News & Events May 2010

Dr Natasha Mayo: Making the Creative Process Visible

This film-based resource developed by Dr Natasha Mayo (Centre for Ceramics Research) is the result of year-long project which aimed to devise the means of teaching fundamental structures at work in the development of ideas in the practice of ceramics.

Supported by an ADM-HEA Learning and Teaching grant, the resource comprises of five short films documenting the development of ideas in the work of a cross-section of students from CSAD's BA and MA ceramic programmes. The films render visible negotiation of thought and seek to illustrate tendencies and patterns in the ways ideas are developed. Whilst a key concern for students is innovation, the ways in which they negotiate ideas often employ common traits akin to the relationship between thought and language. Within an educational context, the identification of these modes of development can provide a toolbox of possibilities to be altered or rejected at any stage in the development of a given body of work but always present to generate and keep ideas mobile. The full project report, Making the Creative Process Visible: An account of strategies that can be used to facilitate the development of independent, creative thought is available from the HEA website.

Metaphor Festival

Dr Clive Cazeaux (CFAR) will be a keynote speaker at this year's Metaphor Festival held by the Department of English at Stockholm University, Sweden, 16-17 September.

The festival is an annual international symposium on figurative language, exploring the nature and importance of figures of speech for human experience, cognition, social structures, culture, production of artefacts and artistic pursuits, including both literature and other art forms. Cazeaux's principal research interest is metaphor in aesthetics and the theory of knowledge. His recent book, Metaphor and Continental Philosophy: From Kant to Derrida (Routledge 2007), argues that metaphor is a movement between domains, where this movement-between is vital for understanding human being, aesthetic experience, and scientific knowledge. He will be sharing keynote billing at the festival with Ray Gibbs, one of the world's leading authorities on metaphor and embodiment within cognitive science.

David Ferry awarded personal Chair

David Ferry (CFAR) was recently awarded the title Professor of Printmaking at Cardiff School of Art and Design.

Professor Ferry is a well known figure in the world of artists books and is represented in many associated publications about the genre, his work has been reviewed in leading publications including the New York Times and was a recipient of a Pollock / Krasner major award in 2002.

Brandon Taylor, author of Collage, The Making of Modern Art (Thames & Hudson) says of Ferry's work: ‘The tourist literature genre that is celebrated and defiled in David Ferry's photomontages is thus at one and the same time an experience of travel, or imagined travel, and photography; a combination that enshrines the contradictions of an accelerating modernity sharply colliding with a sense of "England" that veers between pure nostalgia on the one hand and an earnest striving for good design on the other".

Ferry's work is in many international and museum collections, including, The Ashmolean Oxford, The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art ,New York, The Victoria & Albert Museum, M & C Saatchi, London, The Strang Collection, University College London & the University of Vermont. Recent solo exhibitions have been in Berlin, London, New York, Poznan, and Seoul.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts he was made an ARE (Royal Society of Painter/Printmakers) in 2005 and is a committee member for the society.

Rona Lee: Leverhulme Artist-In-Residence update

Over the summer, Dr Rona Lee (CFAR) will be engaged in a range of activities exploring her research interests in the representation of landscape.

The first is an event on 21st May to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard's historic descent into The Mariana Trench, the deepest point on earth. Dr Lee, who is currently Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the National Oceanography Centre, will lay out 10,911.00 meters of string alongside the Empress Dock in Southampton. The piece: 'a sailor went to sea, sea, sea to see what he could see, see, see and all that he could see, see, see was the bottom of the deep blue sea, sea, sea' will take over six hours to complete and will be recorded as a time-lapse video with a link to the NOCS website.

Dr Lee of the residency "I have been working with scientists and geophysicists from the Geology and Geophysics Research Group at NOCS, whose work involves mapping the deep-sea bed, for over a year now. The nature of such environments makes them extremely difficult to access even with current technology - I wanted to convey a more tangible sense of depths involved - Challenger Deep is after all a mile deeper than Everest is high".

Rona has also produced a number of sculptural works which will be exhibited over the next month in the National Oceanographic Library.

The second event is a public discussion with astrophysicist Pedro Ferreira at the University Museum of Natural History, Oxford, chaired by journalist and radio 4 commentator Jim White, about the value to both disciplines of artists and scientists working together.

Following this discussion, Dr Lee will be the keynote speaker at Creative Public Geographies seminar, hosted by The University of Exeter Geography Department where she will talk about the work she has been doing with physical geographers at The National Oceanography Centre. The seminar forms part of the ESRC funded 'Engaging Geographies' project.

On 27 June, Dr Lee will give a paper 'Truthing Gap', reflecting on her Leverhulme Trust residency at the Emerging Landscapes - between production and representation conference at The University of Westminster. The paper will focus on synergies between production and representation in the formation of contemporary ideas of landscape.

More details about Rona's work can be found at www.ronalee.org

Reactickles win ACHI 2010 Best Paper Award

'Using Rotoscopy Technique to Assist the Teaching of Handwriting for Children with Dyspraxia', a paper written by Wendy Keay-Bright and research student Fakri Othman (Sensory Design), has been selected as one of the top papers at the recent Third International Conference on Advances in Computer-Human Interaction, ACHI 2010 conference.

Exhibitions

Common Culture: Bad Faith

Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast
19 March - 8 May

Bad Faith is an exhibition by the collaborative artist's group Common Culture (David Campbell, Ian Brown and eCPR's Professor Mark Durden). The Bad Faith exhibition will feature the first showing of Common Culture's new work "I Dreamt I Was A Monkey - And They Made Me Wear Shoes", a multi-channel video installation featuring "ex-TV ‘soap' actors performing scenes of discrete social interaction" set against a backdrop of high street consumption.

Helen Sear: Beyond the View

Klompching Gallery, New York
28th April - 11th June

In this new series of work, Dr Helen Sear (eCPR) continues her investigation into the sublime-and an engagement with the retinal and digital-through her innovative use of image superimposition and erasure. Beyond The View is an ongoing exploration, with the photographs originating in and around the agricultural lands south of Milan. The images are a response to the 'hidden' presence of women in this rural environment on the edge of the city.

Andreas Rüthi: Double page paintings

Duckett and Jeffreys Gallery, Yorkshire
29th April - 5th June 2010

Andreas Rüthi's solo exhibition looks at the relationship of high and low art through a series of still life paintings. This latest series of work is an expansion of this concept. More objects, figurines and fruit are laid out on a variety of surfaces and levels. Now, there are two or more reproductions in the picture: blurring the boundaries between high art and the vernacular both with the choice of subject and process of painting.

David Ferry: Belligerent Rock Intrusions

WoodFinch Gallery
Wednesday 12 May - Friday 4 June 2010

The exhibition, curated by WOODFINCH / Simon Finch Rare Books in association with The National Print Gallery, consists of a series of books of collages and a suite of prints based on the book Belligerent Rock Intrusions by Professor David Ferry (CFAR). Each book is an adjusted copy of a pictorial guide of the British Isles from the innocent post war years of the 1950's and 1960's, which he has deftly subverted using donor material from the same period to deconstruct the notion of British national identity and heritage.

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