Now showing items 41-60 of 152

    • A Trace of Actions Unseen: The Photographic Error as Photography ‘in performance’

      Piper-Wright, Tracy; University of Chester (Instituto de História da Arte, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2022-04-01)
      In contemporary digital photography the accident or fault is an increasingly rare and unusual phenomenon, but it presents valuable insights into the practice of photography. This article discusses how the photographic error reveals qualities of the photographic experience normally hidden in conventional photographs, and proposes a reconsideration of time in relation to photography perceived through the accidental image. The error is conceived as a performance, extending the conventional time scales of the photograph from the ‘snap’ into three ‘acts’: the photographic event, the recording of an image and, lastly, interpretation by the viewer. In each stage the error’s relationship to time is shown to be ambiguous and multifaceted, counterpointing a simplified concept of time which prevails in the conventional photograph. The error exposes the entanglement of actors and relationships within the act of photographing and in so doing destabilises common assumptions about photographs as simple, immediate documents.
    • Knowsley Flower Show Archive: a Resource and Celebration

      Grennan, Simon; University of Chester
      The Knowlsey Flower Show Archive presents personal memories, materials and memorabilia of Knowsley Flower Show, between its inception in 1999 and today. In particular, the Archive focuses on the growers, competitors and visitors to the Marquee, which remains the centre of the event. Knowsley Flower Show averages around 20,000 visitors to its large day event in August every year. It is a free public event held at Court Hey Park, a public park in Knowsley. The event centres on a traditional Marquee with around 90 amateur growers exhibiting and competing for prizes in categories encompassing fruit and vegetables, flowers, produce and crafts. The Archive includes a free online image and text archive, a publication and a touring exhibition.
    • The New Map of Barset

      Williamson, Michael; Grennan, Simon; University of Chester
      A comprehensive map of the County of Barsetshire, based on Anthony Trollope’s original sketch plan (1860) but incorporating all the references contained within the Barchester and Palliser Series of novels and other references within Trollope’s works.
    • Beyond Facsimile: The haptic photobook as a distributed archive

      Daly, Tim; University of Chester (2019-03-15)
      This is a case study describing the development of a dossier format photobook as a distributed archive, Long Grove Asylum Medical Journal by Tim Daly. The work presents a twenty-five year long project recording the interior spaces, ephemera and artifacts of an abandoned large scale hospital facility, alongside material collected separately by a county archivist. The work makes explicit the link between past and present by re-materialising archive matter and original photography to create new, tactile ‘things’ that challenge our notions of the past and the present; public and private and the original and the copy. The books forefronts the materiality of collected photographs, documents and ephemera through touch and disruptive sequencing. By handling the loose-leaf contents of the books, viewers are presented with an enhanced, haptic reading experience. The recirculation of material artefacts within the dossier provides an additional kind of archive experience recalling souvenirs, the museum and private collecting. As Scott (2014: 130) suggests ‘The interaction between the book as a material object and its readers brings the book to life, just as the materiality of the book interacts with its narrative.’ Designed to be handled and navigated in a manner that wouldn’t be possible with fragile originals, the choice of papers, unconventional printing processes and hand assembly techniques creates an enhanced experience for the reader. Disrupting the reader’s expectations of a facsimile, the book encourages touch and explores a type of tacit knowledge that is unavailable from viewing alone.
    • Travelling the Imaginary Landscape

      Piper-Wright, Tracy; University of Chester (University of Chester, 2016-07-01)
      Catalogue essay to accompany the exhibition "Death Returned Her to Rags" by Alexe Dilworth at FZKKE gallery, Euskirchen Germany 2016.
    • Appendix 2: Questions of terminology and historicisation. 'Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist'.

      Grennan, Simon; Sabin, Roger; Waite, Julian; University of Chester; Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London
      This appendix considers questions of terminology and historicisation arising in the twenty-first-century study of the published work of Marie Duval.
    • Appendix 1: Questions of attribution. 'Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist'.

      Grennan, Simon; Sabin, Roger; Waite, Julian
      This appendix considers questions of attribution arising in the published work of Marie Duval.
    • Introduction

      Grennan, Simon; Sabin, Roger; Waite, Julian; University of Chester; Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London
      Introduction to the book 'Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist'.
    • The Significance of Marie Duval’s Drawing Style

      Grennan, Simon; University of Chester
      Duval’s drawings were made to provoke laughter, by articulating and rearticulating social stereotypes and contradictions. Duval achieved this in her choice of topics and, more unusually, in her use of ideas of her own position as a humorous visual journalist: her visible lack of training, stage career, gender and social class, relative to the experiences of readers. This chapter will examine this articulation, considering late nineteenth-century gender and class relationships between humour, displays of technical skill and concepts of vulgar behaviour. The chapter will finally exemplify these relationships in two Duval drawings on the topic of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions of 1880 and 1876.
    • Marie Duval and the Technologies of Periodical Publishing

      Grennan, Simon; University of Chester
      The chapter will focus on three areas of activity constituting commercial illustration: training, degrees of labour organisation and types of employment and remuneration. It will construct a description of Duval’s career in commercial illustration according to relationships made between the known corpus of her published work, over a fifteen year period, and the technical processes, personnel and locations of the print technologies utilised by her publisher (Wright 1995). Duval appears to have lacked training in two key areas of her profession: studio – that is, academic – training as a draughtswoman and training as an engraver. The chapter will examine how training, and the lack of it, constituted types of access and prohibition of access to key personnel and locations, as well as to conventions of topic and approach, and levels of remuneration (Huneault 2002). It will argue that these types of facility and prohibition were explicitly gendered whilst also being established trade orthodoxies, in which proof of agreed types of technical competency was key to accessing employment. (Flood 2013). The chapter will consider contemporaneous concepts of women’s work in the media in the last half of the century (in Craik 1857, Starr 1899 and in the Alexandra Magazine 1864, for example), proposing that distinctions can be made on the basis of social class as well as gender, between women who joined or enjoined established trades, such as wood engraving, and women generating new types of work, alongside men, in media professions with emerging or changing identities, such as photography and journalism (Colligan and Linley (2011).
    • Duval and the Woman Employee

      Grennan, Simon; University of Chester
      This Chapter will examine aspects of the life and work of Duval as both exemplary of and, in some aspects in contradiction to, conceptions of the emerging roles of professional women in the journals and literature of the later nineteenth century. Utilising both Duval’s drawings and her historic place in the remediation culture of new serialised papers, the novel and popular theatre productions in the 1870s and 80s, the chapter will extrapolate and examine shared characteristics in the fictional women newspaper journalists Henrietta Stackpole (in James’ The Portrait of a Lady, 1881) and Elsie Bengough (in Onions’ The Beckoning Fair One, 1911). Considering the impact of class on nineteenth century gendering of professional work, first in Patmore’s iteration of the “separate spheres” of agency of men and women in The Angel in the House (1854, derived from de Toqueville’s 1840 Democracy in America), and then in Sarah Grand’s antithetical The New Aspect of the Woman Question (1894), in which the term “new woman” first appeared, the chapter will chart the transformation of women’s domestic work into new types of professional occupations––particularly the new, equivocally gendered, professions that arose with the advent of serial journals, including Judy, or The London Serio-Comic Journal. The Chapter will argue for more diverse conceptions of the lives of urban professional women in the later nineteenth century, touching on recent critiques of masculine constructions of ‘journalistic’ observation and public commentary.
    • The Enduring Power of Comic Strips

      Grennan, Simon; University of Chester
      This chapter argues that the power of comics resides in the historic appearance and modulation of the affective possibilities of the comic strip register. On this basis, it explores how this power is realized in popular visual literature, which derives from, develops and transforms the historic contingencies of reading. Analysing examples in the work of Leo Baxendale, Michiko Hasegawa, Kaz, Christophe Blaine, R. J. Ivankovic, Catherine Anyango, Seth Tobocman, Keiji Nakazawa, Debbie Drechsler and Nicola Streeten, it describes a number of ways in which comics engage with and manipulate these historic contingencies, discussing the use of comedy, satire and parody and the development of political protest and life writing as sub-genres that are fundamentally engaged with readers’ habits and expectations. Finally, the chapter focuses on the opportunities that visual story showing and depictive drawing continue to provide to comics artists to achieve this engagement.
    • I Know How This Ends: Stories of Dementia Care

      Wilkins, Peter; Martins, Melissa; Grennan, Simon; Priego, Ernesto; University of Chester; Douglas College; City, University of London (Priego Publishing Projects, 2020-02-03)
      I Know How This Ends is the second volume in a series that started with Parables of Care: Creative Responses to Dementia Care (2017). The project explores the potential of comics to enhance the impact of dementia care research. This comic book presents, in synthesised form, stories crafted from narrative data collected via interviews with professional caregivers, educators, and staff at Douglas College in Vancouver, Canada, who have cared for relatives and people with dementia in hospital.The intention of the book is to show the importance of feeling in care-giving, the professional aspects of which are sometimes at odds with the family systems aspect of dementia.
    • A Trace of Actions Unseen: The Photographic Error as Photography ‘in performance’

      Piper-Wright, Tracy; University of Chester (2018-11-16)
      In contemporary digital photography the error is an increasingly rare and unusual phenomenon, but it presents valuable insights into the practice of photography. This article proposes time as a specific indicator of difference between the ‘conventional’ photograph and the error, based on a distinction between performativity and performance. The performance of the error takes place in three ‘acts’: the photographic event, image recording and interpretation by the viewer. In each stage the error’s relationship to time is shown to be ambiguous and multifaceted, counterpointing a simplified concept of time which prevails in the conventional photograph. The error exposes the entanglement of actors and relationships within the act of photographing and in so doing destabilises common assumptions about photographs as simple, immediate documents.
    • In Darwin’s Garden: an evolutionary exploration of augmented reality in practice

      Summers, Alan; University of Chester
      This chapter discusses the rapid developments in augmented reality and mixed reality technologies, from a practitioner’s perspective of making the augmented reality sculptural work In Darwin’s Garden. From its conception in 2012, to its exhibition at Carbon Meets Silicon II in 2017, the advances in augmented reality technology led to an interplay between the goal of the creators and the technological realisation of that vision. The art, design and technology involved, generated a reactive process that was mired in external influences as the accessibility to augmented reality became commercially valuable and subsequently restricted. This chapter will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand more about the possibilities, technologies and processes involved in realising mixed reality practice and about the commercial culture that supports it.
    • Between Presence and Program: The Photographic Error as Counter Culture

      Piper-Wright, Tracy; University of Chester
      Common photographic errors such over or under exposure, blur, or inadvertent cropping are increasingly rare as technological developments in digital photography have sought to eradicate the error from practice and perception. Efficiencies such as camera automation and image preview are often designed to remove the ‘unreliability’ of the human element in order to produce accurate and consistent images. The error, occurring on the margins of practice and increasingly rare, provides a counterpoint to this prevailing image culture by revealing the interdependence of photographer and camera through unintended outcomes. This chapter explores the ideological assumptions entwined in the development of camera technologies, and how cultures of practice based on a hierarchy of control between camera or photographer arose. Through examples drawn from the research project In Pursuit of Error, the chapter demonstrates how the error disrupts this hierarchy by evidencing the shared subjective agency of camera and photographer. The methodological framework of Actor-Network Theory is used to interrogate the relationship between photographer and camera and reveals them as equal ‘actants’ in the event of photographing. The embodied photographer’s attitude of play, experimentation and not-knowing is interdependent on the camera as a co-creator of unexpected image events which disrupt the conventions of photographic representation.
    • The north as a fantasy playground: The landscape photography of Raymond Moore

      Daly, Tim; University of Chester
      The photographer Raymond Moore (1920-87) who was born in Wallasey, studied painting at the Royal College of Art and in the mid-70s, taught photography at the influential Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham. In 1981, Moore was the first British photographer to have a retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London. There are two published monographs of his work, Murmurs at Every Turn (1981) and Every So Often (1983). Although Moore’s work drew influence from European and American sources, his work has a characteristically British undertone. Since his death in 1987, photography’s expanded field of practice has emerged, freeing artists and photographers to explore themes and concerns beyond the established silos of practice of documentary and landscape. Moore’s photographic career overlapped several significant points in the history of the medium, yet his highly individualised practice sat outside both established and emerging conventions. Despite this rich complexity, a continuing legal uncertainty over the legacy of Raymond Moore’s archive has prevented a critical reevaluation of his work – his work is no longer accessible and as such, has not been exhibited or republished like many of his contemporaries.
    • Long Grove Asylum Medical Journal

      Daly, Tim; University of Chester
      The piece documents the disposal of a large scale Edwardian asylum complex that closed in 1992. I documented the aftermath of the site from 1993-98, before private development into an executive housing estate. Unbeknownst to me and at the same time, county archivist Julian Pooley was rescuing abandoned documents, medical journals, ephemera and artefacts from the same location. These would later be housed in the Surrey History Centre in Working. The work is a coming together of these two collections with new documentary photographs of the estate as it is today. The work takes the form of a dossier, styled as a large medical journal and contains multiple elements which can be viewed in any order. Alongside photographs taken in situ are photographs of the artefacts held in the archives, creating an unusual mixture of primary and secondary documentation. Within the dossier are details from large hand-written registers left abandoned at the site, chronicling the patient journey from admission onwards. In addition to these formal records, the dossier also includes ephemera relating to the hospital's social programme, a portfolio of curiously redacted press photographs, team photographs of the medical staff, maps and patients personal effects all of which were left abandoned.
    • Barrier, ref: 9774-14, Art Textiles

      Bristow, Maxine; University of Chester (Whitworth Art Gallery, 2015-10-10)
      'Barrier, ref: 9774-14', is a series of 10 modular sculptural components, 5 of which were exhibited as part of the international 'Art_Textiles' exhibition at The Whitworth Gallery, Manchester 10 October 2015-31 January 2016. Occupying four main galleries, 'Art_Textiles' brought together works dating from the 1960s to the present day by 27 artists from around the world who use textiles as a powerful tool for expressing ideas about the social, political and artistic. The exhibition included iconic feminist pieces from the 1970s by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Faith Wilding, Miriam Shapiro, Elaine Reichek as well as contemporary works by artists such as Grayson Perry, Tracey Emin and Lubana Himid. A 96 page catalogue with a forward by the Whitworth's director Maria Balshaw, introductory essay by deputy director and curator of the exhibition Jennifer Harris and further essays by Pennina Barnett and Julia Bryon-Wilson accompanied the exhibition. Designed so that they could be variably (re)configured according to the exhibition and installational context, the modular sculptural components take the form of temporary barriers or handrails which play between a work of art and functional object. As a free standing form, the handrail directs us through space, but it also operates as a barrier which divides space, defines boundaries and alternately either denies or allows access. Articulating space in a physical way, the work also addresses the broader metaphorical connotations of borders and boundaries and their implications in terms of traditional discourses of power. Whilst the work creates a boundary that dictates the movement of the viewer and affords significance to the space that it delineates, the boundary is clearly arbitrary and open to revision. Consciously referencing seminal hard-edged minimalist modular configurations such as Donald Judd’s floor-based open frame-like structures, these works are upholstered and intricately embroidered through the labour intensive process of darning. However, rather than take centre stage, they might easily be mistaken for institutional furniture, where the self-effacing labour intensity of their production could go unnoticed. For the 'Art_Textiles' exhibition they formed a barrier around the artist Susan Collis's work which similarly involves an enormous amount of hidden labour and plays with our perceptions of everyday objects, whereas in previous configurations they have quietly protected the more spectacular work of Grayson Perry.
    • A Mile Apart

      Connolly, Lynne; University of Chester (Lynne Connolly, 2017-10-18)
      Abstract: This paper explores through the use of photography, a parallel mapping of the ‘unspoken’ domestic sphere, the myth of the safety of home, and set against political and external events in a unique period of recent history. It is focused on Belfast, Northern Ireland and the period of ‘The Troubles’. It examines the nature of the space we inhabit, the vernacular, the everyday and how this might influence our identity. Drawing on the work of Bachelard (1969) it will also explore how the vernacular can be located in a different time frame, and therefore allows for a new representation and perspective. The recreation of a wholly new space that partially exists in our experience and further exists in our interpretation of that through memory. It exists in our own parallel universe of understanding wherein we become spectators in the drama of our past. In this research the camera is working in a reversal of representation, using potentially unreliable memory to recreate moments of past events. These moments are often fragments or elements of scenarios. It is not the reliability of memory that is in question but rather the need to have validation of a remembered thing in speaking and visualising of it. Through a series of constructed images, this paper will explore this journey of representation, memory and how the photographic mnemonic becomes a device to explore divergent memories in relation to the home as well as external influences on identity and memory.