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Because it's thereThis exhibition text is part of a long-standing relationship between the artist Richard Crooks and writer Stephen Clarke. Clarke has written about Crooks' work in magazines (online and print) as well as texts for exhibition catalogues and introduction panels. A significant feature of Crooks' practice as an artist is the experience of undertaking an artist residency. During the residency, Crooks explores the landscape and the culture of the host residency. This direct experience informs the artwork Crooks produces for exhibition. In this introduction text, Clarke links Crooks’ practice to the physical act of exploration by drawing comparison to the British mountaineers George Herbert Leigh-Mallory and Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine.
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Retracing Footsteps - The Changing Landscape Yr Wyddfa / SnowdonRetracing Footsteps - The Changing Landscape of Yr Wyddfa / Snowdon is the working title of a long-term, interdisciplinary research project by artist Cian Quayle (Art and Design) and cultural geographer Daniel Bos (Geography and the Environment) at the University of Chester. The first iteration of their collaborative research, which also involved the participation of two BA Photography graduates Jane Evans and Emma Petruzzelli, was exhibited at CASC in Castlefield Gallery New Art Spaces: Chester. The exhibition also formed part of Chester Contemporary [Fringe] (September 22 - December 1, 2023). The project emerged as a result of Bos' study of 19th c. Snowdon summit hotels, visitor books, in which tourists recorded their experience of ascending the mountain. The visitor books are housed at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, and Bangor University. Yr Wyddfa / Snowdon is an iconic mountain, a signifier of Welsh identity and a place rooted in history, myth, folklore and legend. The mountain attracts over 600,000 visitors a year and the project sets out to respond to the mountain and surrounding landscape as it is walked, and experienced today, at the same time as considering the threat and impacts on the ecology, environment and local communities. From May 2023 the team undertook fieldwork based on a series of ascents to photograph and video record their experience and encounter of the mountain. An edit and selection of photographs was made towards the end of summer 2023. The exhibition, which manifest initial practice and research completed up to this point was conceived and curated by Quayle, and Bos selected a collection of extracts from the visitors books, which were juxtaposed with a final selection of images, which the project team edited and selected from a larger body of work. The visitor book extracts were typeset in Albertus by Darren Prior, and an exhibition brochure was designed by Dr Alan Summers.
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Topology of a Home: A Phenomenological Inquiry into the Nature of DwellingTopology of a Home: A Phenomenological Inquiry into the Nature of Dwelling is a photographic investigation of dwelling and habitation based on my encounter with, and return to, urban and rural locations in the United Kingdom and Thailand. These investigations consider, in phenomenological terms, notions that are related to the ways in which photographs establish how human presence is embodied in space and place. Phenomenology can be comprehended as a description of everyday existence as it shows itself to us. The thesis explores the concept of Being (Dasein) as established by German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s concept of Dasein plays a pivotal role in my thesis leading to an understanding of the relationship between Beings who temporally exist in space, and inhabit a place. In Heideggerian terms, Dasein is understood as the essential rootedness of man. The thesis explores the question: What is the relationship between Being-in-the-world and Dwelling? It also puts forward the important claim that the practice of photography itself —the taking and making of photographs—can be understood as a modality of dwelling. To support this claim, I draw from the work of British anthropologist Tim Ingold. The photographic practice has become my means of dwelling and the six bodies of photographs which comprise this thesis set out to determine this. Many of the themes explored in images, and which are discussed in the thesis, are cyclical. Accordingly, there is a deliberate use of overlapping of ideas across different projects and these are revealed in the six chapters and their corresponding photographic portfolios. Chapters One, Two, and Three describe how the photographic trace manifests a chronology of dwelling in sites located in a Northeast province of Thailand and the United Kingdom. Chapters Four and Five evaluate my response to the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus pandemic and unpack the following scenario: What is the effect of dwelling when a global pandemic suspends movement and isolates individuals? Chapter Six draws everything together highlighting how the photographic practice forefronts my research as a means of dwelling. The themes in this final chapter represent a return to the things themselves, a claim first put forward by Austrian-German philosopher Edmund Husserl when he stated that in order to be able to carry out a phenomenological analysis of the lifeworld that we inhabit: “meanings … are not enough: we must go back to the things themselves [emphasis added]” (2001, p. 168). The thesis and supporting bodies of photographs also explores the claim that the nature of dwelling revolves around the complex relationship between the memories of our lifeworld housed in our mind, and the placement of the significant objects that are “bound up with the structure of Being which belongs to the ready-to-hand” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 135), in the sites we chose to dwell in and call home.
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Drama workshop: PapperssnöThis book is for higher and further education tutors who wish to build on their experience, and deliver exciting and accessible classroom techniques and practices that are highly interactive, creative, and engaging to help further the teaching of sustainability.
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Drama icebreaker: Improvisation for beginnersThis book is for higher and further education tutors who wish to build on their experience, and deliver exciting and accessible classroom techniques and practices that are highly interactive, creative, and engaging to help further the teaching of sustainability.
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Before you start with drama and performanceThis book is for higher and further education tutors who wish to build on their experience, and deliver exciting and accessible classroom techniques and practices that are highly interactive, creative, and engaging to help further the teaching of sustainability.
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Tusitala: Pacific Perspectives on Robert Louis StevensonIn collaboration with the University of Edinburgh's Remediating Stevenson project, the public exhibition 'Tusitala: Pacific Perspectives on Robert Louis Stevenson' reflects on his Pacific legacy then and now. The display features new creative works, inspired by Stevenson and his Pacific stories, produced by Sāmoan, Hawaiian and British artists, poets, and filmmakers. These appear alongside original items from the Library's archives, conveying new perspectives on Stevenson and his work.
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Key Terms in Comics StudiesKey Terms in Comics Studies is a glossary of over 300 terms and critical concepts currently used in the Anglophone academic study of comics, including those from other languages that are currently adopted and used in English.
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Thinking About Drawing As Cause and Consequence: Practical Approaches in TimeThis paper, a conversation between Simon Grennan, Carol Wild, Miranda Matthews and Claire Penketh, explores drawing as cause and consequence, applying Grennan’s thinking to three drawings as a means of exploring and exemplifying ideas discussed in his keynote at the iJADE Conference: Time in 2023. Following an initial introduction to key ideas that were raised for that audience, the paper explores the ways that three particular drawings operate, with temporality offering one of a number of ways that they may be explored. The paper centres on three questions: (i) What might students learn are the different purposes of drawing? (ii) How might students adjudicate the status of drawn traces? (iii) How might students adjudicate the value of drawing activities?
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South Wales Housing Estate 1986The photographs for South Wales Housing Estate 1986 were taken during the third year of Clarke’s undergraduate course in Fine Art at Newport College of Art. These pictures were taken in response to Clarke’s first visit to San Diego, Southern California, in 1985. The suburbs of San Diego had made an impression on Clarke; spread across the landscape these were man-made environments of houses, gardens, and parked cars. To some extent, British housing estates mirror the aspirational developments in the US suburbs but on a less ambitious level. Clarke had been made aware of the work of the New Topographics photographers – in particular Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams and Joe Deal – who had documented the housing developments in the American Southwest. Clarke’s photographs of the British housing estate prefigure his work in San Diego that has since been reproduced in publications and exhibitions. South Wales Housing Estate 1986 was published by Café Royal Books in an edition of 250. It was edited by Craig Atkinson, founder of Café Royal Books.
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Designing Women’s Apparel: Approaches to Constructing Silhouette to Represent EmotionThis study considers visual representations of emotion in the forms of new women's apparel. It employs practice-based research methods, using processes of new apparel design, production and analysis to make hypotheses, design and undertake experiments and demonstrate findings. The research methods utilised within the study bring practice and theory to bear upon one another, two interrogate relationships between form, silhouette and emotion in the design of women’s apparel. Consumer research, colour analysis, historical investigation, prototyping and testing were used to answer research questions. Surveys were employed to gather insights on the extent of emotional recognition in the finished garments in 'Experiment Three: Recognizing Emotion'. Across Section 2, historical references were explored within subcultures to determine the stereotypical connotations associated with shape and form in apparel design. The approach to apparel design included moulage informed by the theory in Section 2 and experiment results. The study contextualises these methods by referring to aspects of existing, related explanations of the experience of emotions and apparel, in other disciplines. Multi-modal metaphor theory, theories of image schemata, and emotive processing provide the related theoretical frames for the study. Embodied cognition is not the topic of the study. However, the study pioneers the use of embodied metaphor within garment design and construction, following a hypothesis by Johnson & Lakoff (2003). The impact of introducing textile semantics within the scope of the study, is an area considered for further study (see Page 330). Finally, the study demonstrates a way in which theories of embodied metaphor and bodily force dynamics can be utilised to explain experiences of emotion in the forms of new women's apparel, as well as suggesting ways in which these can be used in apparel design processes. This was demonstrated in three experiments. The first experiment explored the relationship between connotations, emotion, and silhouette. The second experiment tested social responses. The experiment articulated the bodily force dynamics producing different emotions and the ways in which these dynamics interact with different forms of apparel. For the third experiment I asked a further group of participants to describe their own emotional responses to new garments that I designed to represent specific emotions. The garments designs were derived from analysis of the outcomes of Experiments One and Two. The results from ‘Experiment One: Representing Emotion’ allowed for a greater understanding of how emotion is viewed and constructed, which led to the construction of an experiment response guide code, used as a tool in the design process. Experiment Two: Image Schema and Force Dynamics’ identified the force dynamics on the body that occur in a response to an emotion. Consideration of these as part of a design process aided the visualisation of emotions. The dynamics placed on the body by the garment itself mimics that of the human emotional response. Experiment Three: Recognising Emotion demonstrated that there are key connotations associated with structural features and garments require the accumulation of several to steer between ambiguous keywords denoting emotions. This is reminiscent of the sequence of processes used to ascertain emotions. The methods used in the study can be adopted by any designer, but the outcomes of different subjects adopting the method (for example, practitioners across the gender spectrum), will inevitably be different from the outcomes focused upon women’s apparel undertaken by a woman designer (the author) in this study.
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The Power of ManyOpening statement on activist photography and feminist activism for Isuse 6 of We See magazine.
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Lost, Found, Given - Stored, Shown, Seen: Artists’ Responses to the West Cheshire Museums’ CollectionsHumifusus is the Latin botanical term used to describe plants that spread out across the ground. These images were made by pressing photographic paper face down into verges and meadows, allowing plants, soil (and the occasional insect) to imprint their trace. As part of my response to Eliza Potts' Herbarium, this process offered a richly spontaneous and chaotic way to record plants within their environment. The use of video to reimagine and revivify connects me to Potts as another woman touching, and touched by, familiar landscapes, experiencing the pleasure of a haptic connection to place and plant. The sensorial overrides the pictorial, nature subsumes and entangles the human element as both merge playfully and chaotically to become one.
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Quick, Quick, Slow: Making Time for Sustainable Photography Practices in Contemporary Higher EducationAs environmental awareness grows, so do questions about the environmental impact of photography, in particular traditional film development and processing, which includes the use of plastics, gelatine and other environmentally harmful chemicals notwithstanding water usage and waste. Pioneering practice and research into sustainable alternatives to conventional processes has quickly established, supported by organisations such as The Sustainable Darkroom (n.d.). Students in Higher Education are environmentally aware and prepared to take action to mitigate their impacts where possible (Blake et al 2013). As such, there is a coalescence of perceptions within and beyond the classroom which asks to be addressed in the curriculum. This paper draws upon the research project Under a Green Light: a darkroom for the future which investigated how university darkroom practices can pivot toward more environmentally friendly methods. The paper describes the learning environment of the darkroom as a space of slowness, immersion and experimentation and the pedagogic value of this for photography students. The paper argues that incorporating environmental awareness into day-to-day teaching through systemic changes to process and practice, rather than through short term curriculum interventions, contributes to transformative learning experiences and promotes positive long-term change.
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Elvis: Other Stories to TellIn Rethinking Elvis, popular music scholars and historians look beyond Elvis' iconography to shine a light on the branding, historical and geographic reception, heritage, and fan phenomenon that sustain his legacy.
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The Future of Elvis StudiesElvis is someone who’s place in society and pop culture is inescapable, yet whose presence in the academic library and seminar room is virtually absent. In the decades-old, and now rather tired, staged battle between Elvis and the Beatles, on any quantifiable measure of scholarly interest, in academia the Fab Four would easily win. Despite Elvis’s iconism, and despite his evident and ongoing connection to a range of social issues, he constantly seems to miss the requirements for capturing scholarly attention. To some extent, Gilbert Rodman’s claim still holds true that intellectuals have traditionally been unwilling to see Presley as a figure of sufficient importance to undertake serious critical work on his life, his art, or his cultural impact. With their concerns for taste and text, film studies and popular music studies have tended to ignore Elvis. In contrast, disciplines that grapple with those same subjects as social issues have embraced the Elvis phenomenon because it is a useful case study when considering prejudice. In this section I will therefore explore three academic fields that have discussed Elvis Presley, or more precisely the issues that he represents: Southern studies, cultural studies, and legal studies. In addition to these, Elvis “scholar-fans” have produced a wealth of material, some of which is highly insightful and effectively blurs the lines between popular and academic publication. Finally, the chapter makes some suggestions about topics we might desire to see in future Elvis studies, based upon the concerns of fan studies and research on social identity. Though Elvis studies is more a trickle of scholarship than a sub-discipline, it has undergone an expansion in recent times and, like Elvis Presley himself, shows no sign of disappearing.
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Mark Duffett reflects on the issue of cultural appropriation - an interview with Jorge Carrega (in Portuguese)A discussion of the question of Elvis and cultural appropriation in interview format in Portguese.
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A Life Spent Chasing the Band? Female Fans' AutobiographiesThis chapter considers female fans’ book-length autobiographies, life stories written that recount years spent following stars, particularly from the worlds of 1960s, 1970s and 1980s rock and pop. Mass culture criticism, parasocial interaction, totemism, and participatory culture are widely understood as distinct paradigms through which academics can analyze media fandom. In parallel, I suggest they can also be seen as discursive resources that pop fans exploit in the development of autobiographic accounts. To explain this idea, I compare four case study books: My Ticket to Ride by Janice Mitchell (2021), Ah-Ha Moments by Larissa Bendell (2016), Bye, Bye Baby by Caroline Sullivan (2000), My Men, Mick and Me by Andee Baker (2020). My argument is that in such autobiographic accounts some female fans, particularly, play upon aspects of these familiar frames of thinking, not only to talk about their experiences of fandom, but also to frame their encounters inspirationally, and think about gender relations in ways that are potentially empowering.
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Gate People: Fan History Before Elvis Heritage at GracelandAcademic accounts sometimes suggest that Graceland tourism began when Elvis’s mansion was opened to the public five years after his passing. Disputing such assertions, this chapter provides a comparatively inductive, “hidden history” of early fan visits to the Graceland gates. Its methodological approach is deliberate. Academic discussions about fan tourism are, whether consciously or not, often shaped by existing ideas and paradigms. Unless researchers inductively investigate, and increase the resolution of their scholarly gaze, they will not be able to make the distinctions that move our understanding beyond the unproductive myths and generalizations that can inform academic research as easily as they can shape commercial writing. Using historical evidence, the chapter shows that there were several overlapping eras defined by different types and scales of fan activity. These include an early phase exemplified by the disabled fan Gary Pepper, the development of intelligent networks, ritual bus tours and birthday celebrations, and finally a “massification” period associated with larger crowds and negative press stereotyping. The chapter suggests that the famous Graceland music gates physically separated the star and his fans, but they were not “prison gates.” Instead, the Graceland gates functioned as a kind of semi-permeable membrane, allowing ordinary visitors limited entry into Elvis’s world. To conclude, the piece suggests that gate vigils have now become “imagined memories” in guidebook accounts whose real participants have been made comparatively anonymous so that contemporary consumers can imagine themselves occupying the fortunate positions of the actual “gate people.”
