Items where Subject is "Installation"

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.

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.

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 research concluded in an exhibition at Dorset County Museum in 2018. The research explored how scenographic design processes can be used in the creation of visual art, with a purpose of reconceptualizing the complex ideas of deep time and the Anthropocene. Howard (2009) states that ‘Scenographic story telling brings an individual angle to a well-known work so it can be presented to a fresh audience’. I claim that by approaching this art work from a scenographic view point I have developed an exhibition that unpacks the complexity of Earth’s story in a playful and engaging way. Deep time is a notion of geological time determined by the long and dense history of Earth’s development over 4.5 billion years. In this exhibition I used a Longcase Clock, together with other interactive artefacts, to consider emerging theories about time. The Anthropocene is currently an informal term to signify a contemporary time interval in which surface geographical processes are dominated by human activities (Zalasiewicz, Crutzen, Steffen, 2012). By using the construct of the Anthropocene in the artwork I encouraged the audience to think about the world and to be naturally curious about its future. This artwork is the outcome of research which engaged with museum collections, earth scientists and natural forms as well as the development of materials. I collaborated with a theatre director to create dramaturgy in these static artefacts ‘using metaphor[s] to draw [people] into a world plausible for tackling obscure and abstract ideas’ (Braund, 2015).

Within and Between: Women, Bodies, Generations took the form of four sculptural installations staged jointly in 2019 with Janice Howard and Clair Chinnery at Glass Tank Gallery, Oxford Brookes University, UK.

The work drew on auto-ethnographic research which aimed to interrogate and reframe female bodily ageing. Each of the four large-scale works explored different stages of the artist’s life initiated by an active and embodied reworking of feminist paradigms and informed by thematic methodologies of practice-based and theoretical enquiries of women artists who have also addressed rites of passage, puberty, menstruation, pregnancy and representation (Kiki Smith, Womanhouse, Judy Chicago, Louise Bourgeois, Carolee Schneemann, Julia Kristeva, Lucy Lippard, Luce Irigaray).

Representations of women’s bodily function have historically constructed women as subjugated by their embodiment, so incapable of rational thought. This has resulted in negative associations of menopause as problematic, barren, dried-up, unproductive and issueless. Through her work, Richardson raises questions about what remains unresolved and hidden as science, legislation and culture fall short of fully understanding and articulating ‘the change’.

Through her chosen methodology, Richardson responds to the urgent need for a fuller articulation by addressing and redefining the intergenerational space of maturing children and diminishing parents.
By generating positive connectivities, relations and exemplars, the research project offered a more dynamic perspective and associative visual language. Proposing the menopause to be a potentially rich and liberating developmental phase of life, the outcomes contribute fresh understanding that can be usefully acted upon through future cross-disciplinary collaboration and enquiry.

The exhibition was funded by Oxford Brookes University, and accompanied by a series of talks, gallery events and a bespoke website: lisarichardson.me