Rowan Bailey | University of Huddersfield (original) (raw)
Papers by Rowan Bailey
This paper proposes to explore, through new materialist insights drawn from art and neuroscience,... more This paper proposes to explore, through new materialist insights drawn from art and neuroscience, an alternative imaging/imagining of brain plasticity. Such a reading presents the brain image in and through enactments of the brainbody; a phenomenon which accounts for the brain’s own entanglement with ‘bodies, mind, behavior, socio-cultural contexts, and meaning-making’ (Schmitz and Hoppner, 2014: 546). The paper will examine curatorial strategies deployed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, in particular, insights generated out of dOCUMENTA (13) (2012) and the 14th Istanbul Biennial SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms (5 September-1 November 2015). These international exhibitions engage a diffractive methodology of reading through the form-iterations generated by the brain on socio-cultural and psychic levels. Secondly, analysis of a recent film by Ursula Biemann and Mo Deiner entitled Twenty-One Percent (2016), presents an approach to artistic research where the brainbody phenomenon an...
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2014
This interview took place at the National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) in November 2014. Whilst ... more This interview took place at the National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) in November 2014. Whilst there is a necessary focus on Hester Reeve’s most recent project YMEDACA – a re-mapping of Yorkshire Sculpture Park through the features of Plato’s ‘Academos’ – the dialogue also moves its way through the archive’s important role in the process and formation of the project. We were keen to hold our discussion inside the archive itself; to allow the space to hold us while we negotiated the terrain of sculptural thinking. This was our first meeting and what follows is a partial transcription of our three hour discussion. We would like our exchange to honour the 30 year anniversary of the NAEA.
Exhibitions about brain science are not transparent environments. They are rather dissemination p... more Exhibitions about brain science are not transparent environments. They are rather dissemination practices where cultural assumptions and social relations are enacted through the brainbody as a site of and for meaning-making activity. The brainbody is a term used in feminist and critical theory to consider how neurological bodies are entangled with social, political and cultural structures. As a critical tool for thinking about the situatedness of cognition and embodiments of the brain, this paper explores how the brainbody takes shape through differing mechanisms of curation, display and visitor engagement. It does this through a critically discursive analysis of three specific examples of exhibition curation: Brain: The World Inside Your Head (2001), States of Mind: Tracing the Edges of Consciousness (2015-2016) and Brain Diaries: Modern Neuroscience in Action (2017).
Philosophy Today
This essay explores “sculptural plasticity” through neuronal matterings of the brainbody in philo... more This essay explores “sculptural plasticity” through neuronal matterings of the brainbody in philosophy, literature, and art. It focuses on Socrates’s cataleptic condition as evidenced in Plato’s Symposium, the plasticities at work in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, and morphogenetic acts of cell formation in the sculptural installation of Pierre Huyghe’s After ALife Ahead.
International Journal of Art & Design Education
The National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) is housed and maintained by the Yorkshire Sculpture Pa... more The National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) is housed and maintained by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), managed by YSP coordinators and educators with a well-established volunteer programme. This year, 2017, as part of the celebrations of the YSP's 40th anniversary, the Archive will hold its own exhibition entitled Treasures Revealed: a collection of items selected by people who have been involved in the Archive, whether as donors, volunteers, researchers, artists, trustees or steering group members. In parallel with the exhibition, this paper aims to give voice to a selection of individuals and groups associated with the Archive, discussing their interests and experiences of it, and their thoughts on its value and importance as a repository of arts education materials, ideals and practices. Our primary motivations were to consider these different voices in relation to the purpose, direction and relevance of the NAEA today. These exchanges raise fundamental questions and debates about what art education is and what it might become, and how these historical collections, and creative engagements with it, might help to shape our contemporary thinking.
The Sleeping Bag Project involves collective making through salvaging discarded sleeping bags fro... more The Sleeping Bag Project involves collective making through salvaging discarded sleeping bags from music festivals for reuse by a citywide initiative for the homeless. The project takes an open-ended approach to textiles to express a compassionate action towards others who do not have a home. By giving these discarded sleeping-bags a new purpose, the ephemeral nature of the festival environment (in the open field) is appropriated to the semi-permanent habitat of the urban homeless (in the street). Through these modest material interventions and geographical displacements, aesthetic and ethical considerations overlap, resulting in the convergence of artistic and charitable acts. Presented within the Knitting and Stitching Show, Harrogate (2012) was a collage of encounters with volunteers, salvaged sleeping bags, website, washing machines, craft activities and a show-reel occupying 1000 square foot space attracting an audience of approximately 28,000. Within the current debate of advanced skills (Sennett, 2008) versus DIY strategies (IFC, 2007) in the process of crafting, the research investigates cloth’s potential as a metaphor for consciousness and catalyst for empathy and cohesion.
The results of the study undertaken between March and September 2011, through focus group and in-... more The results of the study undertaken between March and September 2011, through focus group and in-depth interview analysis with 10 severely affected employees, indicates that the underlying trauma of the incident that took place on January 7th 2011 has produced a unique form of estrangement with utilitarian objects. The workplace environment within which this estrangement persists, has cultivated an obscure desire in its workers to fixate on the trace of plastic residues in all things. When prompted, the respondents in the study articulate their relationship to obsolete objects in unusual and unpredictable ways. This has affected their work performance and ability to carry out simple tasks considerably. The results of the study show that a condition called ‘involuntary thinking’ has taken over work production. A detailed summary of the underlying issues of this condition will be accounted for in this report, with suggested strategies for coping with involuntary thinking behaviour. Although these strategies are by no means a solution for the problem, they may provide management with short-term safeguards to limit further involuntary conflicts within the workplace. http://www.philipwelding.co.uk/humanresources2.htm
What is commonly known as the 'sophomore slump' or 'second year blues' can be attributed to sever... more What is commonly known as the 'sophomore slump' or 'second year blues' can be attributed to several stress related factors: fears surrounding increased levels of independent learning and selfdirected study, social group cohesion with peers, personal development issues with pressures to cope with new life challenges, such as housing and finance issues (Schreiner, 2010). Evidence suggests that due to the amalgamation of these factors, students often experience a loss of engagement, struggle to manage a smooth transition into year two and, consequently, to get the best out of their intermediate level of undergraduate study (Grump, 2007). At the University of Huddersfield, we have found that fewer students access academic skills provision in their second year and that this pattern is mirrored in taught academic skills session delivery, with sessions being 'front-loaded' at foundation level. Our role as facilitators for the learning journey of a student requires that we engage with the progression levels of a degree programme holistically, but, are we successfully identifying and implementing relevant 'progression points' for each level? This workshop aims to generate a discussion around innovative pedagogical methods and strategies which work to ensure progressive development throughout the student experience and in particular at the intermediate level. Session outline 20 minute presentation of issues 15 minute card exercise on progression of learning development from foundation to honours level 10 mins round up 10 mins case study discussion of innovative models at intermediate level 5 mins Questions Presenters Amanda Tinker Academic Skills Tutor (AST) Pat Hill (AST) Rowan Bailey (AST)
This Writing-PAD discussion forum and workshop event is designed to stimulate collaborative conve... more This Writing-PAD discussion forum and workshop event is designed to stimulate collaborative conversations and exchanges, in and around the archive, with a view to developing a clear set of concepts and approaches, abstracts and ideas, contributing towards a guest edited issue in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. A call for issue will be formulated as part of this event, based on the ideas generated out of the forum. As a way to stimulate re-writings of the archive, the forum will provide an opportunity for you to bring your own archival experiences to the table for discussion. We invite you to join us if you are keen to explore different approaches and styles of writing that resonate with the ‘archival’ as a concept and as a practice. This collaborative event will shape and form the directives of the guest-edited issue. Resources on the topic of the archive and workshop activities will be provided. Themes for exploration: Writing with and through the archive, expanding the field of the archive as a creative concept, experimental uses of the archive in art and design making, material engagements with the past and formations for the future, geographic site as archival resource, fictions of the archive and storytelling, digital platforms, coding and de-coding materiality, creative systems of classification, co-creation in the archive, design innovations through the use of company archives, exploring relationships between copyright, intellectual property and appropriation, archival interplays between materials and things, the public archive versus the domestic archive, the studio as archive, making histories and futures through creative practice, identifying archival inheritances in art and design, working with art education archives, teaching archival interventions within the context of art, design and architecture, and fostering inter/multi/trans-disciplinary encounters in the archive.
Craft Research, 2015
Craft and the Handmade: Making the intangible visible In November 2014, the Department of Fashion... more Craft and the Handmade: Making the intangible visible In November 2014, the Department of Fashion and Textiles at the University of Huddersfield hosted the conference Transition: Rethinking Textiles and Surfaces. 1 The conference sought to scrutinize current and future developments in textile research and its applications within the wider context of the creative industries. With keynote presentations from Professor Becky Earley, Professor Jane Harris, Dr Subramanian Senthilkannan Muthu, publisher David Shah and Trend Union forecaster Philip Fimmano, this two day event brought together a myriad of theoretical perspectives and material approaches through four distinct tracks: Science and Technology, Sustainable Futures, Craft and the Handmade and Enterprise/Industry/Business.
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2014
This interview took place at the National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) in November 2014. Whilst ... more This interview took place at the National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) in November 2014. Whilst there is a necessary focus on Hester Reeve's most recent project YMEDACA-a re-mapping of Yorkshire Sculpture Park through the features of Plato's 'Academos'-the dialogue also moves its way through the archive's important role in the process and formation of the project. We were keen to hold our discussion inside the archive itself; to allow the space to hold us while we negotiated the terrain of sculptural thinking. This was our first meeting and what follows is a partial transcription of our three hour discussion. We would like our exchange to honour the 30 year anniversary of the NAEA. Rowan Bailey [RB]: Could you briefly describe your involvement with the National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) and your motivations for working with the archive as a practitioner? Hester Reeve [HR]: I came here as an artist-scholar and I needed to read. I don't get a lot of time to read deeply as a university lecturer, which is all grist to the research I wanted to carry out into the history of British art school education. YMEDACA is very site-specific to Yorkshire Sculpture Park, including the now abandoned Bretton Hall Art College which surrounds the archive building. So the NAEA was perfectly positioned in many ways to inform the project. I had this strange dialectic whilst here, of, on the one hand, feeling unconfident. Not about the project. I was confronted by lots of material by artists and educationalists, striking positions and arguments, tacitly assuming their place in the scheme of things. I just never feel like that. I avidly read all this good stuff and yet the more I research, the more I feel out of place.
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2004
Arts
In 2015, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) commissioned John Holden, visiting profe... more In 2015, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) commissioned John Holden, visiting professor at City University, London, and associate at the think-tank Demos, to write a report on culture as part of its Cultural Value Project. The claim within the report was to redirect culture away from economic prescriptions and to focus on ecological approaches to ‘value’. Holden considers the application and use of ecological tropes to re-situate culture as ‘non-hierarchical’ and as part of symbiotic social processes. By embracing metaphors of ‘emergence,’ ‘interdependence,’ ‘networks,’ and ‘convergence,’ he suggests we can “gain new understandings about how culture works, and these understandings in turn help with policy information and implementation”. This article addresses the role of ‘cultural critique’ in the live environments and ecologies of place-making. It will consider, with examples, how cultural production, cultural practices, and cultural forms generate mixed ecologies of...
Thought Positions in Sculpture presents ten contemporary artists who have encountered the archive... more Thought Positions in Sculpture presents ten contemporary artists who have encountered the archive through the stories of their own art practice. The physical exhibition at Huddersfield Art Gallery refers to existing works of art from Leeds Museums and Galleries Sculpture Collection, archival material from the Henry Moore Institute, digitised archival material from the Tate Gallery, audio material from the British Library and other archival sites, some of which are inventions by the artist themselves.
Intended as a starting point for thinking in, with and through the archive, the exhibition serves as a platform and context for different narratives of sculptural thinking. Over the duration of three months, conversation pieces will be generated through this website alongside the physical work on display at Huddersfield Art Gallery.
Thought Positions in Sculpture features the following artists: Brass Art are an artist collective who explore the Freud Museum house, London as an archive site for capturing uncanny resonances through digital sculptural forms. Desmond Brett explores the notion of ‘assemblage’ through the photographic archives of Eileen Agar and Paul Nash. Liadin Cooke responds to the parallels of her own sculptural thinking in relation to Geoffrey Clarke (Leeds Sculpture Collection/Henry Moore Institute archive). Sheila Gaffney stages her own thought position through the object relations she believes are in play in the evolution of twentieth century British sculpture. Juliet MacDonald addresses Henry Fehr’s memorial ‘Head of Victory’ (Leeds Sculpture Collection). Nicola Perren explores Ghisha Koenig’s drawings and sculpture works housed at the Henry Moore Institute archive and Leeds Sculpture Collection. Nicola Redmore encounters some of the plaster works of Kenneth Armitage (Leeds Sculpture Collection) and digitised archival materials from the Tate Gallery. Hester Reeve listens to the audio interviews from the ‘Artists’ Lives’ project at the British Library to address the concept of ‘sculptural substance’. Lisa Stansbie explores a series of swimming machine patents from Google to produce her own sculptures. Jill Townsley, a sculptor influenced by serialisation, engages with the processes of making an archive through the retrieval of stones from the West Yorkshire landscape.
In April 2014 I organised and chaired a panel entitled ‘Archival Interventions in Sculpture’ for ... more In April 2014 I organised and chaired a panel entitled ‘Archival Interventions in Sculpture’ for the annual Association of Art Historians conference at the Royal College of Art. The presentation brought together papers from art historians, archivists, curators and sculptors to forge new insights into the role of the archive in sculptural practice and to demonstrate how works of sculpture are in and of themselves archival. The essays presented here were generated from this panel, and they reveal this intertwined relationship in two ways. Firstly, through their discussion of archival resources on sculptural practice and the histories of making they disclose and, secondly, how they point to the ways in which the sculptor uses existing archival collections of sculptural materials and artefacts to think with and through the object of sculpture itself as a documentary record. The essays presented in this issue are an extension of this panel.
This article proposes to explore the variegated plays of concrete as a travelling concept through... more This article proposes to explore the variegated plays of concrete as a travelling concept through four specific examples, viewed from the locality of the Yorkshire Sculpture Triangle in 2015. It will be argued that ‘concrete’ makes possible a triangulated reading practice in, of and for sculpture. The first example looks to the use of concrete, as a material, in some of the ‘technical’ experiments of Henry Moore, from the 1920s-1930s. The second example is the only public concrete sculpture by Barbara Hepworth on record, entitled Turning Forms. This is a kinetic work which was commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The psychic registrations of form-in-concrete will be explored through the aesthetic reception and understanding of these works. The third example examines the interplay between abstraction and concretion in a work of structural engineering: the Arqiva transmission tower on Emley Moor. This structure is a working utilitarian model of the telecommunications industry which took hold in the 1960s and 1970s. It is also a sculptural monument in a landscape of other design ‘types’. The fourth example considers the recent display of Lygia Clark’s Bichos at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, in 2014-2015. Bicho Pássaro do Espaço (‘Creature Passing through Space’) (1960) reveals a particular translation between concrete thinking and concrete experience. These examples call upon the semantics of the concrete as a thought process and will track a journey into a region marked by three interconnected points: the concrete specificity in the material works selected, the broader field of concrete forms within which the sculptural may sit and the philosophical/aesthetic language of concrete for sculpture.
This paper proposes to explore, through new materialist insights drawn from art and neuroscience,... more This paper proposes to explore, through new materialist insights drawn from art and neuroscience, an alternative imaging/imagining of brain plasticity. Such a reading presents the brain image in and through enactments of the brainbody; a phenomenon which accounts for the brain’s own entanglement with ‘bodies, mind, behavior, socio-cultural contexts, and meaning-making’ (Schmitz and Hoppner, 2014: 546). The paper will examine curatorial strategies deployed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, in particular, insights generated out of dOCUMENTA (13) (2012) and the 14th Istanbul Biennial SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms (5 September-1 November 2015). These international exhibitions engage a diffractive methodology of reading through the form-iterations generated by the brain on socio-cultural and psychic levels. Secondly, analysis of a recent film by Ursula Biemann and Mo Deiner entitled Twenty-One Percent (2016), presents an approach to artistic research where the brainbody phenomenon an...
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2014
This interview took place at the National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) in November 2014. Whilst ... more This interview took place at the National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) in November 2014. Whilst there is a necessary focus on Hester Reeve’s most recent project YMEDACA – a re-mapping of Yorkshire Sculpture Park through the features of Plato’s ‘Academos’ – the dialogue also moves its way through the archive’s important role in the process and formation of the project. We were keen to hold our discussion inside the archive itself; to allow the space to hold us while we negotiated the terrain of sculptural thinking. This was our first meeting and what follows is a partial transcription of our three hour discussion. We would like our exchange to honour the 30 year anniversary of the NAEA.
Exhibitions about brain science are not transparent environments. They are rather dissemination p... more Exhibitions about brain science are not transparent environments. They are rather dissemination practices where cultural assumptions and social relations are enacted through the brainbody as a site of and for meaning-making activity. The brainbody is a term used in feminist and critical theory to consider how neurological bodies are entangled with social, political and cultural structures. As a critical tool for thinking about the situatedness of cognition and embodiments of the brain, this paper explores how the brainbody takes shape through differing mechanisms of curation, display and visitor engagement. It does this through a critically discursive analysis of three specific examples of exhibition curation: Brain: The World Inside Your Head (2001), States of Mind: Tracing the Edges of Consciousness (2015-2016) and Brain Diaries: Modern Neuroscience in Action (2017).
Philosophy Today
This essay explores “sculptural plasticity” through neuronal matterings of the brainbody in philo... more This essay explores “sculptural plasticity” through neuronal matterings of the brainbody in philosophy, literature, and art. It focuses on Socrates’s cataleptic condition as evidenced in Plato’s Symposium, the plasticities at work in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, and morphogenetic acts of cell formation in the sculptural installation of Pierre Huyghe’s After ALife Ahead.
International Journal of Art & Design Education
The National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) is housed and maintained by the Yorkshire Sculpture Pa... more The National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) is housed and maintained by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), managed by YSP coordinators and educators with a well-established volunteer programme. This year, 2017, as part of the celebrations of the YSP's 40th anniversary, the Archive will hold its own exhibition entitled Treasures Revealed: a collection of items selected by people who have been involved in the Archive, whether as donors, volunteers, researchers, artists, trustees or steering group members. In parallel with the exhibition, this paper aims to give voice to a selection of individuals and groups associated with the Archive, discussing their interests and experiences of it, and their thoughts on its value and importance as a repository of arts education materials, ideals and practices. Our primary motivations were to consider these different voices in relation to the purpose, direction and relevance of the NAEA today. These exchanges raise fundamental questions and debates about what art education is and what it might become, and how these historical collections, and creative engagements with it, might help to shape our contemporary thinking.
The Sleeping Bag Project involves collective making through salvaging discarded sleeping bags fro... more The Sleeping Bag Project involves collective making through salvaging discarded sleeping bags from music festivals for reuse by a citywide initiative for the homeless. The project takes an open-ended approach to textiles to express a compassionate action towards others who do not have a home. By giving these discarded sleeping-bags a new purpose, the ephemeral nature of the festival environment (in the open field) is appropriated to the semi-permanent habitat of the urban homeless (in the street). Through these modest material interventions and geographical displacements, aesthetic and ethical considerations overlap, resulting in the convergence of artistic and charitable acts. Presented within the Knitting and Stitching Show, Harrogate (2012) was a collage of encounters with volunteers, salvaged sleeping bags, website, washing machines, craft activities and a show-reel occupying 1000 square foot space attracting an audience of approximately 28,000. Within the current debate of advanced skills (Sennett, 2008) versus DIY strategies (IFC, 2007) in the process of crafting, the research investigates cloth’s potential as a metaphor for consciousness and catalyst for empathy and cohesion.
The results of the study undertaken between March and September 2011, through focus group and in-... more The results of the study undertaken between March and September 2011, through focus group and in-depth interview analysis with 10 severely affected employees, indicates that the underlying trauma of the incident that took place on January 7th 2011 has produced a unique form of estrangement with utilitarian objects. The workplace environment within which this estrangement persists, has cultivated an obscure desire in its workers to fixate on the trace of plastic residues in all things. When prompted, the respondents in the study articulate their relationship to obsolete objects in unusual and unpredictable ways. This has affected their work performance and ability to carry out simple tasks considerably. The results of the study show that a condition called ‘involuntary thinking’ has taken over work production. A detailed summary of the underlying issues of this condition will be accounted for in this report, with suggested strategies for coping with involuntary thinking behaviour. Although these strategies are by no means a solution for the problem, they may provide management with short-term safeguards to limit further involuntary conflicts within the workplace. http://www.philipwelding.co.uk/humanresources2.htm
What is commonly known as the 'sophomore slump' or 'second year blues' can be attributed to sever... more What is commonly known as the 'sophomore slump' or 'second year blues' can be attributed to several stress related factors: fears surrounding increased levels of independent learning and selfdirected study, social group cohesion with peers, personal development issues with pressures to cope with new life challenges, such as housing and finance issues (Schreiner, 2010). Evidence suggests that due to the amalgamation of these factors, students often experience a loss of engagement, struggle to manage a smooth transition into year two and, consequently, to get the best out of their intermediate level of undergraduate study (Grump, 2007). At the University of Huddersfield, we have found that fewer students access academic skills provision in their second year and that this pattern is mirrored in taught academic skills session delivery, with sessions being 'front-loaded' at foundation level. Our role as facilitators for the learning journey of a student requires that we engage with the progression levels of a degree programme holistically, but, are we successfully identifying and implementing relevant 'progression points' for each level? This workshop aims to generate a discussion around innovative pedagogical methods and strategies which work to ensure progressive development throughout the student experience and in particular at the intermediate level. Session outline 20 minute presentation of issues 15 minute card exercise on progression of learning development from foundation to honours level 10 mins round up 10 mins case study discussion of innovative models at intermediate level 5 mins Questions Presenters Amanda Tinker Academic Skills Tutor (AST) Pat Hill (AST) Rowan Bailey (AST)
This Writing-PAD discussion forum and workshop event is designed to stimulate collaborative conve... more This Writing-PAD discussion forum and workshop event is designed to stimulate collaborative conversations and exchanges, in and around the archive, with a view to developing a clear set of concepts and approaches, abstracts and ideas, contributing towards a guest edited issue in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. A call for issue will be formulated as part of this event, based on the ideas generated out of the forum. As a way to stimulate re-writings of the archive, the forum will provide an opportunity for you to bring your own archival experiences to the table for discussion. We invite you to join us if you are keen to explore different approaches and styles of writing that resonate with the ‘archival’ as a concept and as a practice. This collaborative event will shape and form the directives of the guest-edited issue. Resources on the topic of the archive and workshop activities will be provided. Themes for exploration: Writing with and through the archive, expanding the field of the archive as a creative concept, experimental uses of the archive in art and design making, material engagements with the past and formations for the future, geographic site as archival resource, fictions of the archive and storytelling, digital platforms, coding and de-coding materiality, creative systems of classification, co-creation in the archive, design innovations through the use of company archives, exploring relationships between copyright, intellectual property and appropriation, archival interplays between materials and things, the public archive versus the domestic archive, the studio as archive, making histories and futures through creative practice, identifying archival inheritances in art and design, working with art education archives, teaching archival interventions within the context of art, design and architecture, and fostering inter/multi/trans-disciplinary encounters in the archive.
Craft Research, 2015
Craft and the Handmade: Making the intangible visible In November 2014, the Department of Fashion... more Craft and the Handmade: Making the intangible visible In November 2014, the Department of Fashion and Textiles at the University of Huddersfield hosted the conference Transition: Rethinking Textiles and Surfaces. 1 The conference sought to scrutinize current and future developments in textile research and its applications within the wider context of the creative industries. With keynote presentations from Professor Becky Earley, Professor Jane Harris, Dr Subramanian Senthilkannan Muthu, publisher David Shah and Trend Union forecaster Philip Fimmano, this two day event brought together a myriad of theoretical perspectives and material approaches through four distinct tracks: Science and Technology, Sustainable Futures, Craft and the Handmade and Enterprise/Industry/Business.
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2014
This interview took place at the National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) in November 2014. Whilst ... more This interview took place at the National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) in November 2014. Whilst there is a necessary focus on Hester Reeve's most recent project YMEDACA-a re-mapping of Yorkshire Sculpture Park through the features of Plato's 'Academos'-the dialogue also moves its way through the archive's important role in the process and formation of the project. We were keen to hold our discussion inside the archive itself; to allow the space to hold us while we negotiated the terrain of sculptural thinking. This was our first meeting and what follows is a partial transcription of our three hour discussion. We would like our exchange to honour the 30 year anniversary of the NAEA. Rowan Bailey [RB]: Could you briefly describe your involvement with the National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) and your motivations for working with the archive as a practitioner? Hester Reeve [HR]: I came here as an artist-scholar and I needed to read. I don't get a lot of time to read deeply as a university lecturer, which is all grist to the research I wanted to carry out into the history of British art school education. YMEDACA is very site-specific to Yorkshire Sculpture Park, including the now abandoned Bretton Hall Art College which surrounds the archive building. So the NAEA was perfectly positioned in many ways to inform the project. I had this strange dialectic whilst here, of, on the one hand, feeling unconfident. Not about the project. I was confronted by lots of material by artists and educationalists, striking positions and arguments, tacitly assuming their place in the scheme of things. I just never feel like that. I avidly read all this good stuff and yet the more I research, the more I feel out of place.
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2004
Arts
In 2015, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) commissioned John Holden, visiting profe... more In 2015, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) commissioned John Holden, visiting professor at City University, London, and associate at the think-tank Demos, to write a report on culture as part of its Cultural Value Project. The claim within the report was to redirect culture away from economic prescriptions and to focus on ecological approaches to ‘value’. Holden considers the application and use of ecological tropes to re-situate culture as ‘non-hierarchical’ and as part of symbiotic social processes. By embracing metaphors of ‘emergence,’ ‘interdependence,’ ‘networks,’ and ‘convergence,’ he suggests we can “gain new understandings about how culture works, and these understandings in turn help with policy information and implementation”. This article addresses the role of ‘cultural critique’ in the live environments and ecologies of place-making. It will consider, with examples, how cultural production, cultural practices, and cultural forms generate mixed ecologies of...
Thought Positions in Sculpture presents ten contemporary artists who have encountered the archive... more Thought Positions in Sculpture presents ten contemporary artists who have encountered the archive through the stories of their own art practice. The physical exhibition at Huddersfield Art Gallery refers to existing works of art from Leeds Museums and Galleries Sculpture Collection, archival material from the Henry Moore Institute, digitised archival material from the Tate Gallery, audio material from the British Library and other archival sites, some of which are inventions by the artist themselves.
Intended as a starting point for thinking in, with and through the archive, the exhibition serves as a platform and context for different narratives of sculptural thinking. Over the duration of three months, conversation pieces will be generated through this website alongside the physical work on display at Huddersfield Art Gallery.
Thought Positions in Sculpture features the following artists: Brass Art are an artist collective who explore the Freud Museum house, London as an archive site for capturing uncanny resonances through digital sculptural forms. Desmond Brett explores the notion of ‘assemblage’ through the photographic archives of Eileen Agar and Paul Nash. Liadin Cooke responds to the parallels of her own sculptural thinking in relation to Geoffrey Clarke (Leeds Sculpture Collection/Henry Moore Institute archive). Sheila Gaffney stages her own thought position through the object relations she believes are in play in the evolution of twentieth century British sculpture. Juliet MacDonald addresses Henry Fehr’s memorial ‘Head of Victory’ (Leeds Sculpture Collection). Nicola Perren explores Ghisha Koenig’s drawings and sculpture works housed at the Henry Moore Institute archive and Leeds Sculpture Collection. Nicola Redmore encounters some of the plaster works of Kenneth Armitage (Leeds Sculpture Collection) and digitised archival materials from the Tate Gallery. Hester Reeve listens to the audio interviews from the ‘Artists’ Lives’ project at the British Library to address the concept of ‘sculptural substance’. Lisa Stansbie explores a series of swimming machine patents from Google to produce her own sculptures. Jill Townsley, a sculptor influenced by serialisation, engages with the processes of making an archive through the retrieval of stones from the West Yorkshire landscape.
In April 2014 I organised and chaired a panel entitled ‘Archival Interventions in Sculpture’ for ... more In April 2014 I organised and chaired a panel entitled ‘Archival Interventions in Sculpture’ for the annual Association of Art Historians conference at the Royal College of Art. The presentation brought together papers from art historians, archivists, curators and sculptors to forge new insights into the role of the archive in sculptural practice and to demonstrate how works of sculpture are in and of themselves archival. The essays presented here were generated from this panel, and they reveal this intertwined relationship in two ways. Firstly, through their discussion of archival resources on sculptural practice and the histories of making they disclose and, secondly, how they point to the ways in which the sculptor uses existing archival collections of sculptural materials and artefacts to think with and through the object of sculpture itself as a documentary record. The essays presented in this issue are an extension of this panel.
This article proposes to explore the variegated plays of concrete as a travelling concept through... more This article proposes to explore the variegated plays of concrete as a travelling concept through four specific examples, viewed from the locality of the Yorkshire Sculpture Triangle in 2015. It will be argued that ‘concrete’ makes possible a triangulated reading practice in, of and for sculpture. The first example looks to the use of concrete, as a material, in some of the ‘technical’ experiments of Henry Moore, from the 1920s-1930s. The second example is the only public concrete sculpture by Barbara Hepworth on record, entitled Turning Forms. This is a kinetic work which was commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The psychic registrations of form-in-concrete will be explored through the aesthetic reception and understanding of these works. The third example examines the interplay between abstraction and concretion in a work of structural engineering: the Arqiva transmission tower on Emley Moor. This structure is a working utilitarian model of the telecommunications industry which took hold in the 1960s and 1970s. It is also a sculptural monument in a landscape of other design ‘types’. The fourth example considers the recent display of Lygia Clark’s Bichos at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, in 2014-2015. Bicho Pássaro do Espaço (‘Creature Passing through Space’) (1960) reveals a particular translation between concrete thinking and concrete experience. These examples call upon the semantics of the concrete as a thought process and will track a journey into a region marked by three interconnected points: the concrete specificity in the material works selected, the broader field of concrete forms within which the sculptural may sit and the philosophical/aesthetic language of concrete for sculpture.