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Tools, skill & identity: The work of Birmingham’s manufacturing jewellers, 1940-1960
Get PDFIn Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, jewellers, silversmiths and members of the allied trades have for centuries clustered skills, materials and demand in this industrial district. The Second World War disrupted these established relationships and routines, as jewellers utilised their tacit knowledge of small metalwork to adapt to production for the Armed Forces. This research project engages with debates in design history and anthropology that link skill and identity to investigate the enduring impact of this change in production on jewellers’ concepts of occupational identity in the 1940s and 1950s, when restrictions on gold made much of their work impossible, and even illegal. This research takes a material focus, particularly following gold alloys (carats), to trace the impacts of these restrictions. Trade members instead worked through loopholes to turn to the jewellery ‘black market’ to maintain their skills, an option made available through the trade’s traditions of independent workshop spaces, tool ownership and discretion. Analysis of employee accident records, wages books, job adverts and new oral histories of trade members reinstates craftspeople to a production history that has previously focused only on industry leaders and managers. By concentrating instead on workers’ experiences, this research reclaims the terms ‘flexibility’ and ‘adaptation’ from ontologies of efficiency and uses them to appreciate jewellers’ discretion in choosing how and with whom they worked in their occupational community. I carefully engage with these jewellers’ occupational legacies by recognising and utilising my position within the trade to work with the industry’s enduring principle of discretion – a knowing from within that traverses the time between the 1940s and the present. The trade structure is thus both methodology and conclusion: jewellers created and sustained their identity through their trade network and their material interactions, and these material interactions help us today to connect with their occupational legacies. Through this principle of proximity, this research proves the possibility and benefit of considering concepts of identity in the past and across a varied trade
Craft 3.0: Positioning craft and design Practice(s) within ‘reduction’ & nature-based design
Get PDFExtractive industries and excessive production are furthering ecological collapse. In the age of the planetary climate crisis, impactful new approaches to ecological practices are imperative. Designers and creatives are not only accountable for innovative solutions, but their work is also intertwined with environmental collapse. By evading ecological implications, designers are complicit in (potential) created problems, requiring a deeper comprehension of their decisions, actions, and their ‘craft’. Our next paradigm (around design) must be nature-based ‘design for planet’. As the world considers this impact, we examine the designer’s role (as a practice of their craft) considering the earth and non-human species. It is within this expanded notion that we see ‘nature-based design’ and Ecological Citizenship as a timely planetary-scale, multi-species contemporary craft. Authors characterise Craft 3.0 as reducing ecological impacts, positioning it as a discourse of: reduction, considerate to its surroundings, contexts, beyond human species, supporting skills to contextualise within environments for positive benefit. Craft 3.0 seeks to differentiate tactics to prioritise ecosystem(s), intent on mitigating against negative consequences. The Craft 3.0 position is mapped through; interviews and insights from contemporary literature, creating a contemporary approach to craft and tacit skills. Craft 3.0 establishes trans-disciplinary skills nurturing knowledge of materials, their cultivation, application and growth/regeneration. In turn this impacts: usability, ecological issue(s) and ‘craft practices’, working contextually within environments for ecological remediation
If not now, when? Generations of women in sculpture in Britain, 1960 – 2022
No full textThe exhibition is the culmination of the feminist research project, Hepworth’s Progeny: Generation of Women in Sculpture in Britain, 1960 – 2022 and will show work by the women artists who responded to either the original 1988 or revised 2022 survey. The 2022 research project was hosted by The Hepworth Wakefield in collaboration with art historian, Professor Griselda Pollock and sculptor Lorna Green, working with Yorkshire based curatorial researchers Dr Anna Frances Douglas and Dr Kerry Harker. The project revisited research into women artists working in the expanding field of sculpture undertaken in the late 1980s by Lorna Green as the basis for a present-day comparative study. Green undertook the original research as a postgraduate student at the University of Leeds, supervised by Griselda Pollock. Recruiting a new cohort of contemporary sculptors working in Britain today, the 2022 research project acknowledges the entanglements of age, class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality, neurosensory diversity and other factors. The research also touches on changes to funding accessibility, display and the critical reception of art by women. A small number of the original survey responses will be on display, narrating an intergenerational story of women artists. The exhibition features around 30 works by sculptors such as Rose Garrard, Glenys Barton, Permindar Kaur, Katrina Cowling, Kim Lim, Lilian Lijn, Veronica Ryan, Shelagh Wakeley and more. Some of the first cohort of survey responses were submitted by then graduates – Phyllida Barlow, Helen Chadwick and Cornelia Parker – who are now recognisable names in the art world
Fluid rock, marble stilled
Get PDFThe context was a two-day symposium about marble as a material and an image held within the Gallerie Borghese in Rome where a complete catalogue of the marbles used to decorated and structure the interior has just been completed. I was one of two artists invited to speak to a group of art and architectural historians, curators and specialist in the material science of marble. I gave an illustrated talk about my work as an artist growing from my 2022 nine-month Ampersand Fellowship at the British School in Rome. The talk addressed the re-use of historic images in contemporary art. In my case this has involved 3D scanning myself posing as a figure from a Goya painting of 1798 and using the silhouette and 3D scan of a copy of a British Roman figure of Venus from Verulamium St.Albans. The process of imaginative immersion in a character with which one may feel an affinity is in contrast with the way a material or abstract image such as a sheet of marbled paper may evoke some sensation of bodily affinity with its organic structures. I spoke of the way in which making marbled paper both reveals and contradicts something of the structure of actual marble which is coloured by mineral impurities and formed through heat and pressure capturing its movement from a molten to a solid state in the forms of the stone itself. I ended with an image of the marbled page in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and a notebook from 1699 with carefully preserved scraps of marbled paper. The lack of information about the history of this craft and the movement of the techniques throughout the world echoes that of the movement of marble, techniques of book matching marble and the trade routes now being researched in other fields
The possibility of things: A teaching case study on addressing global responsibilities in postgraduate education through an interdisciplinary, collaborative, large scale, and blended learning unit
Get PDFThe launch of a new academic model in a specialist postgraduate institution provided an opportunity to ‘try the possibilities of things’ through the introduction of a core unit that invites over 2,200 students to respond to wicked global problems on themes such as Being Digital; Caring Society; Climate Crisis; Justice, Equality and Misinformation. This case study introduces the context for this new unit, delivered to most taught Masters students. It explores the institutional and pedagogical challenges in this ambitious blended unit, and reflects on the ways the unit has enabled students to make connections, and inform the stories that we tell about the role of higher education in identifying and responding to societal change
Preemptive listening: a roundtable discussion about sirens
Get PDFNested within the crisis of our attention economy, the siren is undergoing a profound transformation, prompted by our ongoing alarm fatigue and noise pollution, as well as the near-obsolescence and inefficiency of public sound system broadcasts. Employing an interdisciplinary approach from specialists in the field of sound studies, behavioural psychology, policy advisors and creative practitioners, this roundtable article aims to unpack the critical potential of reimagining sirens, extending physically beyond ear-centred listening, conceptually beyond immediate timeframes, and opening up to new collaborative methodologies across academia, industry, artistic networks and more, to tackle today’s urgent need to recalibrate emergency signals for the immediate and the distant future
Getting your film distributed
No full textThis workshops was about the process of film financing, sales, distribution and releasing. The panel was part of the professional programme at the London Breeze Film Festival. Held at Riverside Studios on 24 October 2024
Unleashing the Wild: Exploring feral design’s power to thrive in the Anthropocene
Get PDFFeral design aims to act as a transformative framework for design in the Anthropocene. This paper explores its potential to navigate the crises of modernity through a speculative deconstruction of three discrete case studies. Analysing said case studies of counter-culture movements’ operating at the fringes of the law reveals valuable insights into creativity, adaptability, and diffuse design capacity. The essence of feral design has been distilled into five principles, aiming to establish design methodologies. It calls for broader engagement from design researchers to expand the discourse and advance design practices in the Anthropocene. Feral design aims to act as a redirective practice that subverts modern design practice to enable its transition towards sustainment. By understanding the values embodied by different feral entities that respond to the collapse of traditional systems we can better understand how the principles of feral design can be embodied
Parked II
No full textA group outdoor exhibition curated by Emma Douglas in two public garden squares in Clerkenwell, London: St John's Garden and the Cloister Garden (part of the Museum of St John)
The essence of architecture
No full textOne person show of large-scale photographic works on the legacy of architect Nicolas LeDoux and his proto-type panopticon in Arc-et-Senance, France. Werkstatt Fotografie Hamburg, curated by Michael Grieve. In conversation with Professor Tobias Zielony, HBFK University Hamburg