Items where Year is 2008

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.

This unique exhibition, the first exhibition of its type, explored flock and the extent of its use across a range of contexts. The exhibition brought together for the first time numerous historical and contemporary examples of flock in its exploration of flock's sumptuous, tactile surface finish. The exhibition explored flock's rich history and importantly its contemporary relevance and importance.

The exhibition showcased artwork and design objects produced by artists, designers and many of the leading international flock manufacturers. The exhibition gained a The Textile Society Award and was successfully supported by the Arts Council England-Grants for the Arts, and the European Flock Association. The exhibition was accompanied by Flockage: the symposium that featured presentations by leading flock specialists and design academics. The exhibition was extended by four months owing to popular demand and resulted in Hardie being invited guest speaker at the Flock Association of Europe conference in Berlin, 2009.

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.

'Lost Islands: inventing Avalon, destroying Eden' is a monograph published by Heart of Albion Press in 2008. It asks whether narratives of place can affect not only our perception of actual locations, but also our treatment of them: whether imaginary geographies can have real world consequences.

In this interdisciplinary examination of the cultural history of islands, the author draws upon folklore, mythology, literature, popular culture, and environmental science to delve into humanity’s long fascination with islands. Drawing upon extensive field research undertaken exploring islands off the coast of Britain (Iona; Lundy; Bardsey; Isles of Scilly; Isle of Man; Holy Island; St Michael’s Mount; Isle of Wight; the Western Isles), which included a week’s solo writing retreat on the tiny Bardsey Island off the tip of the Llyn Peninsula, northwest Wales; as well as archival research pouring over early accounts of explorers; the experiential research as a professional storyteller enthralling audiences with tales of magical islands; and the latest climate science on the impact of Global Warming on sea levels and migration; Lost Islands attempts to understand our collective fascination with islands, real and imaginary. The way we have tendency to narrativize islands, projecting our desires and fears upon them (a tendency with antecedents back to the earliest of literature, such as the immramas of the Celtic saints), show that the island can be an act of the imagination as well as a geographical fact. Interweaving an erudite analysis with personal embodied anecdote, the text challenges the islandization of disciplines and traditions. A study of the littoral and the liminal, the monograph adopts a hybrid style blending the creative and critical to bring alive the ‘threshold’ quality of such places, sometimes described as ‘thin places’. The result is a kind of palimpsest of different texts and modes of thinking, and as such Lost Islands (illustrated throughout by the author’s own photographs) is research ‘for’ islands as well ‘through’ and ‘into’ them, via a creative-critical practice (Frayling, 1993).