoor’s landscape as a context for new architecture. Discourse analysis of interviews and planning documents examines the range of landscape interpretations and notions of ‘appropriate’ architecture among key stakeholders, including locals, planners, and architects. Findings reveal significant rifts in aesthetic design discourses, which are influenced by conceptions of site, landscape character, the built cultural and historic context, and landscape enhancement. In summary, this paper considers the significance of conflicting landscape interpretations for the accommodation of new architecture in protected landscapes
Writerly experimentation in architecture: The laboratory (not) as metaphor.
Get PDFWithin the last two decades, the use of the term laboratory or ‘lab’, as it is often abbreviated to, has become widespread in both the profession and
in education. ‘Spacelab’, ‘Arch LAB’, ‘Laboratory of Architecture’ – these are but some of the names given to architectural practices today. Also, no self-respecting academic institution today lacks a ‘research laboratory’ or ‘lab’ of some kind, often set up in parallel to the conventional studio, but sometimes also as a substitute for it. In a more recent development, the laboratory has also been adopted as a place for exploring architectural themes through writing, as exemplified by the ‘Writing Labs’ set up at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. This development that has seen the laboratory become the very paradigm of conceptualizations of practice and research in architecture revolves, I argue, around a renewed interest in the notion of experiment and the spaces of experimentation. The question I want to raise in this article concerns the role of the laboratory as a metaphor in constructing spaces for writerly experimentation. For, outside the domain of science, how can a laboratory be understood as anything other than a (mere) metaphor