Items where Year is 2017

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 1940s were an iconic period of women's dress history, with the familiar square shoulders, crepe tea dresses and seamed stockings paired with red lips, victory curls and head scarves. This book explains the period's sewing techniques and makes a range of 1940s outfits to recreate the look of those vintage years. With detailed step-by-step instruction and over 300 photographs, it captures the style of the time and explains the impact of wartime austerity on the cut and construction of women's dress.

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.

‘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.

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.

In England's national parks, the design of new dwellings represents a significant and contested part of
landscape planning, inseparable from park conservation ideologies and policies. Within public discourse,
new housing proposals can be praised for enhancing the landscape or decried for destroying it, while the
decisions of planning authorities legitimise or marginalise different points-of-view. Set in Dartmoor
National Park, this paper explores the competing aesthetic interpretations of landscape and the rural as
represented within the design and planning of two separate residential sites that were redeveloped
between 1998 and 2008. Discourse analysis of interviews (with architects, planners and clients), policies,
and written accounts (planning applications and associated correspondence) investigates the positions of
various stakeholders in response to these housing projects and to their protected rural landscape settings.
Results reveal how notions of landscape context and aesthetics vary across different stakeholder
groups, with design quality, sympathetic scale and landscape enhancement proving to be key areas of
contention. Differing interpretations of national park planning policy, the problematic nature of
communicating and judging qualitative aspects of ‘contemporary’ architecture, and the ongoing
emphasis on visual aspects of landscape aesthetics mean that incorporating new housing design within
national park landscapes remains challenging.

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 paper was motivated by an enthusiasm and curiosity to investigate the origins of the illustrated visual language associated with skateboarding. The conspicuous displays articulated the adrenalin thrills of the act itself and disseminated a potent visual code to juvenile consumers eager to establish their rebellious, anti-social credentials. This paper sought out the rich visual iconography associated with Californian youth movements (brought to light by Woolfe in his essay The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, 1965) and attempted to establish a clear lineage between the legacy of Hot-rod customisation practices and the graphic heritage of skateboard culture best characterised by popular skateboard brands such as Powell-Peralta and Santa Cruz, which established the resilient visual inheritance that would eventually transform the perception of these counter cultural attitudes and motifs.

This paper examines notions of truth in relation to fictive modalities and discourses presented in animation and constructed imagery. It explores how notions of minimal departure and recentering of the audience are utilised within fictive depictions as narrative devices that allow the viewer to integrate truth statements into an understanding of their own world.

Drawing upon discussion of documentary animation, it considers how constructed images utilise a range of modalities in order to posi- tion discourses and make statements about reality that can affect the audience through emotional connections. Following this, the paper con- siders Lewis’ and Marie-Laure Ryan’s examination of possible worlds within literary texts. It examines how constructed images negotiate the telling of truths via truth clusters, and how the recentering of audiences in relation to the fictive worlds through those clusters allows for truth to emerge in the bridging between their world and the fictive world.

The paper proceeds to question whether texts combining low modalities or high fictionality are able to present truths through a collusion between the audience and authors’ worlds. It explores this notion through an analysis of the animated film Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared and Scavengers. The paper suggests that such texts utilize playful relocation and recentering towards fictive worlds in order to articulate truth claims about our real-world experiences, and can do so through the utilization of lower modalities and significant departures from such experiences.

In 2018 Ellison was invited by curators Lou Stoppard and Adam Murray to exhibit a series of his Cumbrian portraits and landscapes in North: Fashioning Identity at Open Eye, Liverpool, Somerset House, London and Civic Centre, Barnsley. This celebrated exhibition generated worldwide press coverage and formulated new research opportunities into regional identities in Photography and Fashion. Following this celebrated exhibition, Ellison was invited by Centre Centre to publish Tek Hod, Embroidered Wrestlers of the North.

Research Imperatives

Ellison explores the cultural significance of embroidered costumes of regional sport Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling. The costume of white cotton vest, velvet underpants and white cotton long john’s features motifs that represent or identify the wrestler. Commonly, embodying the idyllic picturesque image of the English Lake District, this costume represents the celebration of rural life depicted by vernacular embroidered symbols. Usually associated with nature, the costume embroidery is sewn by the family who wrestle, often abbreviating the initials of the wrestler and decorated with flora and fauna featuring the native landscape of Cumbria and much celebrated English Lake District.

Ellison researched critic John Ruskin’s connection to the arts and crafts in the Lake District and how his patronage of craft influenced the style of embroidery seen on wrestling costumes. Ellison’s subsequent documentary photographs (2008-2018) follow the wrestling contests in the landscape and trace the performance of tradition. Furthermore, his cross disciplined analysis of embroidery and photography traces the ‘skilled’ labour of the arts and crafts in the Lake District against the ‘unskilled’ vernacular embroidery seen on wrestling costumes from archival photographs.

The book Tek Hod, Embroidered Wrestlers of the North brings together a documentary photographic practice alongside a rigorous research project that re-frames knowledge of the arts and crafts and the picturesque through archived photographs used to chart the evolution of craft - crediting amateur makers of embroidery.

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).

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.