Items where Subject is "Art"

Central to this practice-based investigation is the concept that the iPad has the potential to provide the appropriate tools and resources required to create a body of new and original artworks. I suggest that the iPad enables the artist to re-define the concept of an artist’s studio and facilitates a move away from the traditional studio towards a new virtual studio. This investigation considers the affordances of the iPad in engendering new ways of visualising intimate, private, domestic and public space, through filmmaking, photography, and digital drawing and painting.
The practice-based element of this doctorate is interwoven with an investigation of relevant critical theory and is presented as a descriptive analysis of my virtual studio. The research explores the contemporary methodologies of arts-based research; autoethnography and visual and digital ethnography. My contribution to knowledge is that the iPad is a virtual studio that enables myself and other artists to create new modes of creative practice.
I have examined and analysed the historical technological contexts that form the foundations for the emergence of a new means of artistic production. I have also addressed questions around machine replicability and the role of new media in shaping the cultural landscape.
An autonomous case study reflects on the emergence of new ethical codes of practice in relation to new media iPad art and considers the role of digital integrity within new Fine Art digital practices. It investigates the emergence of innovative online digital artistic communities who use the iPad as the main tool for the creation of iPad art and then access social networking platforms for its dissemination. It further researches a blog of female peers to consider the duality of the iPad as a complementary toolkit to traditional media.

Taking plants of Malabar (present day Kerala, India) as its principal concern, the project, Sensing and Presencing Rare Plants through Contemporary Drawing Practice (Leverhulme Research Fellowshipm 2017-20) engages with and navigates through three distinct but interconnected historical and contemporary sites of knowledge:

- First, the extraordinary twelve-volume seventeenth century illustrated treatise on the flora of Malabar, Hortus Malabaricus, and its twenty-first century English translation
- Second, historical herbaria in Edinburgh and Oxford housing fragile examples of specimens described in the aforementioned publications, and brought to Britain during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
- Third, remote areas of moist deciduous rainforest of Malabar, the centuries-old protection of which has ensured the survival of some of the rarest plants.

The objectives are:

- Establish an original discourse that aims to bridge debates on contemporary drawing, materiality and the vulnerable nature of plant life;

- Enhance an understanding of the vulnerabilities and resilience of rare plants through research at the interstices of fine art, botany and plant science, museology and cultural geography.

Plants have been a ‘currency’ of empires, their collection and distribution having had huge social, cultural and political implications. Today, thousands of plant species are identified as endangered or possibly extinct, while bans on the transportation of plant specimens guard against bioprospecting and biopiracy. This, together with significant ongoing interest in drawing in the expanded field, and in the sensory and embodied experience of museum objects, opens a clear position for research investigating the relationships between rare plant life, drawing and herbaria.

Historically, drawing has been intrinsically connected to the collection and preservation of plants as a vehicle for scientific description and identification. With sophisticated digital visualisation technologies now occupying this central position, the proposed project asserts that contemporary art practices, especially those concerned with themes of ephemerality, are renewing the inspirational basis of botanical illustrations and specimens.

Building on Bowen’s previous extensive research in drawing and states of flux, this project links the extraordinary ephemerality of the natural world to a broader theoretical concern with, as David Howes has written the ‘multiple ways in which culture mediates sensation’. Hortus Malabaricus is remarkable for its in-depth description of Malabar’s plants provided a unique springboard for this investigation. At Edinburgh and Oxford herbaria, investigation of preserved examples of these species generated drawings reflecting the impact of conservation methods, and systems of storage, classification and labelling. Field visits to plant science research facilities and Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, based in the bio-diverse South Indian rainforest, incrementally expanded an understanding of the ontological status of plant specimens in relation to site, whilst interdisciplinary methods offered new ways to engage with herbaria and navigate through protected areas of remote rainforest. This enabled consideration of how dialogue between science and art might be reflected through the conceptual and material aspects of the resulting art works, and the nature of their reception.

The output, outcomes and dissemination included:

i. An exhibition with gallery talks invited exploration of, and critical reflection on, the research by both specialist and non-specialist audiences, providing opportunities for future research and dialogue. The exhibition was staged at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in 2020.
ii. A closing conference offered a platform to review and extend the agenda of fine art practice-led research. Speakers included: Professor Andrew Patrizio, Edinburgh College of Art; Dr Ian Patterson, University of Cambridge; Dr Henry Noltie, RBGE; Joel Fisher and Dr Sarah Casey, LICA. It is anticipated that the papers presented will be published as a collection of texts through Northern Print, Newcastle.
iii. Reflective texts and visual documentation of the project and its dissemination through exhibition and conference papers, were published by Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and linked to social media platforms. The content of the seminars and wider critical themes were articulated, giving academics, practitioners and publics, nationally and internationally, the opportunity to engage with core ideas and outputs.
iv. Core issues which were discussed by Bowen through a conference paper, web article and video interview (University of Oxford) and journal article (DRTP, Intellect Publications).

Descriptions True and Perfect was a one-person exhibition of twenty back-lit drawings, ten artists books and eight video projections, selected and curated for a large-scale immersive installation at the Main Gallery, Jilin University of Arts (JUA), 2016.

Bowen’s research aimed to investigate how the preservation, collection and transportation of ephemeral museum objects might stimulate innovative modes of drawing and video installation. This was achieved by interrogating ways in which to transfer and recontextualise knowledge that had been generated by her earlier AHRC-funded research project Capturing the Ephemeral (2010-12, https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FH020721%2F1) . A further research aim sought to establish a distinctive discourse which might bridge debates on contemporary drawing, materiality, video and the museum context.

The project contributes to discourse that bridges debates on contemporary drawing, materiality, video and the museum context. The project extends Bowen’s interest in devising new ways of creating and exhibiting drawings to interrogate the museological dimensions of the state of flux. It connects with ongoing debates on how the materiality of objects can communicate in various ways as demonstrated through conferences including: Early Modern Matters: Materiality and the Archive. University of East Anglia (2019); Art, Materiality and Representation. British Museum (2018); Childhood and Materiality. Jyvaskyla University, Finland (2019), and publications including Howes, D. and Classen, C. (2014) Ways of Sensing. Routledge; Dudley, S. (2012) Museum Objects. Leicester Readers in Museum Studies and Straine, S. (2010) Dust and Doubt. Tate Papers 14.

The project was framed by Willem Barents’ 1596 expedition which left Amsterdam for China carrying Renaissance prints but only reached the Russian Arctic. The prints, now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam remained frozen for three centuries. As a previous Artist-in-Residence at the Rijksmuseum, this exhibition extended Bowen’s interest in devising new ways of creating and exhibiting drawings to interrogate the museological dimensions of flux, while exploring themes of ephemerality through different means.

In 2015 Bowen had continued to the cartographers’ failed destination - the bamboo groves of East Asia. Filmed solely through a mirror, the resulting video works fragmented Bowen’s passage through sub-tropical landscapes and sought to challenge experiential understanding of time and space. Bowen’s drawings which had previously been frozen in the Arctic after three winters (in collaboration with the Russian Meteorological Research Centre, Arkhangelsk, Russia), were reconfigured. Through multiple folds, the drawings explored ideas connected to the transportation and storage of ephemeral objects.

In addition to the Bowen’s solo exhibition (funded by JUA), the outcomes of this research project were further disseminated through lectures and panel discussions by Bowen at: JUA, China (2016); PSN, Northumbria University (2016); Jerwood Drawing Prize, AUB, Bournemouth (2017) and panel discussion at DRAWING Symposium, South Shields Town Hall, 2017. The project informed Bowen’s Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2017-2020, Sensing and Presencing Rare Plants through Contemporary Drawing Practice) through furthering her understanding of the impact of conservation methods, and systems of storage, classification and labelling on museum objects and how this might be interrogated through drawing practice.

Paper, table, wall and after was a co-curated international exhibition in 2015 of 108 paper-based artworks by 38 national and international artists, selected by Bowen and Chris Dorsett. It aimed to address ways in which a work of art continues to resonate after its creation and critiqued the disconnected moments in the ‘life story’ of an art object. The exhibition focussed on provisional, but vital, stages of making paper-based artworks and examined fluid open-ended possibilities for their interpretation through public installation. The project contributes to debates on how artworks continue to be ‘created and re-created’ after their completion by the artist through their display, preservation, reproduction and reception.

Artworks that could be folded and unfolded were made by 38 participants and installed across the gallery floor, encouraging intimate audience engagement; the installation thus blurred the boundaries between making and viewing. Visitors were invited to make additional pieces and to move artworks to different positions throughout the exhibition’s duration. The content and material nature of the artworks and the unfixed position of their installation, realised the aims of the project.

Bowen’s work with Dorsett spans several years of collaboration: her contribution to the project is distinctive as it instigated and investigated commissioned contemporary paper-based artworks and innovative methods of installation. Contextualisation by other researchers is reflected through conferences and papers including: (Afterlives, University of York, 2018); interdisciplinary workshops (The Afterlives of Art Works, University of Warwick, 2017) and scholarly articles (The Afterlives of Art, Toby Lichtig, TLS, Sept. 2013).

It is also contextualised within the framework of Bowen’s early and ongoing research interests as evidenced by her paper, Materiality and Transience Through Drawing Practice, delivered at the Fourth Early Modern Symposium, Art and its Afterlives, the Courtauld Institute, London, 2012. This paper explored the correlation between the material transformation of a series of Renaissance prints found frozen in the Arctic and their reinterpretation over five centuries. Paper, table, wall and after built on the symposium’s concerns with how, “art is shaped by its afterlives and the ways in which art both persists and changes through time as a material object, a field of generative meaning, and a subject of debate and interpretation”. In 2014 key concepts for the exhibition were tested out with co-curator Chris Dorsett, through an installation of paper-based artworks across series of tables and the walls and floor of Gallery North, Northumbria University, Newcastle.

Paper, table, wall and after was informed by Bowen’s ongoing research in the relationship between the materiality of drawing and the ephemeral nature of museum objects on paper, evidenced through collaborative research projects at the V&A, London and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2006-12), and the conception, development and leadership of Paper Studio Northumbria (PSN), (2012-18). PSN provided a unique facility nationally and internationally for the research, teaching and scholarship of paper in relation to fine art, conservation and archiving. To further inform her understanding of the material characteristics of paper, in 2015 Bowen made research field trips across Taiwan to Shigeru Ban’s architectural construction which utilised cardboard tubes, and to handmade paper mills.

The installation took place in The International Exhibition Hall, National Taiwan University of Arts (NTUA) and Yo-Chang Art Museum, Taiwan. November 2015. It was funded by NTUA. Research findings were further disseminated in lectures in the International Exhibition Hall highlighting research themes through round table discussions with Dr Chih Cheng Chen (Principal of NTUA) and Director of Yo-Chang Art Museum, Dr Chun Lan Liu.
The exhibition directly informed the nature of a floor-based installation of works by researchers and students from AUB and associated drawing workshop, Drawing Boundaries, Folding Islands, led by Bowen at the British Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale 2018.

Insights were effectively shared through lectures by Bowen at: Shigeru Ban Paper Dome, Puli, Taiwan (2015); Jilin University of Arts, (JUA), Changchun, China (2016); PSN, Northumbria University (2016) and Belfast School of Art (2015), and through a lecture and panel discussion, Jerwood Drawing Prize, AUB Bournemouth, 2017.

The exhibition led to an invitation from JUA, China, for Bowen to create a large-scale solo installation of paper-based and video works in 2016.

This book presents distinct perspectives from both geographically-oriented creative practices and geographers working with arts-based processes. In doing so, it fills a significant gap in the already sizeable body of non-representational discourse by bringing together images and reflections on performances, art practice, theatre, dance, and sound production alongside theoretical contributions and examples of creative writing. It considers how contemporary art making is being shaped by spatial enquiry and how geographical research has been influenced by artistic practice. It provides a clear and concise overview of the principles of non-representational theory for researchers and practitioners in the creative arts and, across its four sections, demonstrates the potential for non-representational theory to bring cultural geography and contemporary art closer than ever before.

Franca Donda (Italy, 1933-2017) was an activist, filmmaker, and photographer who lived in Caracas for most part of the second half of the twentieth century. During these decades, she made several short films with the Venezuelan collectives Cine Urgente/Urgent Cinema (1968-1973) and Grupo Feminista Miércoles/Wednesday’s Feminist Group (1979-1988). Throughout her life, she also took thousands of photographs of women across Latin America. However, her work has received little scholarly attention, and her archive has not been properly preserved. This article demonstrates the importance of protecting the legacy of Donda, Cine Urgente, and Grupo Feminista Miércoles. To do so, it explores Donda’s multifaceted identity and outlines the production of the two collectives. It maps, locates, and assesses the conditions of some of the materials that could comprise their archive. And it reflects on issues of positionality and briefly describes the transmedia project that is emerging from this research.

Bajo el título donda-doc: Documenter les Femmes et les Féministes par la photo- graphie documentaire. L’exemple de Franca Donda au Venezuela, este proyecto pretende arrojar luz al legado de Franca Donda a través de la producción de varios artefactos culturales desarrollados a partir de su archivo. En este texto ofrecemos, en primer lugar, una breve biografía de Franca Donda, prestando especial atención a su producción cinematográfica y fotográfica. Y, en segundo lugar, ahondamos en el compromiso feminista de su trabajo fotográfico.

This paper reveals how UK street carnival is located within policy discourses that facilitate notions of creative economy, inter-place competition and the representation of institutionally-preferred versions of local, regional and national place-identity. The paper draws on ethnographic research within two community town carnivals and the professional Battle for the Winds carnival performances that launched the 2012 Olympic sailing at Weymouth. It considers the evolution of policy-driven carnival vocabularies that were designed to articulate preferred ‘Jurassic Coast’ and Olympic place identities for the south-west UK during 2012, and their effect on two vernacular, community street carnivals in East Devon and Dorset. The paper exposes the cultural tension between these vernacular events and the ‘official feast’ of Jurassic Coast and Olympic carnival, in terms of their performance of contradictory place-identities and contested notions of artistic community. It describes the popular challenge to aesthetic hegemony that these community carnivals presented during 2012. Finally, the author argues for a reassessment of the artistic value of vernacular carnivals, and affirms their status as a culture of resistance that creates alternative, sometimes inconvenient, symbolic constructions of community and place to those preferred by institutional actors operating within a neo-liberal discourse of inter-place competition.

This research study examined and tested how the pedagogical elements of live art contribute to young people's development and potentially play a transformative role in secondary education. It offered an alternative art syllabus that incites response-ability and respects individual freedom in secondary education, using creative modes of self-exploration that embrace embodiment, vulnerability, and unpredictability. These elements have shown a potential to transform the perception of assessments in education.

The creative turn within geography has seen a number of returns to the artists’ studio as a site for exploring the vital, immanent, and affective relations that form these spaces of creative practice. Where interviews, observations, collaborations, with artists have directed attention to the non-representational, this paper approaches the studio as both a scene, and an atmospheric staging. Taking up broader discourses around the scenographic, it argues that scenes not only take account of the durational and compositional construction of studio spaces, but can be understood as a form of training and attunement through which participants are enrolled in the joint composition of studio atmospheres and registers. It directs attention to the agency that these compositions have in the production of the studio imaginary.

In Theodor Adorno’s writing the term “natural history” has quite a different meaning to its usual scientific usage. Adorno’s idea of natural history aims at reconciling, in form and in content, the opposing forces of nature and history with the aim of overcoming the division of natural being and historical being that Adorno considered to be the central problem of critical social theory. Through sprawling installations the French contemporary artist Pierre Huyghe creates new forms of interaction between natural systems and artificial constructs. Huyghe’s body of work is submitted to interpretation through Adorno’s dialectic of nature and history to establish the relevance of both Huyghe’s practice and Adorno’s thought to the conditions of the Anthropocene.

The thesis uses art practice as a research method to propose novel characterisations of animal life. These characterisations aim to challenge an organicist image of non-human animals. The thesis considers animal bodies and behaviours as subject to aesthetic judgments that are underpinned by deeper ontological and epistemological commitments as to relations between nature and society, in which to be categorised as the former entails a series of privations in relation to the latter – the absence of freedom, subjectivity and creativity. Scholarly research on the history of the perception and conception of animal life within modernity, and subsequent challenges made to these within the contemporary humanities and contemporary art support and inform the practical enquiry. The thesis draws primarily here upon new materialist and post-humanist-oriented animal studies, and on scholarship surrounding the contemporary French artist, Pierre Huyghe.

Positing the Anthropocene as a condition in which the distinction between human history and natural history has collapsed, the thesis argues for disassociating the concept ‘animal’ and the concept ‘nature’. The thesis attends to entanglements of animal worlds and cultural tropes where this equation fails. It proposes an an-organic and dis-harmonious animal life that attest to the end of nature and witnesses the dissonant and incomplete conditions of modernity. Both the written argument and the artistic outcomes propose novel ways to consider animals in relation to visuality. The thesis takes bio-art (i.e., art practice that incorporates living organisms) as of methodological value in this project where it engages the potentiality of animals themselves to challenge a received historical status. Furthermore, art practice is not just seen as a vehicle for depicting animal futures, but as a condition for liberating animals from nature. The thesis thus equates the postnatural animal with their becoming agents within artworks.

This article draws on the comprehensive historical account outlined in the author’s recent publication on 1970s British experimental filmmaking which challenges the problematic ‘return to image’ thesis evident in most historical accounts of the decade, arguing that image-rich, expressive, personal and representational films were in evidence throughout the decade. The article includes examples of the ‘return to image’ thesis, demonstrating how this has problematically perpetuated the flawed account of the decade. It also outlines the countercultural, psychoanalytic and mystical influences on filmmaking and on American critic, P. Adams Sitney’s taxonomical distinctions – ‘psychodramatic trance’, ‘lyrical’, ‘mythopoeia’, and ‘diary’ – which provide illuminating characteristics useful for examining some of the personal, expressive forms of 1970s British filmmaking. It gives an understanding of how experimental filmmaking grew from a small handful of films and filmmakers, at the start of the decade, to a veritable ‘explosion’ of filmmaking by the end of the 1970s.

This article discusses encounters occurring between the hand of the artist and filmmaking processes that may bypass the intellect, identifying themselves through intuitive modes of production to reveal integral relationships between film form, materiality and content. In this way the results of non-human agency, registered within film chemistry and processes of production – physical, intellectual, ‘spiritual’, (un)conscious – interact as the filmmaker takes an idea from conception to projection. Jane Bennett’s theorization of ‘vital materialism’ is important for investigations (2010), as is the role of chance discussed by William Kentridge (1993), whereby deliberations include the fortuitous manifestations occurring as encounters between hand, page and camera coalesce in the production of films. Additionally, approaches are informed by Vilém Flusser’s description of the photographer as a ‘Functionary: ‘a person who plays with apparatus and acts as a function of apparatus’ (Flusser 2007, p.83). This is, arguably, equally pertinent for the cinematographer/animator/artist who can ‘creep into the camera [and processing/editing equipment] in order to bring to light the tricks concealed within’ (Flusser, p.27).

This comprehensive historical account demonstrates the rich diversity in 1970s British experimental filmmaking. It acts as a form of reclamation by integrating films having received inadequate historical and critical recognition and placing these alongside films existing as accepted texts of the decade. This history challenges the problematic 'return to image' thesis, providing examples of written evidence and demonstrating how this has problematically perpetuated a flawed account of the decade. This is the first extensive overview of 1970s filmmaking, contextualizing films within broader aesthetic, theoretical and socio-political frameworks. The detailed textual and comparative analyses offer unique approaches to individual films, shedding light on technical, aesthetic and economic decisions informing filmmaking. As such, it provides a unique understanding of how experimental filmmaking grew from a small handful of films and filmmakers, at the start of the 1970s, to a veritable 'explosion' in filmmaking by the end of the decade.

The commemorative period between 2014 and 2018 was marked globally by numerous exhibitions of original artworks that had been commissioned and created during and immediately after World War 1. Most national and state museums and galleries also curated comprehensive survey shows of original work from the period; some curators took a thematic approach, some designed new permanent exhibits, and a significant number created innovative opportunities for contemporary artists to reflect on the centenary through the creation of bespoke artefacts, installations and exhibitions.

'The Art of Creative Research Exhibition' held to overlap with Singapore Art Week 2023, which brings together contemporary creative research from Hong Kong, Singapore, and the UK.

Featuring 15 practice-based researchers in the visual arts from the Royal College of Art, University of Cambridge, University College London, Arts University Bournemouth, the Education University of Hong Kong, and the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Taking as its starting point the planting of a number of dead trees in the National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas, Staffordshire, this article examines the iconic, pictorial and metaphorical value of trees - living, dying and dead - in garden and arboreta settings. Arguing that the image of inert nature strikes at the very principle of seasonal recovery and annual cycles of regeneration, the article explores the representation of danger, devastation and recuperation in the work of two contemporary British painters who each have a keen understanding of the totemic monumentality of trees, both within and outside garden and arboreta settings. Drawing upon political contexts in Northern Ireland and Iraq, and on environmental challenges along the east coast of England, both painters reference the work of the British painter Paul Nash. His understanding of decay and regeneration, and the cyclic depiction of death and life through nature, provides a connective tissue that links the major themes of remembrance, iconography and design that are at the heart of the National Memorial project at Alrewas.

Paul Gough is interested in drawing in-between places, liminal zones, waste grounds, empty places that were once something and now have been allowed to lapse back into their habitual shape. Look at his drawings of the former airbase at Greenham Common, or the ash-heaps of the old north Somerset coalfield, the abandoned village of Tyneham or the forlorn gullies on the Gallipoli Peninsula. They are powerful evocations of absence and embedded memory. Writer Marion Shoard coined these unloved, unseen and often unexplored spaces as the ‘edge land’, a mysterious hinterland of brick piles and rubbish tips, derelict industrial plant and ragged landfill, forlorn filling stations and scruffy allotments, abandoned ordnance lying amidst rogue plants.

Thirty years ago, the naturalist Richard Mabey in his book ‘The Unofficial Countryside ‘, had also opened our eyes to the vitality of these unkempt places. He, however, found little to cherish and celebrate in these wasted hinterlands. Instead he marvelled at the resilience of nature in such abject conditions, its refusal to be ground down by toxic contagion.

The work of ‘regimental artists’ is often derided for being jingoistic, irrelevant and predicated on anachronistic representational strategies rooted in high-Victorian battle painting. Despite their marginal status, a core of professional painters today work regularly for the British armed services to record, and occasionally commemorate, contemporary and past feats of arms, as well as more mundane public service duties such as ceremonial display and ‘Keeping the Army in the Public Eye’ (KAPE) tours. Their work is largely unseen by the non-military public, mainly because it is intended for a closed community of serving soldiers, their families and veterans who are associated with the unit. Yet, as a sizeable contemporary body of artwork, it contributes to the commemorative rhetoric of the British military and employs a number of artists of national standing.

Drawing on the author’s own experiences as a several-times commissioned military artist, this paper is a ‘work in progress’ that examines the work of several painters – including John Ross, Ken Howard and Keith Holmes – who have worked occasionally for the British armed services in the past three decades. But the paper will take as its principal case study the work of painter David Rowlands, commissioned in the 1990s by the Permanent Joint Headquarters (United Kingdom) as their official artist to record the British build-up in the Arabian Gulf, and since then fully employed by units in the British army (and some overseas military units) to paint commemorative works related to active service overseas, largely in Iraq and more recently Afghanistan.

Through an examination of Rowlands’ work, the paper touches upon the formal language of military painting, particularly the tensions between illustration and interpretation, between factual and technical accuracy, and examines the issues of authenticity and historical verity. The paper also touches upon issues of agency and reception, and the stresses between the commissioning process, the independence of the artist as interpreter and broader concerns of testimony and visual authority.

Contemporary graffiti artists, or ‘writers’ as they are known, observe a strict hierarchy that self-ranks ambition, daring and calligraphic innovation. At the apex are those writers who create the imposing wildstyle exhibition pieces, large-scale vivid inscriptions that require a high degree of graphic invention and daring. At the other extreme are the stencil-cutters, who by comparison are regarded within the peer community of the subculture, as lesser writers, relying on craft skills that are held to be quaint, even fraudulent. This article explores the persistence and ubiquitous spread of the stencil as a vehicle for mass-produced street art, made especially popular through the iconic work of British street-artist Banksy. Exploring the origins of his work in stencil the article examines how he has both radicalized the genre, while still retaining its essential value as an industrial, utilitarian and iconic graphic. The article compares the deadpan, but hugely popular, drawn language of the stencil with the freehand calligraphy of the taggers, ‘kings’ and other exhibition ‘writers’, and closes with a set of questions, in particular: what is the future of drawing in countercultural expression?

Preservation of historical remains is ridden with complexity. In particular, battle landscapes are multi-layered, with many different and intersecting ideas and meanings about identity, place and landscape production. This article explores the site of battle as a place of the imagination, as a site of continued dispute, a ‘debatable land’. Focusing on contested terrain in northern Europe, the article also briefly examines the creation of new monuments in ‘imperial’ London and New York, suggesting that the lack of a dialogical rationale for such memorabilia fails to extend the language of remembrance, settling instead for monolithic forms that perpetuate the status quo, prioritizing the ‘plinth’ over more fluid forms of remembering.

To 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)

Once heralded as a ‘fortress built by Nature for herself... a moat defensive to a house…’ our island is slowly unravelling. Across political, social and economic dimensions, Britain is beset and besieged. ‘Our scepter’d isle’ is fast fraying at the edges.

Politically, these have been intense years. A tortuous and messy divorce from Europe is being tested daily at customs posts on the land and across invisible lines on the high seas. Once a totem of English authority, the White Cliffs of Dover have become irreversibly politicised. One faction regards them as unassailable battlements, while a rival party deploys their sheer white slopes as a vast projection screen to beam forlorn messages of loss to our European neighbours. North and south along the coastline, our Channel beaches have become the landing sites for waves of refugees seeking solace and security after perilous voyages from war-ravaged homelands.

The city of Bristol was one of the last major cities in Great Britain to unveil a civic memorial to comemmorate the Great War 1914 – 1918. After Leicester (1925), Coventry (1927) and Liverpool (1930) Bristol’s Cenotaph was unveiled in 1932, fourteen years after the Armistice. During that lapse, its location, source of funding, and commemorative function were the focus of widespread disagreement and division in the city. This paper examines the nature of these disputes. The authors suggest that the tensions in locating a war memorial may have their origins in historic enmities between political and religious factions in the city. By examining in detail the source and manifestations of these disputes the authors offer a detailed exemplar of how memory is shaped and controlled in British urban spaces

This paper considers the relationship between site, memory and fine art practices, as viewed from the perspectives of a practitioner informed by the discourses of commemoration and the aftermath of conflict. Through an exploration of art works derived from encounters with displaced spaces, peripheries and edgelands, Gough situates his practice – and that of several selected artists – as a conversation between “place”, “space” and the geopolitical. Artists have long employed the notions of ambiguity, transition and the hybrid in their work.

Framed within the discourses of liminality and aftershock, practitioners have explored various strategies to address rites of in-betweenness to evoke a sensation of transition and displacement. To explore these ideas, Gough posits a number of his artworks as ‘provocations’, and draws attention to other contemporary artists and practitioners similarly drawn to the aftermath of constructed places and re-constructed histories. The paper draws upon two suites of Gough’s work each addressing aspects of the aftermath, and each to a degree addressing issues of transgression. The first is a series of site-specific photographs take on the decrepit and abandoned British army bases in former West Germany where Gough’s family was garrisoned during the Cold War.

They speak of an abjectness and blankness tempered by the depth of familial association. The second suite of practice use frottage, rubbings and photographic collage, to assemble a cycle of triptych forms drawn from prolonged site visits to the sites of twentieth century battle in Turkey, France, Belgium and Macedonia: locations richly associated with transgressive military intervention and now comprised of preserved terrain, military cemeteries and rhetorical topography that has long informed Gough’s practice.

‘Peace’ has not lent itself easily to emblematic or mnemonic forms of representation. In the furnished urban landscapes of the 19th century peace was often personified in female allegorical form. She can be seen in many of the sculpted memorials that commemorate distant battles fought on the edge of Empire. Invariably, however, the figure of ‘Peace’ had a more modest role in the allegory of commemoration than that of ‘victory’ or ‘triumph’. As an ideal, peace and pacifism is more often regarded as a process, a long-term goal that cannot be captured in single static form. To this end, the promotion of peace has most often been realised through intervention, occupation, and fluid, temporal forms such as campaigns, marches, songs, dances and other extended programmes. Peace has also promoted through slow, evolutionary forms such as designed landscapes, parks and gardens. This paper examines in detail two community gardens in central London. Each owes its origins to the radical political agenda of the Greater London Council in the 1980s, but they were borne out of grander visions for world peace, multi-lateral disarmament, and global accord. Twenty years after their creation the author explores their current condition and examines their value as sites of political value and heritage.

This 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’.

As one of Britain's most eminent 20th century painters Stanley Spencer's work has often been overshadowed by his chaotic and colourful private life. This is the first book since Richard Carline's Stanley Spencer at War (1978) to focus entirely on the painter's service as an orderly, soldier, and patient in the First World War, and to critically evaluate his time in Bristol, the Balkans and Burghclere between 1915-1932.

Drawing on Spencer's letters, illustrations and paintings, and interviews with relatives, curators and others who knew him, Gough examines Spencer's journey from cosseted family life, through the drudgery of a war hospital and the malarial battlefields of the Macedonian campaign, to the commission for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere. Through a close reading of contemporary texts and artwork, the book locates Spencer's work as a key component of the commemorative era after the Great War, situating Spencer's paintings of resurrection as a response to the complex bureaucracies of commemoration and a visual re-imagining of the exhumations and burials that were then taking place in battlefields across Europe. Spencer's work is examined in the context of other architects, sculptors and soldier-artists of the period, but is also positioned within the discourses of haunting and memory construction.

A number of the themes in the book were aired through several conference papers: 'Resurrection: reviving the dead in the work of Stanley Spencer, Otto Dix and Jeff Wall' Spaces, Haunting, Discourse conference, Karlstad University, Sweden (15-18 June 2006); 'Heroic death: models and counter models', WAPACC conference, USA (28-30 October 2006).

As war broke out across Europe in 1914 the Vorticist painter Wyndham Lewis advised: ‘You must not miss a war, if one is going! You cannot afford to miss that experience’. He may have been playfully ironic, but he recognised that the Great War presented a set of complex challenges, that might make or break reputations at a critical juncture in British art. Many artists, poets and writers have had to live with the uncomfortable recognition that conflict fuels their muse, invigorating the imagination and honing their creativity.

This book explores a diverse group of those artists and their work, from the conservative draughtsmanship of Scottish etcher Muirhead Bone to the irreverent angularity of the young gunner William Roberts; from the publicity-soaked antics of Richard Nevinson to the deluded ambitions of Sir William Orpen. In it, Paul Gough examines the work of those who were made famous by the war, and those whose reputations were almost irretrievably damaged. He explores in detail the wartime lives of fifteen artists – many of whom saw active service -- who are central to the way we now visualize the War on the Western Front and on more distant battlefields in Macedonia and Gallipoli.

On the First of May 2000, central London was beset by some of the most violent civil unrest seen on the streets of the capital for decades. Tens of thousands of activists had gathered as part of global anti-capitalist protests, drawing vast crowds under a miscellany of banners, causes and affiliations. Anti-road movement ‘Reclaim the Streets’ was one such splinter group. Over the previous five years it had staged numerous street interventions, unannounced occupations of city centre road junctions and pop-up protest parties such as the moment in mid-July 1996 when 6,000 protesters blocked a section of the elevated M41, a four-lane motorway running through Shepherd’s Bush in West London. Hidden underneath colourful dancers on stilts and wearing expansive wire-supported dresses, environmental activists busily drilled holes in the motorway tarmac and planted small trees and saplings; the noise of the pneumatic drills was drowned out by the blare of music sound-systems rolled onto the highway.

This exhibition investigates the properties of forest memory through text, archive, and “xylarium”, or wood collection. Between the French horticultural term “forest trauma” and Robert Pogue Harrison’s “forests of nostalgia”, a whole discipline around history, witnessing, and the memorial qualities of woodland opens up. Art works examining the cultural expression of time and history in the forest are placed here alongside archival photographs, small press texts, artefacts, and museum objects, in an old, low-lit belfry designed by Sir John Soane.

The use of trees and woodland to invoke the past is all around us, from local tree registers and writings (with titles like Legacy Trees, Our Living Memorials, Heritage Trees of Ireland, and Silent Witness: Diary of a Historic Tree), to the Forestry Commission’s 2005 policy for ancient and native woodland entitled “Keepers of Time”. This idea of “Keepers of Time”, of trees being stewards for human memory and the human story, catches the imagination of the government and the media; but it is also the subject of a number of works by artists, writers, and researchers. Relics, by Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson, uses the linguistic record to chart eleven lost tree genera, identified by pollen grain analysis in the 1960s. Edmund Hardy’s A Forest Set fragmentarily re-quotes Rachael Holtom’s Echoes of Epping Forest: Oral history of the 20th Century Forest, drawing attention to the logic by which historical experience is ‘accessed’ in the forest, and by which different voices become federated in a single account of social memory.

Paul Gough’s Upas Tree drawings take inspiration from Paul Nash’s wartime paintings, which link corpses to shattered or blasted trees, but also from the enigmatic fable of the dreaded Upas Tree, based in turn on the tale of the poisonous anchar tree, first revealed by 18th century botanist Erasmus Darwin. The French term “forest trauma”, used for post-war ecological devastation, is echoed by the linking of man and tree in the commonly used phrase ‘veteran tree’.

When serving as an orderly in the Beaufort Military Hospital, Bristol during the First World War, the young Stanley Spencer met Desmond Chute, a 20-year old aesthete and scion of a noted Bristol theatre family. A close friendship ensued, as the 31 letters in this collection attest. Far more sophisticated and better educated, Chute introduced the older man (Spencer was 24 when they met) to classical literature and great music and, perhaps most crucially, to the Confessions of St Augustine. Chute’s influence on Spencer s intellectual development cannot be exaggerated. Spencer’s often illustrated letters include some written while awaiting posting overseas, others from the battlefields of Macedonia give glimpses of his tribulations in a theatre of war, along with extraordinarily well-wrought reminiscences of Cookham, colourfully populated with places and characters. A few, concluding, letters were written from Fernlea back in his home village, and Hampstead in the 1920s.

Desmond Chute (1895-1962) was for a while at the Slade School of Art. He became an assistant to Eric Gill, and involved in the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic. He was admitted as a Catholic priest in 1927, moving to Italy where he was a friend of Ezra Pound. He had some success as a published writer and playwright, including a radio play broadcast by the BBC in 1955. All the letters are transcribed for the modern reader; some are also reproduced facsimile with Spencer s illustrations. A series of introductory essays, Stanley Spencer at war and peace , by Paul Gough give the background to the correspondence, discuss its importance to Spencer, and provide previously unpublished information about the Chute family. Archive photographs provide a visual context

In 1989, at the age of 22, Paul Lewin left Bristol, where he had studied Fine Art for three years and travelled three hours south to West Penwith in Cornwall. He intended to stay for a few months so that he might rekindle an interest in the Cornish landscape he had first experienced at art school. He never returned north and has been based in the far south-west ever since.

Lewin hailed from Manchester, that vast conurbation and 'ideopolis' in the north-west of England, arguably the country's second city after London. As a young boy of seven or eight, he remembers being taken for a visit to nearby Stockport College of Art by his father, who was then studying textile design and helping to mix the coloured gouache paint for intricate wallpaper and carpet designs. A talented child at secondary school, the young Lewin showed such potential in drawing that he gained a place at the same college, which was then renowned (as it still is) for its attention to the essentials of fine art practice. Lewin prospered under the guidance of such lecturers as Duncan Watnough and Derek Wilkinson who laid taught drawing from rigorous observation and laid down the principles of the craft of painting.

This new book takes the form of a collection of existing paintings, and others created specifically for this publication, each painting marking a walking line west from Newlyn along the headland to Land’s End, then north to Zennor. The images are accompanied by a text written by Paul Gough. contextualising Paul Lewin’s practice in the history of Cornish painting, the tradition of en plein work, but also offers a commentary on the artist’s sojourn across West Penwith. The book also includes an interview between the painter and writer which covers the artist’s approach to painting, his methods, materials and those artists and writers who matter most to him.

The Holy Box continues Gough’s published research into the work of British painter Sir Stanley Spencer who served as an official war artist in both world wars. Gough was given unique access to the archive held by the National Trust of correspondence between the artist, the architect Lionel G Pearson and the patrons Louise and Mary Behrend who provided the funding and guidance for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, Hampshire, which Spencer painted between 1924 and 1932, and reflected his war experiences in Bristol and the Balkans, now Macedonia.

The archive of material consisted not only of daily and weekly correspondence between the three main protagonists but also the financial papers, construction history, blueprints and designs related to the vexed history of the design, build and interior decoration. In order to tell the full story of the chapel, now regarded as one of the emblematic painted memorials of the Great War and unique in northern Europe, Gough brought together leading biographers, garden historians, national experts in silversmithing and ecclesiastic decoration to undertake detailed analysis of the social and material culture of the chapel. Each chapter relates an aspect of the chapel’s history and reception.

Gough’s work contributes detailed understanding of the importance of Spencer’s commemorative paintings, based on unique material never before analysed, interpreted and published. Gough was invited to present his research at international conferences in Thessaloniki, Macedonia, May 2018, and Ypres, Belgium in August 2018.

The book was launched in Burghclere at the invitation of the National Trust on the 90th anniversary of the consecration of the chapel in March 2017, in the company of both of Spencer’s daughters, Unity and Shirin, and grandson John Spencer, who now manages the Spencer estate in collaboration with the Stanley Spencer Gallery and the Tate.

The scene that followed was the most remarkable that I have ever witnessed. At one moment there was an intense and nerve shattering struggle with death screaming through the air. Then, as if with the wave of a magic wand, all was changed; all over ‘No Man’s Land’ troops came out of the trenches, or rose from the ground where they had been lying.

In 1917 the British government took the unprecedented decision to ban the depiction of the corpses of British and Allied troops in officially sponsored war art. A decade later, in 1927, Australian painter Will Longstaff exhibited Menin Gate at Midnight which shows a host of phantom soldiers emerging from the soil of the Flanders battlegrounds and marching towards Herbert Baker’s immense memorial arch. Longstaff could have seen the work of British artist and war veteran Stanley Spencer. His vast panorama of post-battle exhumation, The Resurrection of the Soldiers, begun also in 1927, was painted as vast tracts of despoiled land in France and Belgium were being recovered, repaired, and planted with thousands of gravestones and military cemeteries. As salvage parties recovered thousands of corpses, concentrating them into designated burial places, Spencer painted his powerful image of recovery and reconciliation. This article will locate this period of ‘re-membering’ in the context of such artists as Will Dyson, Otto Dix, French film-maker Abel Gance, and more recent depictions of conflict by the photographer Jeff Wall. However, unlike the ghastly ‘undead’ depicted in Gance’s 1919 film or Wall’s ambushed platoon in Afghanistan, Spencer’s resurrected boys are pure, whole, and apparently unsullied by warfare.

The British government was slow to commission artists in the First World War. French and German artists had been recording the battlefronts long before the Scottish draughtsman Muirhead Bone was appointed the first official British war artist in mid-1916. Further painters and printmakers were eventually commissioned by the Department of Information, intending to use their work as little more than pictorial propaganda. Drawn from the art establishment and the royal academies, none of these artists had seen active service, and their imagery was indebted to an honourable (but outmoded) tradition of battle art or reportage.

Within a year, a second wave of younger artists, most them serving with the armed forces, had been recruited in an ambitious and comprehensive programme of arts patronage. Before the war many of these painters, printmakers and sculptors had been associated with Wyndham Lewis, self-appointed ringmaster of a brilliant clique of young Modernists who readily embraced the geometric dynamism of Cubism and Futurism. From their workshop, the Rebel Art Centre in central London, they contrived a powerful visual style, which the Imagist poet Ezra Pound dubbed ‘Vorticism’, a loud and jagged, irreverent aesthetic that was in lockstep with the new machine age.

Painters Paul Nash and Christopher Nevinson were loosely linked with the Vorticists, the latter enjoying a constant and colourful battle for supremacy with Lewis. Both men gained first-hand experience of the Front, Nash as an infantry officer, Nevinson as a medical orderly. Their experience of the battlefields in France and Belgium and the impact on the men who fought there resulted in art of immense power and singularity of vision, unparalleled in modern times.

What does war sound like? During the 2014 centenary of the start of the First World War the question has driven historians, archivists and artists to attempt recreations of a comprehensive sonic landscape of this Great War. There are no known authentic audio recordings of battle from the period but sound engineering has contrived to recreate the sounds of this first modern war. Focusing on the Western Front, historians have created a typology of sound by identifying the particular qualities of each weapon type that was used there. For the 2014 BBC Scotland documentary Pipers of the Trenches British writer and historian Michael Stedman collaborated with Paul Wilson, dubbing mixer at the Digital Design Studio, Glasgow School of Art, to create an audioscape intended to replicate a period of intense fighting during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The result is a rather colourful, though truly cacophonous, soundscape that assaults the ears. Although individual components can be identified the chaotic collage is essentially impressionistic. It tells us something about warfare in extremis, but perhaps less about the actual and separate acoustics of that conflict.

Less concerned with 'the beleaguered ear' of the front-line soldier, the artists explored in this chapter have an interest in the very opposite of the disturbing acoustic of warfare; instead they have become fascinated by the sounds of silence, particularly those associated with the rituals of remembrance. On Remembrance Sunday 2001, conceptual artist Jonty Semper released a double CD album, Kenotaphion, which captures the empty sounds of seventy years of silences recorded at Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday ceremonies at the London Cenotaph. Through her practice as a filmmaker and installation artist Katie Davies explores how society, territory and political debate are controlled. Francis Alÿs is a Belgian artist whose international work occupies the intersection between art, architecture, performance and social practice. Whereas Davies's filmic practice is predicated on a fixed tripod position located perpendicular to her chosen motif, Alÿs puts a premium on movement and collaboration.

In the summer of 2009 Bristol saw a remarkable phenomenon that made international news. An estimated 300,000 people queued for hours, often in pouring rain, for admission to the city’s museum & art gallery. They had been attracted by the media hype surrounding an exhibition ambiguously entitled ‘Banksy vs the Bristol Museum’.

There have been many celebratory books about Banksy, but this is the first non-partisan documentation of the Bristol event and an attempt to assess its local and wider impact. More than a dozen commentators, including art curators, historians, economists, journalists and local government managers, attempt to answer a raft of questions: Is Banksy a subversive influence or merely a bit of fun? Why is Banksy so important to Bristol? Are we dealing with art, ‘street art’ or graffiti? Where does the exhibition leave Bristol as an epicentre of ‘street art’? What was its economic impact?

The book looks at the setting up of the show and questions the need – other than to conform to the required Banksy mystique – for secrecy.

Bristol City Council took an unprecedented risk in allowing the Banksy team a free run of its galleries. The implications of this for future museum practice and for State encouragement of the popular arts are dealt with in detail.

In the wake of the exhibition the council designated a run-down area of the inner city for a ‘street art’ bonanza, inviting artists from around the world. The book attempts to judge the success of that initiative. Finally, a practising lawyer asks whether Banksy’s work can be given ‘listed building’ consent.

‘Stasis’ is widely accepted as the pre-eminent condition of the conflict on the Western Front; a war of congealment, fixity and stagnant immobility fought from defensive earthworks that were intended to be temporary but quickly became permanent.
In the battle zones a new spatial order emerged. Beyond the superficial safety of the front-line parapet was No-Man’s-Land; a liminal, unknown space, a ‘debateable land’ that could not be fully owned or controlled. Far beyond lay a green and unspoilt distance, a ‘Promised Land' that was forever locked in an unattainable future. This was the domain of imperial development and potential exploitation.
This chapter explores the spatiality of conflicts on the Great War battlefield, and draws on the work of several British artists, cartographers and surveyors who attempted to explore and lend visual form to the chaos. Through the act of mapping and drawing they attempted to systematize the outward devastation, whereby trees would become datum points, emptiness was labelled, and the few fixed features of the ravaged land became the immutable co-ordinates of a functional terrain, a strategic field, where maps where predicated as much on time as of place.

The Nobile Index is a series of monographic publications of art sales prices achieved at auction, for a selection of leading 20th-century British artists. Stanley Spencer, arguably one of the greatest British artists of the twentieth-century, is also renowned for his chequered sales history and money struggles.

This rigorous study into the prices his work now commands at auctions demonstrates the significance of major sales over the past twenty-five years and the increasing value the market places upon Spencer's paintings. The publication comes in two sections - an introduction by renowned Spencer specialist Professor Paul Gough, results and analysis, and a booklet insert of appendices.

In the year which marked the centenary of the start of the First World War, a series of creative projects in Bristol considered past, contemporary and continuing conflicts. A unique record of these exhibitions and events has now been captured for this book.

Under the generic title Back From the Front: Art, Memory and the Aftermath of War the projects consisted of five overlapping exhibitions staged at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, UK - a curated show of work by John and Paul Nash; a unique gathering of work by contemporary artists examining war and peace under the title Shock and Awe: Contemporary Artists at War and Peace, and a sequence of exhibitions united under the word Re-membering, which were a series of commissions funded by the Arts Council England and co-ordinated by the Bristol Cultural Development Partnership and Bristol 2014. A fifth exhibition The Death of Nature gave a showcase to the recent paintings of Michael Porter RWA.

The war to recover the Falkland Islands from invasion in 1982 has been described as the last eruption of colonial warfare to be fought by the British Empire. The short, scrappy conflict was conducted under draconian restrictions that controlled the transmission of images, texts and first-hand frontline narratives. Despite an imaginative record of commissioning war art in the 20th century, the British government, through its Artistic Records Committee, chose to send a single artist to accompany troops in the latter part of the war. Her background as a nationally recognised illustrator prepared her to depict the scenery of war, its idiosyncrasies and informal incidents. Her portfolio of line drawings reinforced positive notions of the authority of the eye-witness. First-hand visual testimony effectively trumped all. Newspaper photographers and those working on syndication to agencies produced an equally spontaneous body of raw material. This paper explores the front-line work produced at the time and the body of creative material that later emerged, as artists, art therapists and other visual commentators started to reflect, critique and celebrate the British Empire’s ‘last colonial war’.

Seemingly random acts of violence are occasionally acted upon monuments, memorials, and public icons of commemoration. On occasion, however, the rhetorical topography of cities arouses dialogue and interaction, especially at times of national or global crisis. Drawing on the theoretical work of Boyer and Matsuda, we explore the contested dialogues of commemoration as acts that go beyond evaluation, judgment, and of utterance, to become dia- logic, interventionist, and (in extremis) auto-destructive. This article uses as a case study the creation of an artwork masquerading as a temporary memorial, which was constructed by an artist as a work about commemoration rather than as a commemoration in itself. However, due to the particular circum- stances of its timing, coinciding as it did with the bombing of Afghanistan by America and its allies following the Twin Towers terrorist act in New York on 11 September 2001, it took on an unanticipated function. During the course of the show the Faux Cenotaph was written on, added to, subtracted from, and eventually dismantled by unknown hands. It became a locus for numerous expressions of protest with a sequence of interventions by a largely seen set of players, becoming a temporary version of what the Germans call a ‘Denkmal’: a monument that stands as a warning, causing us to meditate on the mistakes of the past, and hopefully to mend our ways. This paper sets out a number of arguments to suggest that following this sequence of unscheduled, and very radical, interventions the piece became a ‘guerilla-memorial’: a rejoinder to both the object and the genre of the monumental memorial itself.

Prankster, polemicist, painter, Banksy is arguably the world’s most famous unknown street artist. To the press and public, the question of Banksy’s identity is more intriguing than the legitimacy of his work and the price that celebrities, dealers and other wealthy patrons are prepared to pay for it. His greatest triumph has been his ability to keep that identity swathed in mystery, even though the artist’s name is said to be in the public domain beyond all reasonable doubt, readily available on Wikipedia and subject to myriad press revelations in the past five years. Anonymity is less important than the impact of his art, which is more than likely created, fabricated and situated by a group of collaborators. For this reason alone Banksy might best be understood as a ‘he’, ‘she’ or even ‘they’, but for all intents and purposes Banksy is widely-held to be a white male, now in his early to mid-forties, born in Bristol, western England and brought up in a stable middle class family, a pupil from a private cathedral school and a one-time goalkeeper in the infamous Sunday soccer team The Easton Cowboys. At least that is what we think we know. These are the known unknowns.

What 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 strongly entrepreneurial orientation of the University of Huddersfield is the subject of this article. A brief history is followed by sections on belief systems and values between employer engagement and the curriculum. The article concludes that collaborations outside academia are essential in guaranteeing vocational relevance in university teaching

Proceeding from the assumption that there is, and has been, inadequate emphasis on appropriate leadership development and support, at all levels of art and design leadership, this chapter examines contemporary evidence and experiences to test those assumptions. The 12 case studies underpinning this chapter were conducted during the GLAD conference in Cambridge in 2007.

Franca Donda (Italie, 1933-2017) s’est initiée à la photographie avec le photographe américain Paul Strand et s’est impliquée dans les cercles culturels de la gauche italienne. Si elle et son mari, le photographe Paolo Gasparini ont vécu quatre ans dans la Cuba révolutionnaire, c’est à Caracas que Donda a passé la majeure partie de sa vie. Avec d’autres femmes engagées, Donda y a contribué à la diffusion des idées féministes en créant de nouveaux récits filmiques et photographiques. Ses photos représentent aussi bien la lutte des féministes latino-américaines que la vie quotidienne des femmes de la classe ouvrière et des communautés indigènes, dans divers pays d’Amérique latine. Elles constituent des archives absolument uniques et pratiquement inédites qui peuvent être versées à l’histoire des femmes au Venezuela
et à l’histoire du féminisme en Amérique latine.

The paper discusses insights from a post-disciplinary artist who reflects on his artistic practice. This case study is written from an autoethnographical perspective, in a narrative-evocative voice, contextualised with Moon’s strate-
gies of reflective learning and the Socratic method. Adapted on Moon’s suggestions and based on the Socratic discourse of self-examination, semi-structured questions for the self-reflection have been prompted whilst reading texts of Bergson’s process philosophy. These questions have then been scrutinised if and how they are relevant to the artist’s practice. The artist also reflected on his emotions during the reflective writing process and in retrospective thereof which further developed the writing process and content selection of the self-reflection. The general aim of the subjective reflection was to verbalise the complex layers of meanings that are inherent in his artistic processes. The author anticipates that the self-reflection could serve as a case study for students in mainly, but not exclusively, tertiary art education. Ideally, the research could be a guidance, or inspiration, for students to find their own sources for reflection such as writings, artworks or exhibitions, which could trigger questions about their individual artistic processes and outcomes. Based on the artist’s experiences, in the context of his on-going doctoral research, such self-reflections could enhance other students’ and artists’ metacognitions as competencies to better communicate their own artistic practices.

This paper will expand on insights unearthed during a practice-led PhD recently undertaken by the author at University of the Arts, London. The research project is investigating illustrated skateboard deck artwork in order to identify the distinct visual aura the skateboarder conjures within popular culture. Skateboard deck artwork is a kind of illustrated vernacular, principally developed in California during the 1970s and 1980s, to market skateboard products. The imagery is distinguished by thematic concerns aimed at young adult skateboarders. A practice-led investigation will reveal the origins and function of this persistent illustrated language. This approach will rely upon the author’s prior experience as a professional illustrator and arts educator to illuminate the significance of visual aesthetics, thereby offering a new lens to survey skateboard’s resilient visual culture.

Walking Publics/Walking Arts is a research projectfunded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council  exploring the potential of the arts to sustain, encourage and more equitably support walking during and recovering from a pandemic.

I have two projects of mine featured in the exhibition:

https://walkcreate.gla.ac.uk/portfolio/the-herepath-project-kevan-manwaring/

https://walkcreate.gla.ac.uk/portfolio/king-arthur-way-kevan-manwaring/

The King Arthur Way is a brand new long-distance pilgrimage route (or ‘legendary walk’) devised by author and long-distance walker Kevan Manwaring, stretching across south-west England – it tells the story of King Arthur, whose legend is intrinsic to the psychogeography of the area. Starting at the dramatic sea-castle of Tintagel (the place of Arthur’s conception and Merlin’s Cave) and culminating in his final resting place, Glastonbury Abbey and the Isle of Avalon, this 153-mile-long walk is a mythic pilgrimage taking in key sites along the way that will bring the story of King Arthur alive. Along the way, the historical and archaeological evidence will seek to reveal the truth behind Arthur – a composite of traditions, a clash of myth and history.

The idea of a walk being a valid work of art in itself is something the artist Richard Long and others have explored. #WalkCreate offers a platform for modern creative-critical practitioners who use walking as a mode of artistic enquiry.

The video Twisting Metal with Earth was produced to explore how weather stations can be useful beyond their function as mechanical sensors. It was suggested that they also act as an aesthetic interface with the hyperobjects of big data and global climate. The video’s animated characters were voiced by interview recordings from couples discussing their experience of weather. One interviewee collected and shared data from his own weather station, others gave more experiential accounts. From the characters’, a conversation emerged that blurred the boundaries between global systems and local experience. Mechanical climate sensors and plants were discussed by the characters as useful objects to think through large and complex topics.

As UK universities undergo unprecedented internationalisation, they struggle to shape a plethora of cultural and social capitals into an educational environment that is fair and equitable for all. ‘While academia has opened its doors, it has been unwilling or unable to dismantle the norms, networks, and practices that reproduce white, rich male privilege’ states Shilliam (Shilliam, 2014, p.15). With existing concepts of social justice proving adequate, lecturers seek new interpretative models of inclusivity.

In teaching MA Fine Art, Illustration and Drawing, communities of practice are facilitated through discussion, collaboration and engagement between students of differing backgrounds, nationalities, life experiences and neurodiversity. Critical reflection and experiential learning are deeply embedded in these courses and their assessment. The documents that result, support and narrate an individual’s developmental journey, whilst contextualising the self within wider discourses and debates. Reviewing these textual and visual outputs in the context of unconscious gender bias, led me to consider the trajectory of autobiography in terms of diversity.

This article is a launchpad for further enquiry. It questions whether present-day assessments somehow mirror the patriarchal attributes of men’s autobiographies that traditionally focused on power, success and achievement within the public realm. It also examines the more personal, introspective modes of women’s day-to-day self-referential writings for more useful approaches. Perhaps the memoirs, house-keeping records, correspondence and diaries representing women’s real-life narratives have specific relevance to students reflecting and analysing their progress. Feminist artists strategically constructed autobiographies to accentuate the issues women faced. Maybe students could appropriate these methodologies to re-imagine, re-present and rewrite their learning experiences. Autobiography encompasses the subjective, embodied and relational complexities of memory, narrative, creativity, identity, experience and intentionality (Smith & Watson, 2012, p.8). Given these characteristics, the genre arguably demands more consideration in art education.

Habermas locates the distinction between the public and the private spheres in ancient Greece (Habermas, 1989, p.3). By the 1700s, the term home was commonly applied to the private sphere which was also seen as the domestic. This shift generated extensive critical debate during the 20th Century with the development of feminist discourse. In the 21st Century human migration and globalisation added a new dimension to the debate. As perceptions of home continue to shift, the two levels of debate are yet to be fully integrated. My research seeks to contribute towards bringing these two debates closer together by attempting to visualise home through my drawing practice. I appropriate methodologies utilised by feminist artists and theorists; specifically, the strategic use of autobiographic construct. A strategic autobiographic methodology allows me to address home within the context of globalisation and integrate both levels of debate.

In HOUSE, I utilise architectural drawing modes to test conceptions of home as housed by a physical building, only to find that I have no rest, retreat or home of my own within it.

In VIEW, I move around the interior, my defiantly time-consuming lines mapping household activities and tasks. These vision-based methods map the house but not home.

In BODY, I look for home through multi-sensory approaches and embodied inhabitation. What emerges is still the house.

In HOME, my drawings map the fluid experiential entity constituted by social interrelations and encounters. Familial obligations and responsibilities are presented textually and sorted repetitiously. In this way home is materialised as the ties, relations and duties today’s woman carries with her.

This article develops a comparative analysis of Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten, and Eva Szasz and Robert Verrall’s Cosmic Zoom, seen through the lenses of Bergsonian and Deleuzo- Guttarian philosophy. The author claims that, despite similarities with respect to their subject matter and modes of production, there are significant stylistic differences between these films that are suggestive of divergent ontological, epistemological and political commitments. Of particular importance is the foregrounding of objectivity in the case of Powers of Ten and subjectivity in the case of Cosmic Zoom – a distinction that is reflected in their respectively quasi-indexical and expressive modes of representation. This fundamental tension similarly conditions their differently inflected approaches to time, space and measure, drawing attention to the strange intertwining of representation, abstraction and affect that is characteristic of much animated film. Ultimately, it is proposed that, in the context of Powers of Ten and Cosmic Zoom, animation’s capacities for abstraction and expression are differently distributed, resulting in a cosmopolitical opposition which can be aligned with the Deleuzo–Guattarian distinctions between major and minor language, and royal and nomadic science.

Alongside South India’s rapid urbanisation, the early decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed the arrival of new digital technologies and social media platforms in India, opening new possibilities for performance on a mediatised urban and global stage. In a wave of popular performance practices emerging around 2011–2, Bengaluru (as with other cities across India) became the site to a host of flash mobs staged in urban spaces and filmed for online publics. This chapter examines the flash mob performance trend of that era in relation to national discourses of ‘New India’as an example of forms of cultural practice characterised by an ‘aesthetics of arrival’ in globalising India.

Downstream was a solo exhibition held in London during September-October 2019. The research question explored the divinatory powers of water through the process of painting as actual, metaphorical, symbolic and magical source. Utilising his immediate locality and family as visual material, Shepherd uses methodologies of ritual, trance, enactment and prediction as means of visualisation; the intuitive and unknowing are decision-making tools. The act of painting and the painted are where the intuitive is constructed into the concrete, a process of revelation through the act of making. Although seemingly of a very personal nature the finished outcomes are made as universal cyphers that act upon the audience; wider social; historical; cultural; political readings float to the surface. Through his lines of enquiry, painting becomes a scrying tool akin to water, reflection, surface and depth are synthesised through the mediating act of painting.

The exhibition was accompanied by a publication with written contributions by Professor Gavin Parkinson, Tim Russell and a commissioned poem by Miranda Peake. A public discussion between Parkinson and Shepherd on insights garnered in the creation of Downstream took place at the gallery during Frieze week London, drawing an international audience. Ongoing insights into the methodologies and context of the research were questioned through meetings and discussion with publication contributors, resulting in a joint conference paper at Painting Now at the Royal Academy, London (June 2018) and book chapter Dominic Shepherd and Richard Waring, ‘Head, Heart, Hand: Painting in a Post-Digital World’. Painting Now’, which was linked to the Black Mirror Research Network, of which Shepherd is a founding member.

Old England was a two-part exhibition of 19 pieces with differing works created by Shepherd for Charlie Smith London at NY Volta, a major international art fair specialising in solo projects and Charlie Smith London, a gallery with international reach.

As part of an extensive programme of research Shepherd has conducted systematic explorations of the nature of English identity, using mythological resonances, magical / surrealist methodologies and intuitive readings. At the heart of the questions being explored are the artist’s personal dichotomy between his own progressive social stance and romantic yearnings, which reflect a nation in a period of internal political strife and uncertainty. The making of these paintings was an act of negative capability, the defined zone of the artist’s habitat and environs becoming a receiver for poetic readings of wider cultural implications

Critical public debate is core to Shepherd’s research. The exhibition in NY Volta was supported by a public discussion between Shepherd and Jesse Brandsford (NYU Steinhardt) titled ‘Alternative Myths’, its subject: Fascism relies on myth, a form of ideological narcissism that twists reality and forces its own authoritarian will; examines how the mythic and magical is also used as a form of resistance, an alternative, to that authoritarianism.

The portfolio identifies adjacent research projects that informed Shepherd’s research into Englishness and contemporary crises of identity: Observatory residence and exhibition at ArtsWay, New Forest featuring research into Portland, an island off an island (July 2017); public discussion on the painted landscape at Sluice Festival, London (September-October 2017); Exhibition featuring Shepherd’s work ‘The Beast’ at ‘Width of a Circle’, Titan Warehouse, Stourbridge (March-April 2018) with published interview, ‘Burning Beyond the Logical Lake’, with Tom Hicks; presentation of ‘The Haunted Isle: Conjuring England’s Subconscious Landscape’ at International Society for the Study of Surrealism Conference, Bucknell University, USA (November 2018).

Making textiles with others is an exciting and unconventional way of doing research. It has developed from the discipline of textiles practice, but can be readily adapted within other disciplines, bringing arts-based research approaches into conversation with social science research. Textile-making activities can include knitting, sewing, crochet, weaving, dyeing, braiding and embroidery; we consider ‘making’ to also include related activities such as handling textiles or playing with clothes. There are many ways of Making Textiles Together: it should be thought of as an approach rather than a single method.

Making together is the key element of this approach. Activities can be highly diverse in terms of context, format and intention, from drop-in workshops to open-ended creative projects that might extend for months, or even years. They might be synchronous or asynchronous and might take place in person or online. Participants might contribute to one shared piece of work or work on individual textile pieces side by side.

These activities can be used to generate rich data of multiple types. Data might take form in the creative work itself or data might be generated alongside the things being made, for example in the form of audio recordings of discussions, observational notes, or video footage of gestures and interactions. Data can be generated by the researcher, by the participants, or both.

Making Textiles Together offers flexibility in terms of research questions. The approach can be used to investigate something that is closely linked to the act of making, such as how people with different cultural backgrounds learn hand-crafting skills. Alternatively, it can be used to research a completely different topic. For instance, the research focus might be to explore people’s coping strategies when grieving and the researcher might choose a textile making activity to create the desired environment for sharing these personal and sensitive stories. A third possibility is an action research approach that uses making to address and solve problems or create items that can be used directly by the participant group, such as mending garments or creating objects to meet specific needs.

Arising from a recently formed research network, Stitching Together, this article introduces a collection of case studies that critically examine participatory textile making as an emerging methodological approach to research. The twenty-first century resurgence of interest in textile processes such as knitting, sewing and weaving, whether as individual practice or community- based initiative, builds on a long and culturally diverse history of collaborative textile-making activity. This resurgence, combined with the familiarity, accessibility and flexibility of textile practices, has influenced a recent growth in the use of such activities as a means of inquiry within diverse research contexts.

The article considers the ways in which collective textile making projects privilege social encounter as a format for learning skills, creating friendships and consolidating shared interests. It goes on to discuss how researchers are drawing on these characteristics when devising new projects, highlighting the quality of experience afforded by textile making, the diverse forms of data generated and the variety of ways in which these participatory activities can be set up. Recognising that this research approach is far from straightforward, three key methodological themes are then considered: the multifaceted nature of the researcher’s role and the complexities of relationships with participants and other stakeholders; the difficulties that can arise when using such familiar textile processes; and the opportunities, and complexities, of co-producing knowledge with participants through collaborative textile activity.

Despite their many political and philosophical allegiances, Deleuze and Derrida might— in accordance with Deleuze and Parnet’s dictum—be best described as the opposite of a couple. While their mutual hostility towards conceptual stasis, overly linear approaches to temporality and excessively centred notions of subjectivity targeted a number of common philosophical opponents, this apparent unity of purpose arose out of some seemingly incommensurable tensions: Deleuze’s mode of ontological enquiry squared poorly with Derrida’s rejection of metaphysics; Deleuze’s positive engagement with the sciences, and his prioritisation of material-sensation sat awkwardly with Derrida’s more pervasively textual and somewhat idealist orientation; and Deleuze’s development of an impersonal concept of Husserlian expression served to check Derrida’s rather more stringent and single minded rejection of phenomenological presentism.

It is important to remember, however, that like Derrida, Deleuze was predominately a writer—albeit a writer with an at once affective, performative, and corporeal agenda. Indeed, when taken at face value, it would seem to have been Derrida who more directly explored the graphic potentialities of experimental writing. Deleuze’s emphasis upon performativity, emergence, and onto-genetic construction nevertheless serves to extend and supplement the Derridian account of textuality by exposing its neglect of the process of writing. In so doing it foregrounds the potential for Deleuzo-Derridian philosophy to instantiate a genuinely aesthetico-conceptual image of thought.

This article is a contribution to the section on colour photography that I guest-edited for PhotoResearcher 31 (also including articles by Dr Laure Blanc-Benon and Dr Caroline Fuchs).

The text discusses the intrinsic elusiveness of colour photography vis-à-vis the complex historical baggage of its synthetic nature and in respect of Rainbow’s Gravity (Mareike Bernien and Kerstin Schroedinger, 2014) and A 240 Seconds Analysis of Failure and Hopefulness (with Coke, Vinegar and other Tear Gas Remedies) (Basim Magdy, 2012),

Despite the censorship of dissident material during the decade between the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, a number of photographers across Japan produced a versatile body of Surrealist work. A pioneering study of their practice, this book draws on primary sources and extensive archival research in order to map out art historical and critical contexts relevant to the apprehension of this rich photographic output, most of which is previously unseen outside of its country of origin. Richly illustrated, the volume is an essential resource in the fields of Surrealism and Japanese history of art, for researchers and students of historical avant-gardes and photography, as well as for readers interested in visual culture.

Photography’s role in the historical framing of how we see can hardly be overestimated: heralded as the most extraordinary invention in vision, it was meant to deliver the promise of technology’s ability to enrich and improve human sight. Simultaneously, the medium’s capacity to offer photographic evidence placed it at the crossroads of the techniques of representation and regulation. Even as the machine is ever so rapidly substituting the eye in the forging of endless stream of visual data that we are now subjected to, digital vision still relies on the photographic image.
Against such a background, this article departs from a proposition that if we were to envision different ways of seeing we can start from a reformulated understanding of photography. In order to do so, the article critically examines recent photographic works by Taisuke Koyama and Nihal Yesil and argues that abstract photography in particular enables the recognition of material entanglements between the medium and what it aspires to represent. ‘Following’ such materials as cellophane, aluminium, PVC as well as light, the article also mobilises Karen Barad’s project of agential realism in its view of abstract photography as a tool for looking with, a vehicle that enables the rethinking of the medium and, by implication, the ethical parameters of vision that hinges on it.

Narrative comprehension, memory, motion, depth perception, synesthesia, hallucination, and dreaming have long been objects of fascination for cognitive psychologists. They have also been among the most potent sources of creative inspiration for experimental filmmakers. Lessons in Perception melds film theory and cognitive science in a stimulating investigation of the work of iconic experimental artists such as Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Maya Deren, and Jordan Belson. In illustrating how avant-garde filmmakers draw from their own mental and perceptual capacities, author Paul Taberham offers a compelling account of how their works expand the spectator’s range of aesthetic sensitivities and open creative vistas uncharted by commercial cinema.

Experimental Animation: From Analogue to Digital, focuses on both experimental animation’s deep roots in the twentieth century, and its current position in the twenty-first century media landscape. Each chapter incorporates a variety of theoretical lenses, including historical, materialist, phenomenological and scientific perspectives. Acknowledging that process is a fundamental operation underlining experimental practice, the book includes not only chapters by international academics, but also interviews with well-known experimental animation practitioners such as William Kentridge, Jodie Mack, Larry Cuba, Martha Colburn and Max Hattler. These interviews document both their creative process and thoughts about experimental animation’s ontology to give readers insight into contemporary practice.

Global in its scope, the book features and discusses lesser known practitioners and unique case studies, offering both undergraduate and graduate students a collection of valuable contributions to film and animation studies.

As uncompromising as it may be, learning to appreciate experimental animation yields a world of provocative, visceral and enriching experiences. We may ask, what does one need to know when first venturing into this style of ani- mation? What are the first principles one should understand? This chapter outlines some of the underlying assumptions that can serve as a springboard when stepping into this wider aesthetic domain.

This book challenges the status quo of the materiality of exhibited photographs, by considering examples from the early to mid-twentieth century, when photography’s place in the museum was not only continually questioned but also continually redefined.

By taking this historical approach, Laurie Taylor demonstrates the ways in which materiality (as opposed to image) was used to privilege the exhibited photograph as either an artwork or as non-art information. Consequently, the exhibited photograph is revealed, like its vernacular cousins, to be a social object whose material form, far from being supplemental, is instead integral and essential to the generation of meaning.

Contact: A Festival of New Experimental Film and Video, Apiary Studios, London, 6-8 May 2016. Curator.

Participating artists including George Barber, Louisa Fairclough, Nicky Hamlyn, Sally Golding, Malcolm Le Grice, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, Matthew Noel-Tod, Heather Phillipson, Greg Pope, Lis Rhodes, Ben Rivers, Guy Sherwin & Lynn Loo, Jennet Thomas, Jennet Thomas, Andrea Zimmerman.

Contact: A Festival of New Experimental Film and Video featured 70 film, video and performance artists across three days in its venues’ three studios. Its curatorial focus combined a multiplicity of forms, in an accessible and aware manner, which brought together niche and new audiences and formed an important contribution to the contemporary condition of experimental film practices in the UK.

This independent survey, which was supported by ACE, presented single and multi-projector and performance-related works, and specially commissioned installations. To schedule the works in a relatable manner an innovative structure was initiated – the works were presented in small clusters, rather than the normative, often lengthy and formally inappropriate, short film programme format - which challenged viewing hierarchies, introduced new artists, providing the opportunity for the ‘sampling’ and discovery of unknown works. This conception was appreciated by the audience and artists alike (William Raban wrote: ‘Your programming was enlightened').

The Festival programmed established and emerging artists, from original members of the London Filmmakers Co-op to recent graduates, who showed new and untested works. These were selected in consultation with organisations such as no.w.here, collective-iz, Unconscious Archives, Nightworks and Screen Shadows. This ethos reflected the field’s and Festival’s co-operative and collaborative intent, and was emphasised by the supportive presence of many of the artists throughout its duration.

To document the event’s intentions and methodology a publication was produced, which included contextual essays, discussion pieces and all the Festival’s details (Guy Sherwin wrote: 'the brochure is simple, informative, elegant’). This also addressed its legacy through further disseminating its composition and ideas, as such collectable reference points are vital indicators of experimental film and video’s development. The Festival’s discursive structure, which celebrated the fields’ diversity and vibrancy, was enthusiastically and critically received, with each day selling-out.

The Contact Festival included the work of over 70 artists and filmmakers, featuring single-screen films, multi-screen/performance-related works and site-specific installations. Accompanied by a publication including discussion pieces by Luke Aspell and collective-iz (on collective practices), Sally Golding, James Holcombe and Cathy Rogers (on different manifestations of contemporary expanded cinema), and short essays by Maria Palacios Cruz (LUX, Deputy Director), William Fowler (BFI, curator of artists' moving image) and Nicky Hamlyn (filmmaker and writer), plus complete listings.

The Contact Festival included the work of over 70 artists and filmmakers, featuring single-screen films, multi-screen/performance-related works and site-specific installations. Accompanied by a publication including discussion pieces by Luke Aspell and collective-iz (on collective practices), Sally Golding, James Holcombe and Cathy Rogers (on different manifestations of contemporary expanded cinema), and short essays by Maria Palacios Cruz (LUX, Deputy Director), William Fowler (BFI, curator of artists' moving image) and Nicky Hamlyn (filmmaker and writer), plus complete listings.

Contact is a unique configuration of eight artists, which is structured equally across two exhibitions, at New Art Projects, London. These artists work in distinct and interrelated mediums and forms that explore material, temporal and spatial relations working with stil and moving images, analogue and digital practices, human and machine processes. Their distinct approaches and applications produce different, but related, medium engagement, viewing regimes and cross-disciplinary discourse. They are in contact with materials, forms, context, one another, and are part of an ongoing conversation that generates new connections and ideas.

Curated by: Andrew Vallance

Part 1: 20 July-17 August 2024
Jenny Baines, Sophie Clements, Carali McCali, Cathy Rogers

Part 2: 18 January-8 February 2025
Savinder Bual, Jim Hobbs, Simon Payne, Andrew Vallance

Film Talks is an edited collection of unique conversations on experimental cinema from a range of eminent and emerging film and video makers. The book represents a contemporary snapshot of the ways in which experimental cinema is perceived by its practitioners, often in relation to other art forms, moving image culture at large and wider social issues. It is an invaluable guide for those keen to immerse themselves in the insights and perspectives that only artists can offer.

Film Talks: 15 Conversations on Experimental Cinema is a collection of unique conversations on experimental cinema, involving a range of international film and video makers from the United Kingdom, Europe and North America. The book represents a snapshot of the diverse ways that these practitioners have come to think about the field of experimental cinema, in relation to other art forms, moving image culture at large, and wider social issues. Film Talks: A Touring Programme of Experimental Cinema, a series of eight international screenings, is in two parts and features twenty-one 16mm films and video works by artists who feature in the book, drawing out new ideas and connections that span different visions of cinema.

Pairs: - / -, The Depot, London, 19, 27 June & 3, 10 July 2017. Curator.

Featuring: Jennifer Nightingale/Simon Payne, Nick Collins/Cathy Rodgers, Nicky Hamlyn/Neil Henderson, Amy Dickson/Jamie Jenkinson

Pairs: - / -, was a curated series of four events, each of which featured two artist-filmmakers, who presented new work, alongside a work that inspired them, and was introduced by a printed version of a conversation between the featured pair. Its combination of works and words, and consideration of site, facilitated research into creative, critical and curatorial practice and its public manifestation.

My curatorial practice examines film and video exhibition configuration, the resulting spectatorship and addresses the need to develop more accessible knowledge exchange, through challenging the passivity of most film presentations. Pairs’ furthered my investigation into the importance of discursive programming, how through this developmental methodology artists and audiences can experience a more rewarding encounter.

The series presented diverse experimental film and video practices through peer-to-peer and artist-to-audience dialogues. The pairs had shared and/or contrasting areas of interest, and their transcribed conversations, which is a neglected area of research, reflected on their own and one another’s practices and informed the series. Further to this, the artists’ inspirational film choices provided tracible linkages. The works were presented in their original formats – film and digital projections (single and double screen) and multi-media performance – reinforcing the importance of medium specificity within this field. Some of the artists are key figures in the history of experimental film and in combining their work with that of younger artists, the ‘pairings’ built on the field’s legacy and dissemination.

This configuration allowed related debates - contextual histories, thematic focus, exhibition strategies - to occur in an insightful and relatable manner. It reflected the featured works’ experimental intent, a questioning of form and content, created an active encounter between the works and their reception, always an experimental aspiration, and offered a more interactive experience through its discursive assemblage.

Pairs: - / -, The Depot, London, 19, 27 June & 3, 10 July 2017. Curator.

Featuring: Jennifer Nightingale/Simon Payne, Nick Collins/Cathy Rodgers, Nicky Hamlyn/Neil Henderson, Amy Dickson/Jamie Jenkinson

Pairs: - / -, was a curated series of four events, each of which featured two artist-filmmakers, who presented new work, alongside a work that inspired them, and was introduced by a printed version of a conversation between the featured pair. Its combination of works and words, and consideration of site, facilitated research into creative, critical and curatorial practice and its public manifestation.

My curatorial practice examines film and video exhibition configuration, the resulting spectatorship and addresses the need to develop more accessible knowledge exchange, through challenging the passivity of most film presentations. Pairs’ furthered my investigation into the importance of discursive programming, how through this developmental methodology artists and audiences can experience a more rewarding encounter.

The series presented diverse experimental film and video practices through peer-to-peer and artist-to-audience dialogues. The pairs had shared and/or contrasting areas of interest, and their transcribed conversations, which is a neglected area of research, reflected on their own and one another’s practices and informed the series. Further to this, the artists’ inspirational film choices provided tracible linkages. The works were presented in their original formats – film and digital projections (single and double screen) and multi-media performance – reinforcing the importance of medium specificity within this field. Some of the artists are key figures in the history of experimental film and in combining their work with that of younger artists, the ‘pairings’ built on the field’s legacy and dissemination.

This configuration allowed related debates - contextual histories, thematic focus, exhibition strategies - to occur in an insightful and relatable manner. It reflected the featured works’ experimental intent, a questioning of form and content, created an active encounter between the works and their reception, always an experimental aspiration, and offered a more interactive experience through its discursive assemblage.

Pairs: - / -, The Depot, London, 19, 27 June & 3, 10 July 2017. Curator.

Featuring: Jennifer Nightingale/Simon Payne, Nick Collins/Cathy Rodgers, Nicky Hamlyn/Neil Henderson, Amy Dickson/Jamie Jenkinson

Pairs: - / -, was a curated series of four events, each of which featured two artist-filmmakers, who presented new work, alongside a work that inspired them, and was introduced by a printed version of a conversation between the featured pair. Its combination of works and words, and consideration of site, facilitated research into creative, critical and curatorial practice and its public manifestation.

My curatorial practice examines film and video exhibition configuration, the resulting spectatorship and addresses the need to develop more accessible knowledge exchange, through challenging the passivity of most film presentations. Pairs’ furthered my investigation into the importance of discursive programming, how through this developmental methodology artists and audiences can experience a more rewarding encounter.

The series presented diverse experimental film and video practices through peer-to-peer and artist-to-audience dialogues. The pairs had shared and/or contrasting areas of interest, and their transcribed conversations, which is a neglected area of research, reflected on their own and one another’s practices and informed the series. Further to this, the artists’ inspirational film choices provided tracible linkages. The works were presented in their original formats – film and digital projections (single and double screen) and multi-media performance – reinforcing the importance of medium specificity within this field. Some of the artists are key figures in the history of experimental film and in combining their work with that of younger artists, the ‘pairings’ built on the field’s legacy and dissemination.

This configuration allowed related debates - contextual histories, thematic focus, exhibition strategies - to occur in an insightful and relatable manner. It reflected the featured works’ experimental intent, a questioning of form and content, created an active encounter between the works and their reception, always an experimental aspiration, and offered a more interactive experience through its discursive assemblage.

Resemblance to Other Animals (16 mins, HD, 2019) is a memory work that considers locational effect and its recollection. Its key elements, images of encased taxidermy and a traveller’s voice, offer different temporal plains and positions. The images were shot in the Horniman Museum’s, London, natural history gallery and the recordings were inspired by work related travel, time away from home. These combined sensory streams, conjoined by narrative’s reason, suggest temporal and spatial complexity and the partialness of remembrance.

The Horniman Museum is a testament to the Victorian mania for collecting, which was also the time of the ‘memory crisis’ when Bergson, Freud, Proust and later Benjamin were proposing a new intuitive, individuated, understanding of memory. A museum collection creates history, a vision of the past, that is in itself a product of history. Resemblance to Other Animals juxtaposes this site with personal recollection, which relates a sense of place to identity and can challenge institutionalised positions, examining how this correlation can be conceptualised and represented.

This examination considers whether the artistic engagement with form and content can formulate a place of creative reckoning, were an imaginative exploration can occur and a different past can be discovered, and if these sensory and conceptual elements can create a memorious investigation that generates new readings.

Underline produces public film and live performance events. Thus far, it has had three iterations (2022–4), which were staged as part of Open House Festival, London.

It would re-imagine urban public space through artistic intervention, encouraging active co-existence and co-experimentation. Its past programmes featured an open call and invited participants, an inclusivity that places the inexperienced (of all ages) next to international figures, who are all locally connected. The exhibited film and performance work was presented after dark, in an otherwise overlooked location, a Victorian railway bridge that divides the historic terraced street, Beck Road, in east London. The road was closed for the event and the arch of the bridge was repurposed, becoming a screen, creating a truly common space, an inclusive ‘stage’, that brought residents, artists, visitors, neighbours alike together as creators and audience - European Heritage Days, observed it ‘featured a remarkable line-up of locally-made video art.’

Underline explores the re-imagining of urban space, an environment in which a disconnect can develop between the individual and place, producing disenfranchisement, a contested realm. Its method addresses ‘sense-of-place’ and its impact on ‘sense-of-self’ and community, proposing that artistic intervention can engender creative participation and collective engagement, which can help produce more common understanding, a new ‘sense-of-ownership.’

This 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.

The Genius Loci exhibition asks how ten artists can explore sensations of landscape, how are experiences of sensing the character of a landscape transformed into a painted surface or a sonic action? How does each person’s diverse knowledge of that place inform the artwork? Katie Barons is an artist who investigates sensations felt when immersing herself in nature and capturing these sensations using paint. The series of paintings in this exhibition are derived from Hengistbury Head, a headland which wraps around Christchurch Harbour not far from Bournemouth. Luke Mintowt-Czyz’s uses the physicality of paint to explore competing physical tensions on Bournemouth beach where the polarities of young and old, rich and poor, lonely and connected, healthy and ill, extrovert and introvert, coalesce on the seashore each summer in a writhing bodily mass. Sonic Camouflage is a series of collaborative improvisational sound workshops which asks how an ancient Greek whistling language called Sfyria can be used to provoke the creation of contemporary collective artworks.

The 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=rA5t0gYd088

Transmission 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:
transmission151218

The deep geological repository project for the long-term storage of radioactive material opens an encounter between design processes in the present and the ‘deep time’ of 4.46 billion year futures. Beyond debates around ethics of responsibility to future generations, this paper argues,
this invokes a more radical futurity, where human thought confronts its contingency alongside nuclear timescales. Art practices play a key ‘stakeholder’ role in imagining repository sites, in a context where they are both rooted in materialities of stochastic decay process and necessarily subject to interdisciplinary transformation. This paper asks what specific knowledge art practices
could give us in this context. What are their potentials and problems? And what could this mean for the historical conditions of ‘contemporary art’? It does this through departing from the 2010 film Into Eternity and its production of awe-struck ineffability through cinematic allusion to massive duration. Deep radiological times are proposed instead not as ‘eternity’ but as ‘very large
finitude’ (Morton), not immeasurable but as call to develop art practice through collective experimentation and technological augmentation. This extends Nick Srnicek’s proposal for an ‘aesthetics of the interface’ as a making operational of complex data through making it amenable
to the senses, and concludes with some propositions from the author’s current art practice.

This chapter describes the study the author carried out with two 2nd year acting degree students assessed as dyslexic, and how they gained an autonomy over the processing and performing of Shakespeare’s text. The study aimed to develop inclusive teaching strategies to facilitate the abilities of those with dyslexia and bypass their difficulties with reading. For those with dyslexia the reading and speaking of Shakespeare’s text can present significant challenges. This difficulty undermines practical work and masks the abilities of the dyslexic student actor. Conversely, Shakespeare’s rich language encourages a construction of meaning through visually interpreted modalities. The study demonstrated that the participants created an additional text of drawings, colours and symbols, replacing the alphabetical text, embedding meaning into long-term memory. This chapter shares the experiences of the two students and the author as teacher. These observations offer insights for improving inclusive pedagogical choices, when working with dyslexic acting students.

Abstract
This article discusses the challenges that dyslexic acting degree students can experience when engaging with classical text, offering a pedagogical strategy that facilitates the reading, and acting of Shakespeare. Calling attention to restrictions that dyslexic acting students can experience, the author considers how these difficulties might be overcome. It is re-iterated throughout the literature that those with dyslexia have problems with decoding, word recognition, working-memory and automatisation of skills. Shakespeare’s writing contributes additional challenges with idiosyncrasies of word-use. Describing her action-research trials with dyslexic acting students, the author shares her development of a teaching method, which supports identification of meaning and hierarchy within the text, interlinked with an appropriation of physical practice drawn from Brecht and Stanislavski. The final action-research cycle drew from Kintsch and Rawson’s Text-Base (2005) to enable a comprehension and memory of the text, underpinned by the Lexical Retrieval hypothesis (Krauss et al., 2000). The strategy was trialled in a performance of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis with dyslexic acting students. The participants’ modes of processing the text were encouraged as components of performance. Feedback supported the view that this method is effective in assisting dyslexic individuals in realisation of words, self-efficacy and enriched performance.

This book addresses some of the challenges met by acting students with dyslexia and highlights the abilities demonstrated by individuals with specific learning differences in actor training. The book offers six tested teaching strategies, created from practical and theoretical research investigations with dyslexic acting students, using the methodologies of case study and action research. Cross-disciplinary methods are introduced when working on Shakespeare’s text, developing inclusive approaches of pedagogy.

The investigations described in the book explore the visual, kinaesthetic and multisensory processing preferences demonstrated by some acting students assessed as dyslexic, specifically when working with complex texts such as Shakespeare. Utilising Shakespeare’s text as a laboratory of practice, and drawing directly from the voices and practical work of the dyslexic students themselves, the book explores:
• the stress caused by dyslexia and how the teacher might ameliorate it through changes in their practice
• the theories and discourse surrounding the label of dyslexia
• acting approaches for engaging with Shakespeare’s language, enabling those with dyslexia to develop their authentic voice and
abilities
• A grounding of the words and the meaning of the text through embodied cognition, spatial awareness and epistemic tools
• Stanislavski’s method of units and actions and how it can benefit and obstruct the student with dyslexia when working on
Shakespeare
• Interpretive Mnemonics as a memory support and hermeneutic process; the use of colour and drawing towards an autonomy in live
performance

This book is a valuable resource for voice and actor training, professional performance, and for those who are curious about emancipatory methods that support difference through humanistic teaching philosophies.

The presence of students with SpLD (dyslexia) in actor-training institutions is an increasingly common occurrence. This article argues that there is an urgent need to develop inclusive strategies of support in the voice and acting studio that can effectively enable those with dyslexia, while promoting equality of opportunity for realization of potential. Focusing on the author’s research concerning the facilitation of acting students with dyslexia in the areas of reading, speaking and acting of Shakespeare, this article begins by highlighting specific difficulties presented by dyslexia. It goes on to describe a case-study of two acting students with dyslexia and their visually led methods employed in entering Shakespeare’s text. The second workshop section offers a pedagogical strategy for the inclusive voice class when working on Shakespeare, while the third section dedicated to participant three demonstrates how a dyslexic acting student uses a visually led approach in enhancing her articulation of speech and extrapolation of meaning in the text. Underpinning the investigations with analysis and theory, the author concludes by sharing her research findings, seeking to stimulate further discussion within the community of voice and actor- training.

In the context of a rapidly changing world, Rachel Worth explores the ways in which the clothing of the rural working classes was represented visually in paintings and photographs and by the literary sources of documentary, autobiography and fiction, as well as by the particular pattern of survival and collection by museums of garments of rural provenance. The book analyses the ways in which clothing and how it is represented throws light on wider social and cultural aspects of society, as well as how 'traditional' styles of dress, like men's smock-frocks or women's sun-bonnets, came to be replaced by 'fashion'. This study, with black & white and colour illustrations, both adds a broader dimension to the history of dress by considering it within the social and cultural context of its time and discusses how clothing enriches our understanding of the social history of the Victorian period.

In what ways do changing notions of social class correspond with key developments in the history of fashion? Focusing on examples ranging from 18th-century Britain to aspects of the global fashion industry in the early 21st century, 'Fashion and Class' examines the meaning and evolution of the term 'class', from its Marxist origins to modern day interpretations. Did industrialisation, technological change and developments in fashion retailing bring about a degree of 'class levelling' or in fact intensify class antagonism? And to what extent does modern mass consumption and cheap labour revive some of the ethical issues faced in 19th-century British textile factories? Exploring a variety of case studies that examine the changing relationships between fashion and class in different historical contexts, from the French revolutionaries of the 1780-90s through to the changing relationships between couture, designer and high-street fashion in the mid-20th century and onwards, this book is essential reading for those wishing to understand the ways in which the fashion system is closely connected with ideas of class.