Items where Year is 2016

Exploring musicactively can be restricted for someone with cognitive, physical, or sensory impairments. They may face barriers to participation and diminished experiences between their musical expression and the music making means available to them. Technology can be used to bridge these gaps and focus on a person’s capability to create personal instruments that allow for active music making and exploration of sound. Thisdoctoral research aims to look at the use of music technology within the school setting and the needs of the users and those around them.Drawing on this and following an Action Research methodology, a tool will be developed following a participatory design process that utilises both hardware and software, in a modular fashion, to provide a flexible and adaptable system to facilitate music making and sound exploration.The desired outcome will be a toolbox that allows users to put together instruments that suit the needs of those playing them allowing access to musical expression.

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.

Gobbledegook Theatre’s Ear Trumpet is a site-responsive outdoor theatre performance in which a team of “sonic investigators” have discovered pockets of sound, trapped in the Earth beneath our feet. The show allows audiences to listen, using “ear trumpets”, a collection of recycled trumpets, trombones and gramophone horns that have been re-purposed as listening devices. In this paper, Dr Jon Croose describes the aurality of Ear Trumpet through a qualitative, practice-led methodology of first-person performance-as-research, interviews with the artists, and analysis of audience response. The essay considers Augoyard & Torgue’s notion of ‘sharawadji’ in Ear Trumpet in terms of ‘sonic effect’ (2006, xv; 8) arising, the author argues, from its encouragement of ‘the consciousness of early listening,’ (2006, 13) and through a combination of the sonic effects of anamnesis, de-contextualisation, de-localisation, attraction, phototonie and quotation. The paper considers how Ear Trumpet positions the relationship between ‘physical environment, the socio-cultural milieu, and the individual listener’ (2006, xiii) and reveals how participants’ suspension of disbelief in the pseudo-science of ‘sonic geology’ allows them to posit the possibility of multiple ‘historic dimensions of sound’, in a way that reframes their everyday soundscape and ‘magically and suddenly transports [them] elsewhere’ (2006, xv). Finally, it raises questions about the effect of sharawadji in terms of the tension between theatrical illusion, “belief” and critical distance among audiences, and considers a possible politics of aurality in performance contexts.

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.

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?

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 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.

Where once geographers could argue that the ideological issues surrounding the quintessential character of English and Empire military cemeteries had drawn little comment, there is now a considerable literature exploring the space and place of remembrance. Increasing attention has been paid during the past decade to the value of “situation” in the discourse of death, grieving and commemoration. In this respect, “situation” should be understood to be a focus on “place”, “space” and the geopolitical (Gillis 1994). The emerging discipline of cultural geography in the late 1990s created the tools necessary to elaborate “space” in the abstract, to regard “place” as a site where an individual might negotiate definitively social relations, and give voice, as Sara Blair argued, to “the effects of dislocation, disembodiment, and localization that constitute contemporary social disorder.” In our post-historical era, further argues Blair, temporality has largely been superseded by spatiality, what has been termed the affective and social experience of space. Almost a century after Freud’s treatise Mourning and Melancholia (1917), our understanding of how memory and mourning function continues to be challenged, revised, and refined. Issues of place have become important to this debate. Once a marginal topic for academic investigation, there is now a body of scholarly work exploring the complex interrelationship between memory, mourning and what might be termed “death-scapes”. Indeed, this fascination with places of death and dying has given rise to myriad academic explorations spawning academic disciplines such as dark- or thana-tourism, which is an extreme form of grief-incited travel to distant prisons, castles, and abandoned battlefields where anthropological enquiry can be conducted. Suspicions of a release of “recreational grief” aroused after the death of Princess Diana in 1997 have also provided sociologists with considerable material for scholarly attention (Walter 1999).

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.

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.

The Queen of Spades Project is an experimental collaborative project by Joel Lardner and Paul Roberts, Illustration at Arts University Bournemouth. The project explores Alexander Pushkin’s supernatural tale of obsession and risk, The Queen of Spades (1834), and expands on the visual language of Joel Lardner’s 2011 illustrated picture book of the same name. The picture book has always appealed to Illustrators in that it encourages the expansion of a particular visual language and provides a platform with which to build, explore, and examine imaginary worlds.

The research imperative throughout the project has been to harness emerging games technology in order to transform how storytelling and picture books can be understood and reinterpreted. VR technology provides the potential for readers to inhabit a story and offers multi-dimensional insights from within a text. The ability to alternate between characters or intervene at points within the plot opens up new insights as to how stories will be enacted and experienced. Illustrators are uniquely placed to adopt and occupy this new fascinating and portentous field of study -
whether as games makers, or interactive storytellers. An animated experimental film completed in 2016 forms part of an ongoing project exploring the potential for storytelling and illustration within the digital environment.

This film was awarded certificate of Merit in the category of Animation in the 2016 Three x Three International Illustration Awards, USA. It was also selected for screening during the Motion Commotion event on July 11 2018 at ICON 10 International Illustration Conference in Detroit, USA.

Many of the questions that are central to the consideration of graphic design and communication have a strong resonance with issues appertaining to the philosophy of affect. It seems strange then that whilst there has been much interest in the affective turn in the context of the arts, it has been relatively absent
from discussion of graphic design. This seems particularly odd when we consider the ways in which matters of feeling, emotion and behavioural disposition are often combined in the context of advertising and visual communication – that is, in the at once semiotic and political regulation of the social, or, conversely, in the modes of resistance that emerge out of practices of design activism. This article attempts a (re)reading of contemporary and historical graphic design, through the concept of affect.

Following Massimo Banzi's comment that the Arduino development board might be seen as a means of ‘scratching your own itch’, this paper explores the concept of affect in relation to physical computing, and investigates the ways in which cybernetic and networked objects could be said to enact a series of process-philosophical and object-oriented tensions. In so doing it addresses the cultural saturation of Arduino and its employment in an array of institutional, artistic and activist contexts, and brings this to bear on the conflict between the process philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the more directly object-oriented perspectives of Graham Harman, Ian Bogost and Bruno Latour. Framing the enquiry around the at once ethico-aesthetic and speculative realist questions of what it is to ‘scratch' and what it is to ‘itch', the paper examines micro- and macro-political agency in the context of physical computing—contrasting process philosophy's pronounced notion of affective, connective, creative differentiation with the black-boxed, withdrawn objects of object-oriented philosophy, and its quasi-causal mode of aesthetic interaction.

This practice-led thesis proposes that the stop-frame animation process can be used as a practical means to perform Husserl’s theoretical method of henomenological investigation, including transcendental epoché, variation and description. It details two studies using this approach, firstly, into the practice of stop-frame animation and, secondly, into observations of stillness in my studio space.

Firstly, using the practical, ritual epoché proposed by Anthony J. Blasi (1985) and Mario Perniola (2011) I suggest that the ritual nature of creating stop-frame animation enacts a reflexive epoché on the process itself. This allows a series of practical variations, enacted during the set building stage, in which I question the presence of a puppet, the three-dimensional nature of the set, its level of detail and the amount of control it allows the animator. Following this, variations are performed on frame-capture, which examine the requirement of separate frames, change between frames, what can be manipulated between frames and how many frames are actually required.

These two stages of variation allow me to arrive at the essence of the stop-frame process: a set space must have three dimensions; allow the animator a level of control over what happens within it and provide enough detail to register on camera, no puppet figure is required; frame-capture must consist of sixteen separately captured frames using a six-second exposure time with thirty-second gaps between the capture of each frame, it is not necessary to depict overt movement. This new, simplified approach is termed distilled stop-frame, expressing the pared down nature of the process and the stilling of the usually kinetic medium.

Secondly, the resulting distilled; puppet-less stop-frame process is then employed to perform a phenomenological examination of my visual perceptions of stillness in the studio space. Following Steve Odin (2001) I contend that these observations enact a lived, aesthetic epoché in which I directly experience the world in its phenomenological essence from a bracketed, irreal viewpoint. Subsequently, during the set building stage, I perform visual, eidetic variations on my perceptions in which I investigate their detail, form and structure. Variations are then performed during frame-capture in which I examine the temporal nature of the observations. These two stages allow me to create sequences of animation that visually and temporally describe the essence of my experiences.

These two strands of research aim to widen the scope of Husserl’s phenomenological inquiry, relocating the theoretical methods of investigation and description into the practical realm of the stop-frame animation process. Further to this, by getting to the essence of the
stop-frame animation process it expands the boundaries of the medium from a means to express narrative and movement into philosophical contemplation of any phenomena in the world.

This paper discusses making with others as a means of researching the experience of making, with a particular focus on textiles. Group textile craft activities are widespread today; however, there are few documented examples of research by craft practitioners taking place in this context. The activities used by the authors, relating to stitching and knitting, demonstrate that ‘making with others’ is a highly versatile approach that can be adapted according to the variables presented by diverse research aims and questions. Shercliff ’s research is explored in detail as a case study, with three group making activities documented and evaluated. These examples are used to identify a number of attributes, which support the comparison and development of research-led participatory textile making activities. The strengths and challenges of these methods are discussed: a key strength is the gathering of rich data during creative activity, while a central challenge is the performance of multiple roles by the practitioner-researcher.

Lunch with Family is a short film (30’) on postmemory that was shortlisted in the Inspiration category at the AHRC Research in Film Awards held at BAFTA in London in 2016. Judges thought the film to be "visually and thematically engaging and called it strong".

The film reveals the tension between Slav-silenced history in Trieste and its impact on personal life and identity in a city-symbol on the former Iron Curtain, in Italy. The film intertwines the author's own story with the history of forced Italianisation of half a million Slavs, their persecution, their organisation in anti-Fascist groups, and the final attempt to delete this ethnic group, which, in Trieste in 1918, was more substantial than in Ljubljana – the capital of Slovenia.

As part of the wider discourse of postmemory, the films aligns with the work of other scholars: Anne Karpf's The War After: Living with the Holocaust (1997) and Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (2004), but also Eva Hoffman's After Such Knowledge. However, Lunch with Family goes further. It uncovers the long history of resistance and the fight for the existence of a community that does not see its history acknowledged in Italy.

Based on interdisciplinary research, archival material and interviews, the film establishes the use of research-by-practice on film as an adequate epistemological methodology to uncover long-buried events and to explore the loop of existential questions the situation provoked and continues to stir in Trieste's Slav inhabitants. A paper published in Screenworks (Vol.8, No.1) in January 2018 explored the context, methods and outcomes of the research enquiry, and Turina presented conference papers and screenings at events in Sheffield, York and Cambridge during 2016-17.

San Sabba is a short film (29‘ 50”) that debates the way we conceive of sites of memorialisation, the way they represent people and who they were in the past. The Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards gave the film the Recognition Award in June 2017 and screened the film at the Awards event in Los Angeles, US, in March 2018.

Building on the method tested with Lunch with Family, this film displays the archival research and personal engagement in the discovery of the Axis Concentration Camp of the Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste, Italy, which was active from 1943 to 1945. The film debates the alignment of the Museum of the Risiera di San Sabba to the narrative of the Holocaust, as the site was predominantly used for the detention, interrogation and killing of freedom fighters and their families.

San Sabba aligns with known works within the Holocaust film tradition, as it explores events that took place within the same logic of genocide. Especially relevant are filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Night and Fog (1955), and Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (1985), because they tackle the unseen issues related to the depiction of genocide. Equally important is the work of Jeremy Hicks, The Unseen Holocaust of WWII (2014), which casts questions on the predominantly camps based narrative of the Holocaust. However, San Sabba opens the discussion to the concept of memorialisation in Italy, as the camp in Trieste fails to reveal the documented purpose of the site.

Full screenings of the film took place in York and Athens in 2017, and at the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards, in March 2018. Turina presented conference papers and particle screenings at peer-reviewed events in Sheffield, York and Cambridge during 2016-17.

The Chapter considers how and why the author explored the silenced history of the indigenous Slovenian community in Trieste, which is largely unknown in Britain. Written from the point of view of a filmmaker associated with the current resurfacing of Slav culture in the city, it explores the relationship between geographical space, memory, and identity as tackled in the short film Lunch with Family (Turina, 2016). It interprets some of the most representative Italian films that influenced the official reading of the Northeastern part of present-day Italy.

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.

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.

‘The Rock: Above & Below’ is an extended photographic research project exploring the fractured relationship between the community of The Isle of Portland (Dorset) and the quarrying of Portland Stone, once so intrinsically linked, physically and culturally to the island.

Quarrying played a huge part in the island’s history, employing hundreds of workers and shaping the community’s identity. First used by the Romans, Portland Stone has been used to build iconic structures such as The Palace of Westminster, the City of London, and the United Nations Building in New York.

Taking an auto-ethnographic approach to the project, Wenham-Clarke connected with key figures who have lived on the island for generations, including the heads of the mining operations, a lighthouse owner, tug boat captain, funeral director, prison nurse and Portlanders to explore the modern-day link between community and stone. Through photographic portraits and audio interviews the work draws on narrative history, oral history and qualitative research methodologies.

Research outcomes provided a powerful insight into the consequences of industrialisation which has destroyed generational and cultural links and forced the industry to automate and excavate huge tunnels into the island beneath the local community. Wenham-Clarke’s images record these subterranean cathedral-like spaces mined by robotic equipment, controlled by a handful of highly skilled operators from outside the community. The resulting suite of images juxtapose the robotic machinery below and the local community above, set in the context of Portland’s high levels of unemployment and social issues.

In addition to numerous publications, photo essays and group exhibitions, a final selection of 25 photographs and audio tracks were exhibited as part of the B-Side Arts Festival and a selection were shown across Dorset on bus shelter posters and bill boards as part of an extensive public engagement strategy funded by regional arts boards and local enterprise.

This article shares the author’s research focusing on the facilitation of acting students with dyslexia in actor training. For some individuals with dyslexia the translation of the written text into image-based symbols using technological modalities can play a crucial role to access and make concrete the meaning of the words; in this case Shakespeare. Describing the author’s exploratory construction of a computer tool to assist students with dyslexia to read Shakespeare’s words, the article progresses to focus on one individual with dyslexia, whose illustrative PowerPoint compositions representing Shakespeare’s words, afforded her an autonomy over the text, whilst supporting working memory weaknesses.