School of Art and Media Postgraduate Research Culture Symposium 2024

Key note speaker presentation avialable on the MS TEAM: Group-SAM Postgraduate Symposium 2024  join code: 3th9r9r File here:Linda Candy Keynote Lecture Recording – SAM PG Symposium 13 Nov 2024.mp4

 

Sallis Benney Theatre, University of Brighton, Grand Parade In-person/ and above MS TEAM

Please see a PDF of this event SAM RW 2024 PG Programme

Programme

10:00 Welcome from Charlotte Gould, Associate Dean for Research & Knowledge Exchange

10:05 Symposium and keynote speaker introduction from Paul Sermon, Doctoral Studies Lead

10:15 Keynote talk (40 minutes + 10 minutes Q&A)

Professor Linda Candy Creativity, Reflective Practice and the Artefact in Practitioner Research

11:05 Research Methods Panel 1

  • Åsa Johannesson Queer Photography as Practice-based Research (15 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A)
  • Fergus Heron Phoenix Place (15 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A)
  • Paul Sermon Screening of CRIPtic Arts: Quality of life is not a measurable outcome (15 minutes)

12:00 Break

12:10 Research Methods Panel 2

  • Alison Hermon Developing a framework for collaborative creativity using A/r/tography as a research method (15 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A)
  • Julia Winckler Crawley New Town seen through the lens of Wolf Suschitzky (15 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A)
  • Amy Cunningham Screening ‘Material +Time’ (2024) (8 minutes + 2 minutes Q&A)

13:00 Lunch

14:00 PGT Lightning Talks (3 x 8 minutes + 2 minutes Q&A)

  • Ümair Malik (MA Sequential Design / Illustration Alumni) Picking and Unpicking
  • Devon McCulloch (MA Fine Art PT) Alien Registration: A summary of how material histories can illustrate bureaucratic procedures past and present
  • Markus Taylor (MA Fine Art Alumni 2023) A Rite of Passage: Using van Gennep’s three stage scheme to bring meaning to the embodiment of an incurable cancer diagnosis through a visual art practice

14:30 PGR Lightning Talks (5 x 8 minutes + 2 minutes Q&A)

  • Sue Breakell An Archive State of Mind: Research Through Archival Practice
  • Tianyi Liu Humidity responsive iridescent wood polymer composite (WPC) based shape changing material for self-assembly design
  • Joanne Bell Artist Talk: Forms of attention
  • Ruohan Yu Artist Research Talk: Nesting Through Paintings
  • Ola Teper and Charles Binns Artist talks and introduction to their current exhibition ‘Ice & Teeth: a Dialogue on Process’ in Dorset Place Gallery

15:20 Break

15:30 PGR and Post-doc Research Talks (3 x 15 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A)

  • Muna Al-Jawad Comics-based research in the healthcare humanities: a doctor’s quest
  • Vanessa Marr Mapping my Domestic Terrain: Drawing Dialogues
  • Zhenia Mahdi-Nau A phenomenological investigation of peak-experience and flow states (peak-flow) through a practice of embodied Screendance filmmaking (online)

16:30 Plenary chaired by Paul Sermon, Doctoral Studies Lead

16:45 Close

Presenters and Talks

Linda Candy (keynote talk) Reflective Practice and the Artefact in Practitioner Research

This keynote will explore the nature of creativity, reflective practice and the role of artefacts in the context of practitioner research. Reflective practice will be discussed in its varied forms as a key method for externalising, documenting and interpreting the new knowledge that emerges from practitioner research. I will also discuss the role of the artefact in the practitioner research process and differentiate between problem led and artefact led projects. I will draw upon my research with creative practitioners working in a wide variety of disciplines.

Linda Candy is a writer and researcher with an enduring interest in how creative practitioners think, act and make creative works. For over 30 years, she has studied the work of artists, designers and technologists focusing on the role of digital systems in amplifying and transforming their creativity. Her book The Creative Reflective Practitioner (2020) gives direct voice to contemporary creative artists and provides insights into the nature of artistic practice and how reflection plays a vital role in creativity. Her previous books include Explorations in Art and Technology (2002, 2018), Interactive Experience in the Digital Age: Evaluating New Art Practice (2014) (with Dr Sam Ferguson) and Interacting: Art, Research and the Creative Practitioner (2011) (with Professor Ernest Edmonds). Her most recent publication in which she authored leading chapters and acted as consulting editor is The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research (2022) (with Professors Craig Vear and Ernest Edmonds). She also writes poetry and travel journals. She is influenced by the writings of great authors of the past and is an avid reader still. Most of all, she is inspired by the dedication and determination of the many creative people she has met over her working life.

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Dr Linda Candy BA (Adelaide), MPhil (DMU), PhD (Loughborough)

Web site: www.lindacandy.com

Åsa Johannesson Queer Photography as Practice-based Research

My proposal for the SAM Postgraduate Research Culture and Community Symposium 2024 is a 15 minute presentation on queer photography as practice-based research. I will present a critical insight into the writing of my recently published monograph Queer Methodology for Photography (Routledge 2024). I wrote this book in response to the methodological limitations in existing literature on queer photography, which almost exclusively has focused on questions around gender and sexual desire while overlooking the complexity of artistic strategies in image making. My book centres around 27 artworks produced by LGBTQ+ artists. Written from the logic of studio practice, it provides further diversity within queer arts, also beyond the established theoretical framework of ‘representation of identity’. With my book, I propose a new concept of the photographic image that addresses its materiality, in the form of the poetic and the political, in relationship to a generative principle that is named as a queer quality: the photograph’s ability to voice queer concerns also beyond its role as representation. The reader is invited on a journey that is both photographic and queer, amongst pixels and grains, double exposures, 3D sculpture, and Polaroid emulsions. While primarily addressing photography, this book is entwined with broader philosophical questions concerning identity, difference, and the creations of systems of thought that limit the possibilities of existence to binary categorisation.

https://www.routledge.com/Queer-Methodology-for-Photography/Johannesson/p/book/9781032285375

Fergus Heron Phoenix Place

In this talk Fergus Heron discusses the process of producing new work, exhibited as part of Photo Fringe at Phoenix Art Space Project Space in Brighton. The work develops earlier research picturing urban environments, including Albion Street 2017, showing and returning the view from the window of Heron’s studio in the Phoenix Art Space building. The new project titled Phoenix Place, depicting the immediate vicinity of Phoenix Art Space, is partly inspired by art historian Nikolaus Pevsner’s perambulation including Phoenix Place in The Buildings of England: Sussex East with Brighton and Hove. In connection, a dialogue occurs between different observations; Heron’s pictures propose a sense of place made up of views imagined from the past, layered with others seen in the present. The exhibition addresses the Photo Fringe 2024 theme Common Ground by inviting consideration of how the histories of a community can be seen in pictures of urban environments in which people live and work. Referencing histories of photography, art and architecture, the project combines different ways of seeing place to reimagine ideas of the common past and present.

Paul Sermon Screening of CRIPtic Arts: Quality of life is not a measurable outcome

AHRC Follow-on project A Telepresence Stage for Disability Performing Arts is working with CRIPtic Arts based in London, a leading UK disability performing arts company. Together, they have developed a unique online performance Quality of life is not a measurable outcome, utilising technological advances made during the previous UKRI COVID-19 response project. The current research has identified new features and bespoke solutions for the disability performing arts sector. CRIPtic Arts undertook a Telepresence Stage residency programme lasting four months to develop this unique public performance outcome. They have used and adapted the developed tools and techniques to access and engage participants and audiences they could not previously due to geographic or mobility restrictions. The performance outcome includes hybrid solutions, combining live staged productions with remote online telepresence participation, as well as international collaborations with disabled performers in Singapore through an ongoing partnership with LASALLE College of the Arts. This project is led by principal investigator Prof Paul Sermon in collaboration with co-investigators Dr Jayne Lloyd from the School of Art & Media at the University of Brighton and Steve Dixon from LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore.

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Link to video

Alison Hermon Developing a framework for collaborative creativity using A/r/tography as a research method

 My name is Dr. Alison Hermon, an art and design educator previously working in the School of Education at the University of Brighton. For this presentation I am focusing on specific aspects of my doctoral research – Developing a framework for collaborative creativity using A/r/tography as a research method. I used A/r/tography, embedding three positions of artist, researcher and teacher, to investigate collaborative creativity, a creative pedagogy advocating a balance between agency and instruction to foster the self-efficacy of students and non-specialist Early Career Teachers (ECTs) in art and design. Evidence suggests that self-efficacy may be constrained by an imbalance between agency and instruction, exacerbated by pedagogies of repression associated with current policy.

I present how A/r/tography supported this theory-led collective case study working with three primary art and design specialist teachers and three primary non-specialist ECTs in which I promoted collaborative creativity supported by a communities of practice ethos to foster the development of a Creative Attributes Framework for Collaborative Creativity. The final framework– the Witch’s Hat – was instrumental in addressing issues in self-efficacy as members engaged with their own creative practice and roles encouraging a democratic, reciprocal ethos fostering positive perceptions of each other.ah

Julia Winckler Crawley New Town seen through the lens of Wolf Suschitzky

The starting point for this Community-University partnership project is a series of photographs made by the émigré photographer and cameraman Wolf Suschitzky (1912-2016), commissioned by the Royal Academy, London in 1959. Rediscovered by Julia Winckler during a research residency at Fotohof Salzburg, Austria, in 2022, these photographs portray the first nine British New Towns, including Crawley New Town, within a decade of their initial construction. The archival collection comprises 56 contact sheets and over 1000 images, with more than 100 images featuring Crawley New Town’s architecture, businesses, shopping arcades, houses, schools, nurseries, residents and green spaces. Returning Suschitzky’s Crawley photographs to the New Town where they were taken 65 years ago, these important images will be reactivated through a two-months long exhibition (February & March 2024) and community engagement workshops. Julia will work closely with project team partners, UoB colleague Georgia Wrighton (course leader for MSc Town Planning), international project partner Fotohof Salzburg, Crawley Museum staff, and co-sponsors, the Austrian Cultural Forum in London.

Amy Cunningham Screening of ‘Material +Time’ (2024.) Single Screen HD video and stereo audio, 8 minutes. Dimensions variable.

Material + Time is an 8 minute video artwork which explores the visual and sonic textures of the port of Newhaven in East Sussex. Through writing, video, drawing, and audio recording Amy Cunningham has been observing the activities of wildlife including egrets and avocets and the various industries and businesses that are to be found in and around Mill Creek which runs between the coast and the town. Material + Time was first exhibited at Towner Eastbourne and at Newhaven Art Space in June and September 2024. This work is part of a series of site-responsive art works in which she engages with in-between spaces, and spaces of transition. Amy Cunningham is an artist who uses the singing voice, sound, video, materials and drawing to explore patterns and glitches in technologies and environments. She has exhibited her music compositions, performances, video installations, and drawings in various spaces including, Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey, IKON Gallery, Cafe OTO, Towner Gallery, Portland Sculpture Quarry Trust, SC Gallery, Zagreb, and Serpentine Gallery London. Amy is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader of MA Fine Art, University of Brighton. https://vimeo.com/amycunningham

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Ümair Malik Picking and Unpicking MA Sequential Design / Illustration Alumni

 I will share how I was able to finish multiple projects by shifting my focus away from the ‘project’ and towards ‘design and research process’. I picked up elements of enquiry from our interdisciplinary workshops, case-studies, and discussions, as well as from my own Architectural background. And then I unpicked them, and retained only that which fit into a sound research framework. This research framework with all its powers and constraints, helped me complete beautiful projects including a children’s book, a hand-illustrated map layered with augmented-reality, an interactive Topia world, and an understory of a fictional series.

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Devon McCulloch Alien Registration: A summary of how material histories can illustrate bureaucratic procedures past and present MA Fine Art PT Year 2

As a multi-disciplinary artist, I use a range of mediums including photography, printmaking, collage, drawing, painting, and sculpture. I combine modern and historical photographs, documents, found objects, and medical paraphernalia as reference points in my methodology.

My working practice consists of using anachronistic technology in unconventional ways. Technology, such as thermal and household printers (which I use in a large percentage of my work), produce organic mistakes. The ‘mistakes’ created by these machines are a by-product of the machines being, themselves, physical objects in a physical world, as opposed to, for example, digital software. This slippage allows me to explore and exploit the genre of anti-portraiture. An anti-portrait resists and disrupts its art-historical conventions, some anti–portraits can retain a partial investment in figuration, others opt for a conceptual or object-based representation.

Life and death cycles are explored using collage ensembles to produce analytical compositions. By juxtaposing 20th-century data, photographs and government documents (such as passports). These to me encapsulate a diagrammatic beauty. Often ignored and discarded, these records document and reflect our physical ascent and decline throughout our lives and remain as representations after we have departed. They are the only surviving records that are guaranteed.

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Markus Taylor A Rite of Passage: Using van Gennep’s three stage scheme to bring meaning to the embodiment of an incurable cancer diagnosis through a visual art practice MA Fine Art Alumni 2023

When beating a dog, it will bite and snarl at the hammer not the body wielding it. In its approach to disease the medico-scientific focus is upon pathology, the disease narrative, a microscopy tunnel vision ignorant of embodiment and resonances. This inter-action, dualistic attack removing identity, enables the torture of treatment and the disempowerment of the person. We become ‘patient’, without agency or language, an object to be spoken about and for, and acted upon. Scans, tests, biopsies, measurements, data give no meaning for the person with cancer. Having a diagnosis of incurable cancer, how was I to forge meaning, empowerment and agency within this traumatic situation? Markus Taylor, MA Fine Art, University of Brighton. Artist. Visiting lecturer Brighton Sussex Medical School (BSMS) and Institute of Cancer Research, London. Patient Educator, BSMS. Haematology Insight Advocate, Dept Experimental Medicine, BSMS.

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Sue Breakell An Archive State of Mind: Research Through Archival Practice

Sue Breakell is Archive Director and Principal Research Fellow at the University of Brighton Design Archives; she is also currently enrolled on a PhD by Publication. This lightning talk starts from her hybrid identity as an archive practitioner (in national museums and galleries as well as HE), researcher and PhD candidate. She will discuss her research on archives as subject and method in art and design history, with particular reference to a current film-making project (with Dr Harriet Atkinson) about the meanings of home for German-Jewish designer FHK Henrion (1914-1990), one of Britain’s most successful postwar graphic and corporate identity designers. This project illuminates ways that archives, spaces and memory combine to bring the past into the present.

Tianyi Liu Humidity responsive iridescent wood polymer composite (WPC) based shape changing material for self-assembly design 

In this presentation, I want to present a kind of humidity responsive wood-based material for self-assembly design and iridescent structural colour coating for humidity indicator which combines aesthetic and functionality. Cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) is kind of rod-like particles. Most CNC is made for sulphated hydrolysis. It results in the CNC brings negative charged sulphate ester group. After the evaporation induced self-assembly (EISA) process, it will self-assemble to the cholesteric phase. And in certain condition it will reflect specific wavelength selectively for forming iridescent structural colour films. Wood polymer composite (WPC) is kind of thermoplastic polymer based composite polymer. A certain amount of cellulose powder is added during the manufacturing process. The final wire produced is porous and water-absorbent. Under the pre-programming of printing path, it can be shape changing (twisting, bending, helix) under the humidity stimulation. Because of the porosity and hydrophilicity of WPC, CNC rod can attach on the WPC substrate surface and form iridescent coating. Via add different materials in CNC suspension, can control the colour performance, pattern, and colour changing functionality. This research via the material perspective to design an innovative material. According to the property of WPC, it can self-assemble to the certain shape, for example, a flat sheet self-assembles to a chair. And the structural colour coating show mother pearl like iridescent colour can offer aesthetic value.

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Joanne Bell Artist Talk: Forms of attention

How can making drawings in a familiar place and subsequent collaging, explore and communicate an empowered relationship to time for the artist/researcher/inhabitant, through a study of the everyday?

I have been sitting, observing a familiar place, recording the inhabitants in the flow and rhythm of one ordinary day after another, actively intervening within it. This is a study of what it is to pay close attention, as artist/researcher to a specific spot, a road leading to a parade of shops, one that has a high content of humanity. Paying close attention through sketching, taking photographs and collaging, in order to understand how these practices can aid the imaginative process, an inherited legacy from the past. Alongside this I am analysing the text of Flann O’Brien’s work, where his imagined worlds for me show a previously unrecognised strand; his unique way of thinking and describing time and space, where volition is everywhere, a universe we recognise but also one that tears up our conventional interpretation. This study will challenge previous studies of place, particularly Mark Auge who has identified in our super modern times a disempowered relationship to time.

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Ruohan Yu Artist Research Talk: Nesting Through Paintings 

The research aims to explore how daily spatial perception can be translated into painting by viewing painting as an object and challenging the understanding of contemporary painting as an object in space creation. The research question is based on the hypothesis that the perception of space results from the interaction between the body of the viewer, the spatial structure, the objects, and the furnishings with the space, which generates the perception of depth, distance, direction and functionality of the space. Through the extraction and representation of the qualities of the spatial structure, as well as the facilities within the space, it is possible to develop an abstract visual model of the space that the viewer can perceive. The ultimate aim of this research is to create paintings that can be experienced in the same way as real space in daily life.

Ruohan Yu is currently a 1st year practice-based PhD researcher in Fine Art at the University of Brighton. She earned her Master’s degree with distinction from Camberwell College of Arts in 2022, and previously studied at the School of Experimental Art at Tianjin Academy of Arts, where she completed her Bachelor’s degree in painting in 2020. Ruohan’s work spans multiple media, including painting, instalment and performance. Her recent work is closely connected to her daily spatial perceptions and surroundings. She is intrigued by how painting, as an object, can translate the intimate interactions and imaginings that arise between our bodies and the spaces where we inhabit. Through her interpretation, she attempts to convey a sense of instability that the events behind everyday objects can occur at any time.

Her work has been featured in various exhibitions, including being shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize China 2022.  She has also participated in group shows such as Spring, Sprang, Sprung at Husband Space in Beijing in 2024 and Church/Factory at Southwark Park Gallery in London in 2023.

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Ola Teper and Charles Binns Artist talks and introduction to their current exhibition ‘Ice & Teeth: a Dialogue on Process’ in Dorset Place Gallery

What happens when the subject matter becomes the very ingredient in the photographic process? Ice & Teeth seeks to explore exactly that. Combining work on two seemingly different topics – holga & pinhole camera images of the Arctic by Charles Binns and Ola Teper’s photograms of a woman’s body – the process here pushes the boundaries of traditional representation. The Arctic saltwater and red lipstick become active elements in the conversation about landscape photography in an era of climate change and the enduring struggle for gender equality, which continue to shape the world of today. Together, their work opens a dialogue on how process, materiality and subject matter intersect in photographic practice.

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Muna Al-Jawad Comics-based research in the healthcare humanities: a doctor’s quest Consultant Geriatrician, University Hospitals Sussex, Senior lecturer, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, PhD Student, School of Art and Media, University of Brighton

I use comics to research my practice as a clinician, teacher and in leadership as well as supervising others doing the same. Having published comics-based research in medical journals for over 10 years, in 2023 I undertook a PhD by publication, which I passed in September 2024.

Alongside providing a meta-narrative for my published works, the PhD has allowed me to explore the artistic processes through which I make research comics. Through reflecting on my work, I have reinforced that for me comics are about relationships and connection through multi-layered narratives. I have created a map of the important comics creators and scholars who have inspired and guided me in this interdisciplinary field.

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Vanessa Marr Mapping my Domestic Terrain: Drawing Dialogues

A short, reflective presentation of my PhD case study, within which I mapped the activity of my family around my kitchen island through my practice of drawing with thread upon yellow dusters as the embodiment of my gendered domestic experience. Underpinned by the theory of drawing as a sensory extension of the world I inhabit (Rosand, 2002) this work presents a conversation between three of these dusters and myself, my family, my domestic space, an erasable pen, a needle, and a spool of red thread. The purpose of this research is to entice and enact auto-ethnographical stories that place my gendered experiences of domesticity within a feminist, creative and critical academic context, giving voice to experiences that are often silenced or dismissed. I have selected a duster because of its cultural and semiotic associations with cleaning and so called ‘women’s work’ (Kirkham, 1996), combined with a method that reflects the feminine legacy of stitch and cloth-work (Barber, 1995, Parker, 1984), and red thread to represent femininity (Gordon, 2011). As a co-created dialogue, this study provided the foundation for knowledge making and analysis, capturing that which happens in space and time as tangible visual phrases that flow as lines and shapes, like the rise and fall of voices in a conversation in a dialogue between my family and myself, between theory and practice. Ultimately our dialogue was co-constructed and collaborative, material and human, drawn and stitched; and we had each had our say in the mapping of our shared domestic terrain.

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Zhenia Mahdi-Nau A phenomenological investigation of peak-experience and flow states (peak-flow) through a practice of embodied Screendance filmmaking (online)

In this presentation I highlight understandings and significance of peak-experience and flow states in embodied Screendance filmmaking.. In particular, I examine the role of the body and sensory experiences and the ‘intra-actions’ and ‘entanglements’ between the various components during particular creative experiences for some artists, which have generally been overlooked in studies during the phenomena and. The transpersonal approaches which I have used in this study and the internal lens of my own phenomenological filmmaking experiences and reflections, those of selected established filmmaking artists interviewed, as well as those who took part in an experimental filmmaking workshop, aim to offer a more expanded view of the phenomena and a better understanding of artistic experience in these states. My research aims to identify and offer strategies that may facilitate such states in the creative experience and production of Screendance and potentially other artforms. It will also highlight potential for further research into the possible impact of such creative experiences on viewership.


Date: Wednesday 13/11/24

Time: 10.00-16.45

Who can attend: All 

MS Team Group-SAM Postgraduate Symposium 2024 join code: 3th9r9r

Where: Grand Parade, Sallis Benney

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