RSS 1.0Art and Design
The Department of Art and Design is based at Kingsway Buildings, Chester and offers Single Honours undergraduate programmes in Graphic Design, Fine Art and Photography. You can also study Photography, Graphic Design and Fine Art as part of a Combined Honours course. We also offer postgraduate programmes in Design and Fine Art. This collection is licenced under a Creative Commons licence. The collection may be reproduced for non-commerical use and without modification, providing that copyright is acknowledged.
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Correction to: Introduction (Key Terms in Comics Studies)The original version of this chapter has been revised and an updated bibliography has been incorporated in the chapter.
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Soliata LafoaiThe research explores the legacies of Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific writing (c. 1893), investigating the relevance of his work to contemporary readers in Sāmoa, Scotland and Hawai'i. This is a wordless graphic adaptation of Stevenson’s novella The Beach of Falesā, included as a chapter in an anthology of adaptations and creative responses to Stevenson’s Pacific writing by artists, scholar and artists/scholars Solomon Enos, Simon Grennan, Keao Nesmith, Lalovai Pesetā, Caroline Sinavaiana Gabbard and Selina Tusitala Marsh.
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Introduction (Island Tales: New Creative Interpretations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Writing)The research explores the legacies of Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific writing (c. 1893), investigating the relevance of his work to contemporary readers in Sāmoa, Scotland and Hawai'i. This is a written Introduction to an anthology of adaptations and creative responses to Stevenson’s Pacific writing by artists, scholar and artists/scholars Solomon Enos, Simon Grennan, Keao Nesmith, Lalovai Pesetā, Caroline Sinavaiana Gabbard and Selina Tusitala Marsh.
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Drawing and installation on the British Peak District: Self, environment and a mobile working kitThis text reports about my practice-based doctoral research project exploring the question ‘How can the relationships between self and the outdoor environment of Bakestonedale Moor manifest in a creative arts practice from drawing and installation?’. I have developed a drawing and installation practice as the bearer and expression of my relationship with the outdoor places of the British Peak District in the vicinity of Pott Shrigley. This led to the development of the ‘mobile working kit’, a collection of modules fashioned from paper, string, wood and fabric, which I use to make drawings and mark the land with sculptural additions. My outdoor art-making events may only last a few hours but I later exhibit its artefacts as indoor art displays complemented by photographs and videos from the outdoor sites. I provide descriptions of two drawing activities outdoors, first, using a three-dimensional fence-like paper sculpture as a drawing surface and, second, drawing on a ground-based paper platform. These examples of art-making are then contextualized in reference to Barad’s concept of intra-activity where material changes in the world are understood to occur in co-constitutional negotiation of all active components. I use this concept and Barad’s understanding of performativity to describe process in art-making and in geological, meteorological and biological changes outdoors. I then relate these positions to current performance drawing in reference to the role of the artist and how the arts practice determines her connection to the outdoor environment.
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Practice-based Research and Creative Arts Practice: Intra-action, Self and the Other; Drawing and Installation in the British Peak DistrictThis research uses a creative arts practice emerging from the processes of drawing and installation to create and explore the relationships between the artist and the outdoor spaces of the British Peak District. A mobile working kit made from paper, fabric and wood is used to make temporary installations outdoors in response to wind, weather and topography. The mobile working kit modules are then returned to the studio and later installed in art exhibition spaces, their display indexing the connection between self, other and the outdoors. The multitude of processes in outdoor environments and their relationships to landscape and its inhabitants’ actions is used as a methodological template to frame change. Based on the dichotomy of mobility and inscription, artmaking actions and the research process are described through the conceptual lenses of ‘gesture’, ‘practice’ and an expanded understanding of drawing. Following this, a taxonomy is suggested that categorises the embodiment of artmaking events from the tensions between their experienced particularities and the artist’s perceived material practice frameworks.
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Casting ShadowsThis research output is a resource for teachers and students in Scottish schools working at 4th Level in English, Media and Social Studies. It is made with the Scottish development Education Centre (ScotDec), which delivers professional learning in Global Citizenship, Learning for Sustainability and Rights-based learning for teachers and youth workers across all sectors. The research explores the legacies of Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific writing (c. 1893), investigating the relevance of his work to contemporary readers in Sāmoa, Scotland and Hawai'i. Research Questions: 1. What legacies has Stevenson’s Pacific writing, and his residency in Hawai ‘i and Sāmoa, left for contemporary Pacific communities? 2. In what ways can an engagement with RLS’s Pacific fiction inform the creative practices of our project poets and workshop participants? 3. In an era in which educators around the world are seeking to ‘decolonise the curriculum’, what does it mean, within the structures of our project, to ‘decolonise’ Stevenson’s work, given his keen observations on the consequences of western colonial incursion into the Pacific? As methods, it utilises narrative drawing, creative writing, movie, literary criticism, community-based participation and pedagogy in English, Hawaiian and Samoan languages.
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Artmaking in the outdoor environment: Negotiating experiential and material complexitiesThis practice-based research project uses a new materialist approach to investigate the relationship between the geological, biological and meteorological activities of the outdoor world and the dynamics of a creative arts practice. It asks the question how the relationship between the self and the outdoor environment might manifest in a creative arts practice in the British Peak District. The project has produced a new approach to arts practice based on the development of a mobile artmaking kit made from string, fabric, paper and wood, and in response to the topography and the wind and rain of Bakestonedale Moor. This mobile working kit (MWK) has been used to make site-specific drawings and temporary installations and provide artefacts for indoor exhibition displays. The research understands outdoor environments as an intra-active process (Barad, 2003) and the activity of its material components as a performance. The arts practice produces meaning for the artist and audiences due to the aesthetic changes that MWK installations bring to the environment. Such meaning-making processes are based on an individual’s subjective engagement with the artwork (Dewey, 1994). The emerging practice operates as an epistemic practice that creates and captures knowledge in the experience of the particularity of artmaking events, and such knowledge also accumulates in ‘techniques’ (Spatz, 2015) regarding the use of the MWK. The development of the arts practice has revealed a range of dynamic relationalities between artmaking materials, the outdoor environment and the artist. Such relationalities are exemplified by the connection between emerging material properties in moments of creative experimentation and their implementation in the design and outdoor use of the MWK modules. My engagement with many outdoor artmaking situations prompted the formulation of a number of experiential schemas as a way of describing the experience of the outdoor world, for example the relationality of distance versus proximity. It has also led me to understand the outdoor environment and its plants, rocks, valleys, hills and animals as a material complexity that is similar to the material complexity within artmaking. Considering both, the outdoor processes and actions of artmaking, as a performance, led to the conclusion that this arts practice operates as a form of non-verbal, gestural transaction between the self and the other.
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Medium (un)specificity as material agency – the productive indeterminacy of matter/material (Russian Translation)In this article, I consider some of the debates brought to the fore by the proliferation of recent textile focused exhibitions; namely the tension between a continued allegiance to medium specific conventions and the richness, hybridity and heterogeneity afforded by the post-medium condition of contemporary art. Through a new body of sculptural and installational practice I propose a constellatory opening up of textile in which the medium specific can be (re)mapped in a fluid and fragmentary way. Drawing particular reference from Adorno’s conception of the constellation and mimetic comportment, this model of practice involves a mode of behaviour that actively opens up to alterity and returns authority to the affective indeterminacy of the sensuously bound experiential encounter. This is manifest through a range of practice strategies - “thingness”, “staged (dis)contiguity”, and the play between “sensuous immediacy and corporeal containment” - which mobilise a precarious relationship between processes of attachment and detachment. Acknowledging the critical currency afforded to textile through feminist and poststructuralist critique, the work moves away from “a rhetoric of negative opposition” and predetermined discursive frameworks, returning authority to the aesthetic impulse, privileging the ambiguous resonances of an abstract sculptural language over more overt strategies of representation.
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Too Good To Hide: Tony HayesThe article ‘Too Good To Hide: Tony Hayes’ was written in relation to the exhibition of the same name at the Rainbow Tea Rooms in Chester (July - October 2024). The exhibition was curated by Stephen Clarke, and was the fourth curatorial project for Clarke at the café’s exhibition space in Chester city centre. Tony Hayes is a photographer based in Widnes who has undertaken an AA2A (Artist Access to Art Colleges) residency at the University of Chester. In the article Clarke considers how the camera operates as a series of lenses and mirrors to view a subject. Clarke refers to the catalogue essay by John Szarkowski for the exhibition ‘Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960’ at the Museum of Modern Art New York in 1978. Szarkowski describes how a photographer uses a camera either as an objective ‘window’ to view the world or a subjective ‘mirror’ that reflects the photographer’s own sensibility. Clarke applies this discussion to the work of Tony Hayes who has made a series of photographs looking into shop windows that record both the view through the glass pane and the reflection of the photographer. Stephen Clarke and Tony Hayes were interviewed by Sean Styles on BBC Merseyside in Liverpool at 1.30pm on Sunday 6th October 2024.
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Stephen Clarke: Stars, Stripes and SteamThe photographs of New York city in this exhibition were taken by Stephen Clarke during two visits to New York in the mid-1990s. Paul Sampson, curator at Oriel Colwyn, organised the exhibition to coincide with the 2024 Presidential Election in the United States of America. The closing night of the exhibition was the final polling day for presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The starting point for this exhibition was a number of photographs of the US Flag – the Stars and Stripes – along with images of steam rising from the underground heating systems in New York city centre which gave the show its title – Stars, Stripes and Steam. This is a humorous comment on the nature of political discourse that mixes patriotism and heated debates. Stephen Clarke (photographer) and the Paul Sampson (curator) wanted the audience to reflect on the historical perspective of New York city while considering the future of the new presidency and the USA. This was Stephen Clarke’s second solo exhibition at Oriel Colwyn; his first was ‘Shifting Sands’ (22/12/12 – 15/03/13). Some of the photographs in Stars, Stripes and Steam were previously published by the independent photobook publisher Out Of Place Books (2020) in the photobook ‘NYC-19XX’ by Stephen Clarke.
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Blackpool 1980s – 1990sBlackpool 1980s - 1990s was published by Café Royal Books in an edition of 250 in February 2023. It was edited by Craig Atkinson, founder of Café Royal Books. Clarke photographed Blackpool seafront and Pleasure Beach fairground throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This extensive collection of images is part of his larger archive of photographs of the British seaside. The CRB photobook includes a number of key leisure features of Blackpool Pleasure Beach including the roller coaster rides ‘The Grand National’ and The Big One’. Also pictured in this CRB publication is the now defunct monorail that was a ride at the Pleasure Beach.
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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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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.
