Items where Year is 2019

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.

Investigating the performing body as both a still and moving image In the Gap Between is a live performance work consisting of 5 performers and lasting approximately 15-20 minutes.
Informed by synchronised dance structures such as Corps de Ballet and The Chorus Line; the work utilises key characteristics of these structures (moving in sync, single file arrangement, repetition, pace & pauses) as a means to explore the body as an image. The movement vocabulary for the live work is developed in rehearsals where performers explore every day micro-actions such as shifting weight, turning, stretching & leaning. By slowing movement down, the work invites the performers to fully explore these often-overlooked gestures whilst challenging audience spectatorship.

This article describes a pedagogical approach to collage based on the work of art historians John Berger (1926–2017) and Aby Warburg (1866–1929). Its aim is to understand how images can be used to develop critical visual thinking skills within the context of architectural education and architectural theory in particular. Drawing on the notions of ‘visual literacy’ and ‘visual learning’ familiar from educational theory, the article proposes collage as a means to challenge the predominantly verbal modes of assessment prevalent in contextual and critical studies, where ‘contextual’ refers to the wider contexts (cultural, social, historical, theoretical) within which architecture is situated.The Collage Workshop, which the author has developed over the last five years whilst working closely with students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, is a concrete attempt to implement visually oriented forms of learning and reduce the reliance on written assignments across the curriculum. By analysing some examples of collages produced by students who participated in the workshop, the article hopes to show how images can be used in the construction of an argument and, perhaps more crucially, how seeing assumes meaning in an image-saturated world.

This chapter explores two manifestations of the black-mirror in architecture. The first of these consists of a shallow pool at the Barcelona Pavilion (1929), designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969); the second takes the form of a ceiling at Villa Cavrois (1932) in Croix (near Lille), designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens (1886-1945). The chapter claims that the architectural black mirror opens up a realm, at once metaphorical and material, that can be understood beyond the binary mass/void distinction as standing in a negative relation to space.

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.

I want to explore the potency of gardens, trees and flowers to evoke and stimulate memory. I would like to
start with two opposing provocations about nature as a place of commemoration: the first provocation which forms the opening section of my talk today is framed in the diction of protest. It contests the notion that the garden is a place of rest and repose; a view expressed so provocatively by Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay who asks why should certain gardens be described as retreats when in fact they are really attacks. To do so, I’ll briefly draw on some notions of horticountercultural politics, which can best be presented here through a number of visual images framed within the rhetoric of radical gardening.

The second section of my talk embraces the idea of the garden as a place of recovery, remembrance, even redemption. I will reflect on the huge enamel wreath, Flowers of War, made by my RMIT University colleagues and installed in the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. This will offer an opportunity to offer some thoughts about the value of gardens as enclaves of a temporal peace, and I’ll also explore the idea of surrogate gardens through guerrilla tactics and the roadside floral tribute, which will also introduce the uncomfortable concept of ‘recreational grief’. So, I’ll be taking a rather binary approach; on the one hand the garden as attack, as place for dissent and intervention; on the other hand the land as memorialised space, with its manicured turf and strict taxonomy of plants. But my overarching question comes straight from writer-gardener Jamaica Kincaid who asks, ‘Why must people insist that the garden is a place of rest and repose, a place to forget the cares of the world, a place in which to distance yourself from the painful responsibility with being a human being?’

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’.

Where once geographers could argue that the ideological and aesthetic issues surrounding the military cemeteries created by the British Empire had drawn little comment, there is now a considerable literature exploring the spaces and places 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. 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 localisation that constitute contemporary social disorder’. Almost a century after Sigmund Freud’s treatise Mourning and Melancholia, 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 – including deep research in landscape and garden design – that explores the complex interrelationship between memory, mourning and ‘death-scapes’ (or ‘memory-scapes’), a portmanteau term that fuses an appreciation of once-violated landscapes with personal and discursive memories.

Herein you will find a fascinating variety of material. The ways we perceive the landscape, and what it means to us, reflect the diversity of our humanity… From the slums of Beijing to the rich urban spaces of Barcelona, from the Malvern Hills to the Green Belt – landscape in poetry, planning and art – you will be captivated.
Merrick Denton Thompson, OBE. Former President of the Landscape Institute

qualitative research inquiry sets out to investigate the active interplay of design
poetry with users, designers and the objects of design. The outcome of this thesis has
contributed to the field of design by expanding the concept of design poetics and
developing design poetry as another dimension of design writing. It examines the
relationship between poetry and design against the backdrop of a growing interest in
the ways in which we write about the designed world. It proposes design poetry as a
compelling and immersive form of design engagement, one which is as yet underresearched.
This research has also shown that, with its capacity to encompass social, political and
cultural factors, design poetry can be a significant vehicle in shaping our view of the
objects of design. The plastic chair became a focus for this research gaze, as an
object of design importance, with both social and cultural relevance; as an object that
is mundane and quotidian but one that can achieve iconic status as a design classic.
The research adopts methods that support the critical-creative approach which
underpins an arts-based inquiry. A significant outcome of the research is in the
development and synthesis of new creative research methods: the creative
conversations facilitating a dynamic collaborative dialogue with the key protagonists
i.e. designers, poets and users who remain at the heart of this inquiry; the synthesis of
individual and group critique on design poetry practice, employed as a method to both
share, evaluate and contribute to the development of the researcher’s creative work;
the creative output itself, a book of original poetry that reflects the research endeavour
and captures the dynamic interplay of making, consuming and narrating.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 14 and 15 outline a broad concern for us to take better care for our lands and oceans and act on the negative anthropogenic impact that we, as humans, are having on this planet. However, I propose that many of us see ourselves as separate from nature and lack a connection with it. This, in turn, affects the way we treat it. In this research I explore how we can frame our futures by telling visual stories about the land and sea and the geological foundation of the world we live in. This is achieved by exploring the relationship between natural landscapes, earth sciences and the ‘bodily’ canvas. By presenting examples of costume and textile design in response to a specific brief this visual essay introduces the notion that by anthropomorphizing nature through costume design a sense of connectivity between humans and nature can be bridged. Although there are many examples of how nature has been used as a springboard for garment design this article draws attention to theories explored in social science that claim if we attribute human characteristics to natural forms we feel greater connectivity towards it. I present ideas that using the visual detail of the landscape and by exploring the opportunities of how these can be embedded into costume design we can create a playful public engagement performance tool. This approach has the potential to, not only investigate new ways of interpreting landscape and geology through a costume-design-led performance model, but also challenge the way people think about the natural world with the potential to foster pro-environmental behaviour.

Taking the vernacular ornamental quality perceivable within the built environment as a catalyst, this article will attempt to position the sometimes-eccentric housing development of Poundbury in Dorset as a framework for Illustration practice.
The particular auspices of the new town are utilised as a discursive springboard into the idea of illustration as part of a communicative artefact in a wider physical and social context.
To this end, this article explores the Poundbury development itself as a set of images presented within the larger communication of the town. This is done with reference to architecture's interactions with ornament as well as specific overlaps between design, image and architecture. This article goes on to consider the social ramifications of such material as it forms the content of communication to a wider audience.
The priority of this investigation is the wilful exploration of this potentialy disparate subject matter under shifting definitions of illustration practice in order to open up and explore such practice.

In recent years there has emerged an increasing theoretical and contextual impetus from within the discipline of illustration that would seek to define the practice by authorial approaches to the production and distribution of illustrated content. The priority of this investigation is the attempt to imagine a theoretical landscape or environment in which an ‘authorial turn’ within the discipline might emerge and anchor itself to strategies outside of persisting colloquial or industrial notions of illustration practice. Specifically, this paper aims to tie such thinking to existing practices and concepts relevant to the contemporary construction, distribution and exchange of networked images.

Taking a phenomenological approach, this article explores the benefits and challenges of writing long-hand, and how this has significant qualitative impacts upon the early stages of the creative process. I will consider exemplar from famous practitioners; the benefits of archival research; and the implications on my own praxis. I will argue the efficacy of this aspect of practice-based research, one that aligns with Frayling's research through and into practice. As an experiential and kinaesthetic approach, long-hand writing can act as both a form of critical cultural resistance to the digitisation of daily life and also complementary to other technologies (e.g. ‘smart’ devices with styluses). The pedagogical effectiveness of this approach (e.g. timed writing activities within a workshop; use of notebooks for qualia-capture in the field) is explored and evidenced with particular focus on a series of ‘Wild Writing’ workshops led between 2015 and 2017 in England and North America.

This article explores the benefits and challenges of experiential research for a PhD novel in the contemporary fantasy genre and how this has significant qualitative impacts upon the “early drafting” stage of the creative process (Neale 2018). Drawing upon the extensive field research undertaken in the Scottish Borders, with its rich palimpsest of oral tradition, traumatic historicity, and touristic gilding, the article shows how this informed the emergent multimodal approach, resulting in a transmedia novel – one that ‘performs’ the liminality experienced according to a reader-response model. The Scottish Border ballad of ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ (Roud 219: Child 37) is used as a map – both in the field trips to associated locations, and in the creative-critical process itself. Within the ritualised landscape of the ballad three roads offer three ontological choices for not only the protagonist, but also the researcher-writer. Layered over this is Walter Benjamin’s three-step model of the musical, the architectonic, and the textile. How does one negotiate the various tensions of different disciplines? How does one avoid displacement activity in a protracted research project that embraces different modes of enquiry? When and how does one ‘return’ from this crossed threshold? And in what form can one’s findings withstand critical scrutiny, while retaining faith with the initial vision, the demands of the narrative, and the expectations of the reader?

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.

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

This article examines the performative digital practices of India’s feminist campaign group Blank Noise, with a focus on their 2016 project #WalkAlone. The event sought to explore and challenge embodied notions of female safety and visibility in night-time urban public spaces, by inviting women to walk alone in a place of their choosing between 9pm and midnight. In doing so, Blank Noise called on participants to ‘walk alone, together’, utilising digital documentation tools and media platforms to network these dispersed embodied acts. Drawing on my participation in #WalkAlone from the remote position of the UK alongside online documentation of the project, I examine how these tools established ‘digital proximities’ between participants, transforming our solitary acts into collective embodied action. I argue that Blank Noise’s project extends Butler’s notion of ‘plural performativity’ (2015) into a digital public sphere, by constructing a mode of embodied assembly within media spaces. Here, digital proximities between dispersed participants forged a concerted enactment from the private and personal actions of individual women, walking on the stage of the nocturnal city.

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.

Site-specific, collectively made textiles are particularly effective producers of histories that entwine place and people. More than simply a means to an end, the process of making together foregrounds the potential of textiles to transform and be transformed beyond their materiality. The material making process mirrors another kind of making process: that of a certain kind of social integration or a sense of being and belonging somewhere, however temporary and changeable these may be. Once completed, however, these material artifacts can provoke difficult questions concerning the responsibility for their storage and display, succumbing to a fate in semi-permanent storage and eventually relinquishing their material presence to a form of visual or textual representation. Although this is not the fate of all collectively made textile works, given the widespread practice of collective textile-making, it is inevitably the fate of some. Using the example of a collectively made hooked rug project that I coordinated and participated in 15 years ago, I will explore in this article the transformed status of collectively made textile artifacts through memories of making in order to open up new understandings of these types of site-specific collective textile- making projects as a different kind of creative practice: as a narrative performance of experiences of being together.

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),

At 1 p.m. on 6 February 1971, eight “actors,” a reporter, and a cameraman entered a space at an undisclosed location with the intention of spending 24 hours together. They did not belong to a single artistic group and some of them had never met before. Tōmatsu Shōmei’s photographic record of this event appeared in the spring 1971 issue of the magazine Kikan shashin eizō accompanied by sections from a transcript of the tape recording. The images and the text – jointly titled NO.541 – offer fragmented glimpses into the situations and conversations unfolding in the room and also function with and against each other, as in a dialogue.

The jointly written text continues this dialogue in the writing up of major themes contextualizing the performing and recording of this work: the space, the magazine page, and the body. We imagine ourselves in NO.541 and enact this intermingling of space-times by reproducing not only some of Tōmatsu’s photographs but also parts of the transcript in translation. Joining the conversation, we adopt some of the main strategies of the image-text, such as fragmentation, improvisation, and refusal of any singularity. Woman C and Man G take on the role of mediums, channeling, for instance, a possible future re-enactment instead of producing a conclusive account of the event.

Lucifer Rising can be understood as the culmination of Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle. The power of this film, in part, rests on the way in which Anger alludes to a range of esoteric myths and Gods, without contextualising them in the way a more traditional film would do. This article sets out to reveal the various allusions, and in turn elucidate Anger’s unique aproach to filmmaking.

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.

Practice as Research (PaR), and Practice-led Research, as studied by Hazel Smith, Roger T. Dean, and Graeme Sullivan, are increasingly being implemented in a wide range of disciplines. In this article, I will report on the methodological trajectory of my creative practice, an autoethnographic work that used film forms as research. The process progressed on three levels of investigation: the narrative, the epistemological, and the ontological. It developed from my personal experience and research in the archive, as a network of references supporting and responding to the needs of producing films through the exploration of prior film methodologies, and elaborating novel forms of mediation of history, memory, and postmemory

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the presence of a large American animation studio in Ireland, under the stewardship of ex-Disney animation director Don Bluth, played a pivotal role in the development of the indigenous Irish animation industry, and constituted a colonial moment in Irish animation history. This paper aims to discuss the nascent Irish animation industry prior to the arrival of the Don Bluth studio, and to consider aspects of indigenous production onto which a global North American industrial model was imposed. Aspects of postcolonial theory are used as a method of describing the historical circumstances that have determined the emergence of an indigenous Irish animation industry in the late 20th century, and also deployed to illustrate how the social and historical aspects of animation production in Ireland reflect the postcolonial conditions of Irish society itself. In considering the pre- Bluth period of animation production in Ireland this paper offers insights into models of production, aesthetic expression and processes of cultural transmission, and provides commentaries on work of Irish animators overlooked by Irish film studies.

Music technology can provide unique opportunities
to allow access to music-making for clients with complex needs. While there is a growing trend of research in this area, technology has been shown to face a variety of issues leading to underuse in this context. This literature review is a collation of information from peer-reviewed publications, gray literature, and practice. Focusing on active music-making using new types of alternate controllers, this review aims to bring together information regarding the types of technology available, categorizes music technology and its use within the music therapy setting for clients with complex needs, catalogues work occurring within the field, and explores the issues and potentials surrounding music technology and its use in practice.

The chapter examines how animated documentaries represent temporality in relation to their subject matter, with a particular focus on the concepts of 'recollection' and 're-enactment' and how they structure animated nonfictional forms. In particular, the term 're-enactment' is more complex than it might first appear and, on closer inspection, raises all sorts of questions about temporality, viewer positioning, performance and agency. The discussion will focus on two main examples - 'Andersartig' (and animated short) and 'Children of the Holocaust' (a television documentary that includes live-action 'talking head' interviews and animated sequences) - and examine these in relation to notions of the 'fantasmatic' and 'atavistic' dimensions of the animation.

The chapter examines the ways in which affect and emotion are channelled and challenged through animated documentary. Murray Smith (1995) usefully distinguishes between alignment and allegiance in his discussion of how viewers identify with what is on the screen when viewing fictional characters and scenes. But there are clearly different moral and ethical registers at play in how such feelings and alliances are mobilised in nonfiction. Once we start talking about how films make us feel, alongside how they try and persuade us to root for particular (real) people, or find their specific arguments convincing, we are also in the realm of rhetoric.

But a further problem arises if we are watching something whilst knowing that elements of it are not real, that is, that there are certain fabrications involved: the long-standing debates about how dramatisation and re-enactment can be mingled with documentary are evidence of such a problem. I have discussed elsewhere (in the anthology Drawn From Life, forthcoming, 2017) the specific problems of thinking about animated documentary as a form of re-enactment, but there is a more fundamental way in which animation foregrounds its constructed nature. Various philosophers of literature, drama and film have discussed the ‘paradox of fiction’ – that viewers will respond emotionally and authentically to something or someone they know does not exist – but animated documentary is a special case of a ‘paradox of nonfiction’: an expressive act, directly connected to real events and people, but peculiarly attenuated by its constructedness.

The idea of animated documentary as an expressive act is something I connect to a discussion of philosopher and linguist J. L. Austin’s concept of ‘illocutionary force’ in his ‘performative’ model of language. The illocutionary force of a speech act is concerned with effect and intention: it points to what something means and what you mean by saying it (in the way that you do). Animated documentary’s power, poetry and potential can therefore be understood by thinking about its illocutionary force – how it communicates and expresses certain things in certain ways. Central to the deeper understanding of animated documentary proposed by this chapter is an interrogation of how the emotional ‘charge’ of viewing something we know to be real-yet-fabricated is underpinned by a series of paradoxes that are built on belief, emotion and affect.

This collection is a study of the value of craft as it can be understood within the study and practice of animation. The book reconsiders the position of craft, which is often understood as inferior to ‘art’, with a particular focus on questions of labour in animation production and gendered practices. The notion of craft has been widely investigated in a number of areas including art, design and textiles, but despite the fact that a wide range of animators use craft-based techniques, the value of craft has not been interrogated in this context until now. Seeking to address such a gap in the literature, this collection considers the concept of craft through a range of varying case studies. Chapters include studies on experimental animation, computer animation, trauma and memory, children’s animation and silhouette animation among others. The Crafty Animator also goes some way to exploring the relationship craft has with the digital in the context of animation production. Through these varied discussions, this book problematizes simplistic notions about the value of certain methods and techniques, working to create a dialogue between craft and animation.

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 research captured in this publication builds on Wenham-Clarke’s photographic project The Westway: a portrait of the community, exhibited at St Martin’s in the Fields, Trafalgar Square, London in 2013, which included 15 Traveller images. Further ethnographic research into this community resulted in 2019 of a new publication Urban Gypsies.

The research explores the immense socio-political and economic pressures exerted upon a community of Irish Travellers sheltering beneath the A40, a major highway leading into central London. Today very few Travellers in the UK are able to maintain their traditional nomadic lifestyle. Most are restricted to official sites. Over many months Wenham-Clarke gained the Travellers confidence and was granted unprecedented access, immersing himself in the community and becoming a trusted member, invited to attend weddings and christenings. The images provide a unique insight into a community that rarely gives access to outsiders.

Not intended as a survey, the research draws on narrative history, oral history and qualitative research methodologies and explores the experiences of the Travellers over a 40-year period.

Few academic practitioners have been able to conduct such detailed research: the outcomes, negotiated entirely with the community, reveal uncensored views of the Traveller community, a marginalised subjugated group struggling to retain its cultural identity as it is gradually assimilated into the wider population. The project set out to challenge stereotypical views perpetuated by the popular media and highlights what is now perceived to be one of the last forms of ‘acceptable’ racism in Britain today.

The images were disseminated internationally through news websites such as CNN and News.com.au, Marie Claire Magazine and BBC Radio London, reaching a global audience, actively challenging and informing public perceptions, engendering debate and promoting inclusivity.

Students entering art and design courses in UK higher education come from a range of educational and cultural backgrounds. These students frequently report finding academic writing challenging. Expectations as to the nature of description, analysis and criticality can also differ across subject areas. As a result, students need support in developing their ability to communicate appropriately within their disciplines – their academic literacies. This study applies genre analysis to identify ways in which students express critical thinking in undergraduate Visual Effects Design and Production essays. The findings highlight common ways of linking ideas through exemplification, drawing conclusions from grounds, and challenging the validity of assumptions. Ways of expressing the strength of claims and indicating the writer’s attitude are also frequently used in the sample. The findings are then integrated into a practical model for impromptu teaching of writing by subject lecturers. The article confirms understandings of the way students express criticality in essays, and aligns insights from genre analysis and academic literacies in a novel way. The outcome is a proposal for a practical, low-preparation approach to teaching academic writing within the disciplines.

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.