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Wonderful 2024
No full textSolo exhibition of painting installed at Unicef Innocenti, Florence, IT. Opening on the occassion of the Leading Minds Climate Conference
Herons 2024
No full textTideway Tunnel commission at Carnwath Road, London SW6. 2 cast bronze herons adorn a kiosk at a new Thameside park
Designing managed retreat: Coastal communities in the green transition - community engagement report
Get PDFThis report presents research and findings from the project 'Designing Managed Retreat: Coastal Communities in the Green Transition,' funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council under the Design Exchange Partnerships (2022) scheme. It documents the engagement and conversations held with local communities of Hull and East Riding of Yorkshire in 2023/24 regarding the social and cultural impacts of coastal change. The report discusses the need for community participation, proactive communication, and the representation of individual and collective experiences and community assets in coastal adaptation planning
Navigating co-creation and collaboration through artists’ publishing
Get PDFThis article attempts to thread insights and learnings through a decade of research and practice on centring artists’ publishing as a collaborative method for qualitative research. The article focuses on a discussion of three case study works. These are 1) On Innards Publication (2015), 2) Non-Sequitur (2021), and 3) Re: Infinite Dialogue (2023). In all three projects, the book has been a central concern in collaborating with a broad range of practitioners across fields of art, design, architecture, media and beyond. Analysis and discussion subsequently considers the unique qualities of artists’ publishing in relation to positioning the book as a third space and boundary object. The insights can be useful for the research community in engaging in complex research contexts and the scaffolding for centring the relational position of the book as a method to engage with diverse communities, practices and knowledges, and mediating and remediating the hierarchies involved
Your bay, my bay, our bay - Planning street experiments for a child friendly city
No full textYour Bay, My Bay, Our bay focused on conducting two placemaking workshops with children aged 6 - 11yrs residing in Winstanley Estate. It aimed to engage children through interactive sessions to express their vision for their neighbourhood streets. These workshops empowered the children to explore the things/activities they wished were there to make the streets more playful, fun and accessible. This workshop focused on creating awareness among children to be active citizens of the community thus impacting the ecosystem that revolves around children, including parents, caregivers, their peers, educators and local communities. The project is based around the Winstanley Estate in Wandsworth which is social housing. It supports the Council’s ongoing regeneration work in the area
Rationalising Violence: Leros
Get PDFThe paper considers Leros in the Greek Dodecanese as a case study in the history of rationalist architecture of the fascist Italian regime, implicating varied forms of surveillance, exile, detainment, and incarceration. The paper explores the enduring legacy and impact the colonial and military architecture, policy, and planning have had on urban and architectural forms, local labour economies, and the community that continues to the present day. The research spans from the Italian occupation of Leros to the establishment of detention centres for refugees today, following the chronologically overlapping trans-institutional transformation of Italian military and medical infrastructures into notorious mental health care facilities and camps for political prisoners and violently displaced children from mainland Greece. The paper focuses on the relationships established by the plan, the architecture, the strict imposition of gerarchia [hierarchy], as defined elsewhere by Diane Ghirardo, and associated governing frameworks, which established a unique urban form and social fabric. The paper explores not only the aesthetic and formal qualities of the architectural object but also the socio-political diagram embedded in the logic of the ambitious building programme of the Italian occupation. It will further examine the spatial tactics and policies that supported Italian control and, consequently, the gradual erosion of agrarian traditions and capabilities of the local population, forcing them into a complex co-dependence. It is precisely the interdependence and co-existence of architecture and labour that perpetuates the island’s role as an apparatus of control, creating a carceral campus of surveillance and exile
Painting in the age of technological reproducibility: Re-establishing sensuousness via the complexity of System of Emergent Touch (SET)
Get PDFThis practice-led research delves into pressing inquiries regarding the relationship between humans and algorithms and their impact on the realm of painting. In particular, this thesis focuses on the significance of tactility and touch in painting, as well as on its relevance to the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), which necessitates a completely new approach. At its core, the thesis is centred on creating a painting system named The System of Emergent Touch (SET), which is an algorithmic digital system designed to manually convert digital photographs into oil paintings. This approach serves to bridge the gap between digital and paint, fostering a re-evaluation based on the coworking of algorithms and human, rather than an algorithmic takeover of painting. The thesis positions AI and current applied research in physical computing in relation to painting in a way that enables a practical approach to human/machine coevolution that does not privilege the machine over human as is so often the case in apocalyptic pronouncements. The primary aim of this thesis is to argue that AI and its relationship with intelligence is distributed and emergent. Notably, the resulting painting that emerges from the co-working process of SET is not a result of an algorithm doing X and the human doing Y; rather, it foregrounds the importance of human tactility in the making of art. This is the most important and original contribution of this thesis. The method employed involves the analysis of digital images and the development of a mathematical system that calculates the premix and placement of paint on the canvas. It takes a twofold approach, incorporating both discursive analysis and mathematical algorithms. The methodological approach was originally developed in Heidegger’s Identity and Difference, exploring the concepts of “belonging” and “event” and the question of meaning and how something gets to be what it is. The discursive analysis is based on the writings of Jean-François Lyotard in Discourse, Figure, specifically examining the notion of the “figural.” Chapter Zero explores the details of the journey leading to the project and elucidates the reasons behind the engagement in the particular type of work. Chapter One focuses on how algorithmic coding and mapping allow for a rethinking of representation in contemporary painting, introducing the idea of affective touch and a new type of touch that creates sense. Chapter Two introduces a theoretical methodology aimed at constructing a painting system that allows for unrestricted hand and brush movement, without relying on a strict point-by-point approach. The chapter elaborates on how systems establish its foundational element, known as the “ground,” and how SET transitions from the abstract notion of a ground towards the concept of surface by exploring undecidability and uncertainty. Chapter Three provided an introduction to the construction and practical functioning of SET, while Chapter Four discusses the concept of distributed touch, incorporating elements of Duchamp’s ready-made to challenge traditional subject-object dichotomies and explore the shaping of the emerging scenario of the artwork. This process gives rise to a novel type of artist, a “spread agency artist.
Art in orbit: Why artists choose to send work into space
No full textThe environment of space provides unique challenges to artists that cannot be replicated or sufficiently represented on Earth’s surface. For the forthcoming book, Art in Orbit, interviews have been conducted with 10 artists who have deployed in space. These interviews have provided insights into why artists seek to deploy work in the environment of space - on board spacecraft or in open space – the challenges that they have faced, and the lessons that they have learned. Artists have forged partnerships with the spaceflight industry to assert the value of art practice in space, and have turned astronauts onto collaborators where there is a need for a third-party to deploy work on their behalf. In the work itself, artists have engaged with (dis)orientation, weightlessness, and the unexpected behaviour of their tools and materials in microgravity. The paper will represent the important distinction between astroart that is inspired by space, and art that engages directly with the environment of space, such as art satellites. It approaches space as a site for art installation and production, as well as a source of inspiration. It considers the potential for art objects as celestial bodies, and the ethical implications of this practice. It locates these ideas in the context of the culturalization and democratisation of space. This paper will consider the relationship between the visual arts and the environment of space, informed by interviews with artists including Trevor Paglen, Eduardo Kac, Lisa Pettibone, Jeanne Morel, Sana Sharma, Max Baraitser Smith, Yasmine Meroz and Liat Segal. It will discuss the nature of their work and their relationship with the spaceflight industry, and the challenges presented by the environment of space, as well as by the structures, constraints, and disciplinary assumptions that have shaped the deployment of their work. It will then consider the motivations that underpin these artists’ spaceworks, and the significance of their work for future artists and our spacefaring civilisation more broadly. The paper considers how the interviewed artists are contributing to the establishment of a new field of practice with approaches and concerns that are distinct from those employed in a terrestrial environment. This includes discussion of the ways in which these artists are developing new tools and new production methods, where terrestrial tools and processes cannot operate as they do on Earth; the ways in which these artists are contributing to defining a new field of practice; and how, through their engagements with the environment of space, they have been prompted to critically reflect on their terrestrial experiences and practices
Fragments and borders: (Re)constructing Korean womanhood through patchwork
Get PDFThis thesis is a decolonial feminist exploration of the representation, materials, and histories of Korean women told through Korean patchwork, theorising patchwork as a radical form to reimagine (material) histories of Korean women and women of the Korean diaspora. As an amalgam of different pieces that unifies once separated fragments, patchwork is identified as a material object, decolonial methodology, and metaphoric and corporeal lens that contributes polyphonic voices to histories of Korean women, while troubling nationalist agendas in the (re)construction of the Republic of Korea (1948 to 2023). Beginning with, but not bound to the patchwork wrapping cloth called jogakbo, I explore the possibilities of decorative, ornamental wrapping, by mapping new connections between jogakbo, patchwork in contemporary Korean fashions, and the Korean plastic surgery industries through the processes of cutting, sewing, mending, wrapping, healing, and becoming. Locating and situating the practices of collecting jogakbo under General Park Chung Hee’s cultural reform policies, this dissertation reveals how tradition and authenticity were evoked to build the written histories of the patchwork form. As the democratic uprisings of the 1980s led to the democratisation of the government, jogakbo came to represent folk cultures, while symbolising ‘Korea’ to global communities. By foregrounding these nationalist agendas, I draw on a multiplicity of perspectives to complicate these narratives, excavating new material relations between jogakbo as a wrapping cloth, patchwork fashions and the corporeal processes of plastic surgery cultures, while foregrounding these practices as women’s work. Three chapters of the thesis unfold to map Korean patchwork in archives, asking how Korean patchwork as jogakbo was constituted in national memories; the development of patchwork as style-fashion-dress in South Korea and for Korean diasporic communities abroad; embodied patchwork practices through (Korean) plastic surgery cultures, specifically exploring the experiences of blepharoplasty for Korean women and women of the Korean diaspora. This thesis builds and tests patchwork as a decolonial methodological approach, using material object analysis, archive research, interviews, and oral histories, and autoethnography, to produce a cross-disciplinary practice that pieces fragments of knowledge, and memories of being as a conceptual writing of history. Necessarily understanding ‘Korea’ and South Korea through the framework of coloniality and colonial modernity, Fragments and Borders highlights the multiple encounters that shaped the formation of the country through institutional and national memory. By illuminating the transcultural and global connections and constellations of Korean womanhood through patchwork, I complicate and trouble the constitutive practices of Korean womanhood through these polyvocal approaches, while imagining the possibilities for the Korean woman through an alternative ontology of ornamental existence. In doing so, this thesis contributes to decolonial feminist studies, Korean diasporic studies, and Korean design and material histories by highlighting new possibilities for Korean womanhood by understanding patchwork as a form of mending and becoming
(Re)modelling form: Sculpture in flux
Get PDFThis practice-based PhD explores sensations of flux and instability created through the ‘monumental’ sculptural object. The text acknowledges the legacy of Rosalind Krauss’s concept of sculpture’s ‘Expanded Field’ (1978) but moves to affirm a legacy for the monument, thereby circumventing the dialectical logic of her argument. Drawing on the sculptural tradition of the monument, the works produced steer away from minimalism’s objecthood in order to explore a material ‘hapticity’. Modelling is a point of departure for a series of replications produced through diverse modes of casting. By escaping Krauss’s positioning of sculpture as ‘not-architecture’ and ‘not- landscape’, works made within this project engage critically with the idea of the monument (defined through its separation from environment and its traditional verticality) through wall-oriented projection into architectural space. Intermediate sculptures produced within the project are initially manufactured from clay and grease, whose malleability remains as sensation to counter the tendency to identify the object as fixed. Interconnected chapters follow the principles and practices of sculptural production and associated temporalities. Behaviours of matter (such as clay) under certain types of pressures and material conditions, including haptic forming, and the upkeep of material conditions in the service of sculptural production will be examined. Certain unorthodox forms of writing in the main body of the thesis seek to articulate these material conditions and encounters within the process. Material behaviours will be linked to methods of realising sculptural archetypes employing traditional methods of modelling, mould making and casting to produce condensed, singular sculptural forms that eschew representation evident within the legacy of the monument, instead, operating at the limits of recognition. To further problematise association with the canon, the orientation of sculptures will work against the dominant verticality of the monument. Replication and simulation are brought into focus as cast sculptures mimic archetypes of forms without previous existence. The mould and its association with certain trajectories of sculptural production is understood as a site of material movement capture, a container to arrest sensations of flux embedded into the cast sculptural object. The work of Lynda Benglis, William Tucker, Medardo Rosso and Alina Szapocznikow will form the contextual basis for proposing the existence of sculptural instability, being examples that promulgate sensations of flux enfolded into sculpture and that offer a critique of the monument through approaches to material handling and objecthood. Tucker’s attempt to build sculpture bearing ‘familiarity that resists recognition’ is especially important to this project, where modelling operates at the threshold of formal legibility and works against fixing specific, quotidian identity to the sculptural object. This project argues for a different lineage to the trajectory of the ‘Expanded Field’ through the manifestation of sculptures that draw upon close bodily connection and intimate haptic contact with material. The monumental sculptures of Tucker and intrusive anti- monumental works of Benglis produced during and beyond the emergence of Krauss’s essay offer a divergent route for new sculptural thinking, one that problematises the dominant presence of the ‘Expanded Field’ and instead proposes the sculptural object as something fixed intellectually, yet through the intensification of material behaviours enfolded into the work, operating intuitively as something in flux. Despite being infused with qualities of bodily intimacy and close-at-hand working, sculpture is, paradoxically, referred to as both monument and not monument