STAFF RESEARCH SEMINARS 2007-2008
All take place in boardroom 205

SEMINAR 1
Thursday Dec 6th 5-7
FINE ART STAFF –RESEARCH UPDATES

MAGGIE JACKSON/JEREMY TURNER
In Praise of Gawping

This is not the open mouthed gawping that fuels a thousand fights, met with aggression and ill humour.
Particularly in North Lincolnshire the act of gawping is ruminative and speculative; simultaneously allowing reflection on experience and a projection into the unknown. By necessity of the physical inactivity involved, it usually involves a decrepit farm gate.
The relevance of this particular gate is by no means coincidental. This is not just any gate. This gate, the definition of which relies more on binder band, and less on ‘gateness’, is a line of demarcation between time, space, place, ownership, geography and physical state.
In this paper, Maggie Jackson and Jeremy Turner will reference, in no particular order, Edward Thomas, Manuel de Landa, Richard Wentworth, Philip Larkin, Primo Levi, Tennyson, Gainsborough, LeClanche and Constable. Jackson’s texts and photographs, and Turner’s sculptures will be examined as vehicles informed by the above worthies and as a means of holding together information too disparate in every sense to be bounded by other forms of activity.
The paper will focus on an ongoing joint project exploring a triangulation of memory, longing, history and anecdote prompted by long experience of the North Lincolnshire landscape.

CIAN QUAYLE
Transmission

Cian Quayle will discuss the curation of this recent exhibition at The University of the Arts London and a forthcoming exhibition in Antwerp

" Transmission is an installation of seven artist's work. which encompasses moving image, sound, performance, drawing, sculpture, text and photography. The artists in this exhibition have all followed a course of practice-based research with the University of the Arts London are now teaching or involved with other universities...
On one level the work of these artists is drawn together at the intersection of practice and theory. This position intimates a point of rupture or a gap, which opens a way to somewhere else. The artist is able to adapt or even subvert prescribed notions of practice and theory, which are beyond language, where ideas meterialise at the point of their dematerialisation. As a consequence everyday experience is transformed into new constellations of meaning, which encompass systems based procedures, chance and empiricism."

 

SEMINAR 2
January 31st 5-7
PERFORMING ARTS STAFF RESEARCH UPDATE
TBC

  

SEMINAR 3
February 25th 5-7 -MONDAY
REASEARCH STUDENTS-PRESENTATION OF ON-GOING WORK

RICHARD HOPPER-Fine Art Research Student

‘CAD/CAM as a sculptural strategy: Mustering, thoughts, resources and experimental equipment, the story so far’
Title of Research Project
Sculpture Against The Odds: Strategies of Making In The 21st Century
Summary of the Project
This research proposal relates to the formal and semantic implications for sculpture of the developments in technology following the digital revolution in the late C20. The research proposed revolves specifically around the viability; appropriateness and significance of CAD/CAM (Computer Aided Design/Computer Aided Manufacture) produced sculpture (both solid material and virtually animated) within the canon of contemporary sculpture.

The wide availability of desktop computers and software since the 1980s has given artists (and many other practitioners) graphic tools hitherto unavailable. This had led to a wide diversity of two dimensional practice exploring bitmap, vector and photographically manipulated imagery in both static and animated modes. More recently, complex three-dimensional software has been developed leading to potentialities which sculptors (and two dimensional artists) have begun to explore as prices have fallen and free software has become available.

Alongside the new image creation software, new manufacturing processes have been developed. These are variously reductive (i.e. involving the removal of solid material eg. Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) routing and milling) and depositional (often termed Rapid Prototyping) (i.e. involving the addition of material eg. SLA (Stereolithograpy), LOM (Laminated Object Manufacture), SLS (Selective Laser Sintering), FDM (Fused Deposition Modelling) etc.). These processes too have been augmented by reverse engineering processes involving laser-scanning technology to digitally map the surfaces of existing structures. Furthermore, whereas previously the transition from manufacturing in one material to manufacturing in another would be made with some difficulty necessitating a shift in working methodologies and concomitant learning curve, now a vast array of materials can be manipulated with the same software and hardware.

It is the sculptural potential that the convergence of these technologies has presented which forms the basis for this research proposal.

JILL TOWNSLEY-Fine Art Research Student

‘The role of repetition in the process of art
production'

Currently a PhD research student at Chester University with a Gladstone
Fellowship, and Lecturer in Textile Art at Winchester School of Art
University of Southampton.
Jill has exhibited internationally she graduated from the Royal College
of Art with an M.A. in sculpture, following a BA (Hons) in Embroidery at
Manchester Metropolitan University. This unusual crossover informs her
work today.

JENNY SHYRNE-Performing Arts Research Student

The subject of my research is the work of the Berlin-based music collective, Einstürzende Neubauten. I am posing and answering the following questions: how radical and influential are these musicians within contemporary music, how representative is their work of late 20th century/new millennium culture, how is their music created and disseminated and what does it communicate?

For the purpose of this seminar I will concentrate on one aspect: their recycling, over the last 27 years, of their cityscape and its industrial debris to create their own unique collages of noise/music.

SEMINAR 4
MARCH 13th 5-7

The next two months of research seminars will match researcher with external speakers to develop through the format of an ‘in-conversation’ a specific aspect of their research interests-these are in development-staff have the opportunity to propose subjects where there are spaces

RINA ARYA-Fine Art/Design-subject to be confirmed

ELISA OLIVER Fine Art, with REBECCA DUCLOS, Research Student Manchester University.

Rebecca Duclos is a research student at Manchester University but resident in Montreal, Canada. Her research explores ideas of narrative in art practice through the works of artists such as Janet Cardiff, Mike Nelson and Sophie Calle. This presentation explores an aspect of nostalgia in this context allowing or assisting an interrogation of the over-evaluation of teenage experience in Elisa Oliver’s research on the 1970s.

Adolescence/Obsolescence: Recent British Art Beyond Nostalgia-
                                              Nostalgia and Return in Contemporary British Art.

This joint presentation will discuss the work of 1960’s born British artists George Shaw,
Susan Philipsz, Paul Rooney, and Mike Nelson.  In linking the ‘emotional geographies’ explored by these artists, Oliver and Duclos will focus on how discreet spaces of adolescence and obsolescence have been re-imagined and re-constructed by these artists using media ranging from painting to video to sound to architectural installation.

Oliver will focus on the preoccupation with teenage experience within the work of Shaw, Philipsz and Rooney. Unique in its insistence and character – intimating more than a typical generational nostalgia – the artists’ repeated engagement with the emotional geography of the teenage moment highlights a particular relationship to the cultural moment of Britain in the 1970s and 80s. Seminal not only to their personal identity, but also as a marker of a certain threshold demarcating a particular outlook and engagement with the world that is now obsolete, theirs is not just nostalgia for a lost youth, but of much more far reaching political and cultural transformations that have resulted in an aesthetic of stasis and return. Oliver’s discussion will consider why the teenage experience of the 1970s has taken on such significance in the contemporary historical moment and how the emotional legacy of the 1960s may have contributed to this.

With her reading of Mike Nelson’s work, Duclos will pick up on the question of a 1960s and 70s ‘emotional legacy’ that has produced a strain of art making whose interest in the past has moved beyond the world of objects to explore instead what Michael Fried disdainfully called the realm of ‘objecthood’. Shaw, Philpsz, Rooney, and Nelson variously fabricate work in which practices of citation, production, and repetition purposefully draw upon the objecthood of ‘objects’ in order to stage encounters with what is missing in the artwork as much as with what is there. If the ‘thingness’ of images, songs, memories, or spaces seems at once reified by the recall and re-inscription of the packaged past by these artists, the stability of these entities is at once duly dissolved through a purposeful manipulation of their reception within new contexts. These artists have found ways to hypostasise the emotional content of objects and to tie ‘experience-as-object’ (objecthood) to a particular sense of place that is, as Oliver contends, a threshold rather than a simple locale. In that the ‘objects’ of adolescence enter a state of obsolescence only to be re-encountered in a new place and time some decades later, the eternal return of objecthood is as comforting as it is haunting.

SEMINAR 5
APRIL 24th 5-7
2 SLOTS HERE OPEN FOR PROPOSALS.