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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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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Quick, Quick, Slow: Making Time for Sustainable Photography Practices in Contemporary HEAs environmental awareness grows, so do questions about the environmental impact of photography, in particular traditional film development and processing, the use of plastics, gelatine and other environmentally harmful chemicals notwithstanding water usage and waste. Pioneering practice and research into sustainable alternative to conventional processes has quickly established, supported by organisations such as the London Sustainable Darkroom. Students in Higher Education are environmentally aware and prepared to take action to mitigate their impacts where possible. As such, there is a coalescence of perceptions within and beyond the classroom which asks to be addressed in the curriculum. Sustainable and alternative processes are often more time consuming than established methods and rely on having sufficient time for the gathering and processing of unconventional materials. This is problematic in a contemporary HE environment where a shortened teaching year and modularisation break up the learning experience and desiccate the attention required by durational activities. This paper will draw upon the current research project Under a Green Light: a darkroom for the future (PI Tabitha Jussa) which is exploring ways to pivot the undergraduate darkroom toward sustainable methods and will reflect on the potential and possibilities of sustainable photography in HE.
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Under a Green Light - A Darkroom for the FutureExploring the evironmental impacts of darkroom photography and how the University of Chester's darkroom has been modified toward more sustainable alternatives.
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Revisiting Robert Louis Stevenson in the PacificIn this Archive Case display, artists Simon Grennan and Soloman Enos re-examine the work of nineteenth century author Robert Louis Stevenson through dynamic graphic storytelling. Stevenson travelled to several Pacific islands before settling in Sāmoa in 1890. Referencing this time in Sāmoa, as well as Hawai’i and Europe, related items are brought together from the Museum's Pacific collections and displayed alongside historical publications of Stevenson's Pacific stories, set within new graphic remediations of these stories as comics by British and Hawaiian artists. The illustration-led display explores the journey of ideas across media (remediation) in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, Robert Louis Stevenson’s fascination with ‘the foreign', and post-colonialism in the Pacific, including new poetry focused on Hawaiian, Samoan and European post-colonialism. The display at the Pitt Rivers Museum celebrates work that is part of a wider research project 'Remediating Stevenson', led by a UK research team (Michelle Keown, Shari Sabeti and Alice Kelly, Edinburgh University; and Simon Grennan, Chester University), in partnership with the National University of Sāmoa. The project explores Robert Louise Stevenson's Pacific fiction, travels, and friendship with Indigenous Pacific communities. The Remediating Robert Louis Stevenson project is producing the first ever multilingual graphic adaptation of the three stories from Robert Louis Stevenson's Island Nights' Entertainments (1893). The project is also commissioning new poetry by indigenous Pacific authors, and developing a set of accompanying teaching resources for use in Sāmoa, Hawai’i and Scotland through participatory arts workshops and film-making.
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Beyond the Playground - Exploring the Production of Playfulness as an Embodied Experience through Personal PracticeThe consensus amongst scholars is that playfulness is an attitude whereas play is an activity. This thesis interrogates conceptions of attitude and proposes a fresh definition of playfulness, suggesting it is a bodily attitude and not just an attitude of mind. Using personal practice to test existing and new knowledge, and drawing on embodied cognition theories, this thesis goes on to define a playground as a cognitive and physical arena in which bodies are at play or engaged with playful activities. Therefore, the role of a ‘play’ body is significant in the production of playfulness. Playfulness requires a ‘play’ body and a playground that is either imaginary or physical. Without these elements it cannot fulfil its purpose which is to generate humour, joy, and spontaneous fun. This thesis argues playfulness is an embodied experience and is produced with our bodies as we actively move towards something we perceive will make activity more fun. There can be a motor-intentionality towards playfulness. It starts in a playground designated for playful activities or one the body has produced, but as it continues after the activity has finished, playfulness can extend beyond the playground. Few scholars in the field of art and design have contributed to academic research on playfulness. This thesis, which is embedded with visual work to inspire and test research questions and demonstrate gaps in academic literature, highlights the importance of the ‘play’ body in producing playfulness using a practice-led methodology. The thesis’ argument that playfulness is embodied, encompassing the rules of a playground, is supported by an examination of theories of depiction, in particular Walton’s theory of fictional truth and mandated imagination. This thesis proposes that when a body makes a physical orientation towards playfulness, it is also opened to wonder, serendipity, and Kairos moments which cannot always be anticipated. Extant academic literature suggests we can frame or reframe situations to make them more amusing, but this thesis posits that our bodies, not just our minds, also achieve a spontaneous reframing by moving in such a way to inculcate playfulness. It also suggests that playfulness opens the individual to possibilities not yet considered or felt; it cultivates an environment where wonder and imagination thrive, driving creativity, and instigating humour.
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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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Comics in the Design Studio. On the use of graphic narrative as a tool to represent, narrate, and rethink architectural spaceThis chapter looks at several works produced by architects and students in order to discuss and illustrate some uses of the comics medium as a tool both to visualise and explain, to develop stories and discourses, and start morphogenetic processes that lead to novel architectural form, or even rethink architectural space.
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Tessier [other name Ross], Isabella Emily Louisa [pseud. Marie Duval, Ambrose Clarke] (1847–1890)Biography of Isabel Emilie de Tessier (Marie Duval and others).
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Caring Work12 'tablescapes' in colour tell a personal story of 12 Oxford Hospitals Trust staff working in the areas of Cleaning, Catering, Portering and Estates across the four Trust hospitals (John Radcliffe Hospital, Churchill Hospital, Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre and Horton General Hospital, Oxford). Derived from individual and group conversations, these include stories of offering or receiving help from other staff, other carers or patients, reflections and realisations had in quiet moments, or at the busiest times of day and anecdotes of creative problem-solving or the use of humour as care. These stories demonstrate the ways in which the work of support staff in the Trust is the work of caring – for patients, the communities of staff and themselves. Together, they contributed to "Our National Health: Hospital Stories", responding to the national 'prompts and provocations' offered by Kwame Kwei Arma, in the creation of a new performance. The 12 drawings are permanently installed as 12 printed vinyl table-top in cafes across the four hospital sites.
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Editorial: Drawing and knowledgeEditorial: Drawing is widely appreciated as a means of knowing, something testified to in a wide range of practices, fine art practices as well as practices such as architectural, botanical and other scientific drawing. This text recounts anxieties regarding the epistemic worth of drawing that persist from early modern art education and before. These relate to the embodied, situated and enactive nature of drawing. The text charts a distrust of the body as aid in the attainment of knowledge, as audible in Plato’s dialogues as it is in the disputes of the first Florentine academy. It delineates the deep-seated apprehension evident in theories of disegno as proposed by 16th century artists/theorists such as Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccaro who sought to elevate the status of drawing to an overarching principle, firmly ensconced within the theoretical domain. That strategy privileged drawing as a paragon while paradoxically distanced it from association with the taint of manual labour. The discussion identifies the same apprehension and distrust in the Duchampian disparagement of skill and retinal art – the retina too is a body part. These phenomena have been diagnosed elsewhere in terms of deskilling the artist, reflecting a wider societal division; the elevation of symbolic labour over productive labour, an all too familiar hierarchy. The text expounds recent research rooted in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, which offers a perspective that challenges these apprehensions, including Somaesthetics and Situated Cognition theory that assert the essential embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive dimensions of cognition – the 4E model.
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Newport Snow 1985The photographs for Newport Snow were taken in the winter of 1985 during the second year of Clarke’s undergraduate course in Fine Art at Newport College of Art. He had photographed the city following a heavy snowfall which had transformed Newport’s everyday landscape of streets, buildings and fields. The book stands as an allegory for Clarke’s own dilemma: he was searching for a way forward in his undergraduate studies as he had reached a point of stagnation. Following a tutorial with the head of his course, Roy Ascott, he was advised to go out to take photographs of whatever was of interest. Subconsciously these photographs of walkways, bridges and gates leading through the city mirrored his own mental state which had him feeling snowed in and looking for a way ahead. These pictures were a turning point for Clarke signalling his commitment to photography. Newport Snow 1985 was published by Café Royal Books in an edition of 200. It was edited by Craig Atkinson, founder of Café Royal Books.
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St HelensStephen Clarke was born in the Lancashire town of St Helens. His extended family, from his parent’s generation back, worked in the town’s major industries: collieries and glassworks. In 1982/83 when Clarke photographed St Helens only two of its coal mines remained in operation, both on their way to closure; and Pilkington, the largest of the glass manufacturers – and a name still synonymous with the town – had halved its local workforce in the face of recession and global competition. The fabric of the town’s nineteenth century housing and its shopping centre – modernised in the late 1960s and early ‘70s – was typical to 1980s northern Britain. Slum clearance programmes left sections of red brick terraces propped up on wastelands of rubble to co-exist with new housing and concrete commercial precincts. Today the street sign that announces Hope Close is battered but retains as a backdrop the same terraced house with its now partially bricked up window. The St Helens pictures were taken with Clarke’s first 35mm SLR camera bought for him by his grandfather and father. Aged twenty, Clarke was unused to handling a camera and was unfamiliar with the history of photography or the genre of social documentary. His visual references were formalism and graphic components, particularly text, within painting. This initial exploration of place through photography laid the foundations for Clarke’s ongoing photographic practice. What it represents, significantly, is an end point: a severance with a familial place and a way of life that had defined previous generations. [A version of this abstract was written by Julia Garcia Hernandez and published as the Introduction to St Helens.] St Helens was published by Café Royal Books in an edition of 150. It was edited by Craig Atkinson, founder of Café Royal Books.
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San Diego Topographics 2 1986-1987When Stephen Clarke arrived on America’s West Coast in the mid-1980s having just completed his art degree, he had expected to feel a familiarity with its landscape. Growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s he had absorbed a version of California by watching popular American detective shows. Onto this childhood picture he later mapped the work of the photo-artists based there who informed his art practice —Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Lewis Baltz. For a year he took photographs of San Diego, struggling to navigate through an arid and sprawling landscape which he discovered was alien territory. [a version of this abstract was written by Julia Garcia Hernandez and first published in the RPS Contemporary Photography, No. 63, Spring 2016] San Diego Topographics 2 1986 - 1987 was published by Café Royal Books in an edition of 250. It was edited by Craig Atkinson, founder of Café Royal Books. San Diego Topographics 2 1986 - 1987 is one of Clarke’s four CRB photobooks dedicated to the subject of San Diego, California, USA. The published photographs form part of a larger project—including books, articles, and exhibitions—titled Alien Resident based on Clarke’s legal status while in the USA as a resident alien.
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San Diego Topographics 1 1986-1987When Stephen Clarke arrived on America’s West Coast in the mid-1980s having just completed his art degree, he had expected to feel a familiarity with its landscape. Growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s he had absorbed a version of California by watching popular American detective shows. Onto this childhood picture he later mapped the work of the photo-artists based there who informed his art practice —Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Lewis Baltz. For a year he took photographs of San Diego, struggling to navigate through an arid and sprawling landscape which he discovered was alien territory. [a version of this abstract was written by Julia Garcia Hernandez and first published in the RPS Contemporary Photography, No. 63, Spring 2016] San Diego Topographics 1 1986 - 1987 was published by Café Royal Books in an edition of 250. It was edited by Craig Atkinson, founder of Café Royal Books. San Diego Topographics 1 1986 - 1987 is one of Clarke’s four CRB photobooks dedicated to the subject of San Diego, California, USA. The published photographs form part of a larger project—including books, articles, and exhibitions—titled Alien Resident based on Clarke’s legal status while in the USA as a resident alien.
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Typography San Diego 1986 - 1987When Stephen Clarke arrived on America’s West Coast in the mid-1980s having just completed his art degree, he had expected to feel a familiarity with its landscape. Growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s he had absorbed a version of California by watching popular American detective shows. Onto this childhood picture he later mapped the work of the photo-artists based there who informed his art practice —Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Lewis Baltz. For a year he took photographs of San Diego, struggling to navigate through an arid and sprawling landscape which he discovered was alien territory. [a version of this abstract was written by Julia Garcia Hernandez and first published in the RPS Contemporary Photography, No. 63, Spring 2016] Typography San Diego 1986 - 1987 was published by Café Royal Books in an edition of 250. It was edited by Craig Atkinson, founder of Café Royal Books. Typography San Diego 1986 - 1987 is one of Clarke’s four CRB publications dedicated to the subject of San Diego, California, USA. These photographs form part of a larger project—including books, articles, and exhibitions—titled Alien Resident based on Clarke’s legal status while in the USA as a resident alien.
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Mailboxes San Diego 1986-1987When Stephen Clarke arrived on America’s West Coast in the mid-1980s having just completed his art degree, he had expected to feel a familiarity with its landscape. Growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s he had absorbed a version of California by watching popular American detective shows. Onto this childhood picture he later mapped the work of the photo-artists based there —Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Lewis Baltz—who informed his art practice. For a year he took photographs of San Diego, struggling to navigate through an arid and sprawling landscape which he discovered was alien territory. [a version of this abstract was written by Julia Garcia Hernandez and first published in the RPS Contemporary Photography, No. 63, Spring 2016] Mailboxes San Diego 1986-1987 was published by Café Royal Books in an edition of 250. It was edited by Craig Atkinson, founder of Café Royal Books. Mailboxes San Diego 1986-1987 is the first of Clarke’s four CRB publications dedicated to the subject of San Diego, California, USA. These photographs form part of a larger project—including books, articles, and exhibitions—titled Alien Resident based on Clarke’s legal status while in the USA as a resident alien.
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Rhyl Caravan ParksRhyl Caravan Parks was published by Café Royal Books in an edition of 150 in 2015, and was reprinted in 2020 in an edition of 250. It was edited by Craig Atkinson, founder of Café Royal Books. Rhyl Caravan Parks is one of Clarke’s four CRB publications dedicated to the topic of the seaside town of Rhyl, North Wales and is part of Clarke's larger project that documented family holidays in Rhyl. This photobook was published to coincide with Clarke’s exhibition End of the Season at the Grosvenor Museum, Chester. The black&white photographs record the caravan parks of Towyn situated west of Rhyl’s seaside resort. This CRB also marks Clarke's early exploration of his photographic archive that dates from the early 1980s.
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RhylRhyl was published by Café Royal Books in an edition of 250 in October 2020. It was edited by Craig Atkinson, founder of Café Royal Books. Rhyl is the last of Clarke’s four CRB publications dedicated to the topic of the seaside town in North Wales and was released to coincide with the reprinting of Clarke’s three other CRB books on Rhyl. Clarke's larger project focused on his paper archive of family holidays in North Wales. This photobook of black&white photographs shows Rhyl’s promenade and fairground.
