MA Week 4 - Theoretical Context Presentation

Presentation 1: Theoretical Context

 

 

 

I gave the first of my two presentations on 23^rd October, on the topic of “theoretical context".

I started out talking about how I work, particularly my copious notemaking as discussed in my week 2 blog post.  I also discussed how I use action research, and how I’d applied grounded theory to my practice to discern my main strands or meta-narratives – as discussed in my week 3 blog post.

Having seen the variety and quality of work produced by some of my classmates, I had felt quite diffident about presenting the main theme of my work as a narrative enquiry into my own lived experience. It suddenly felt quite uninspiring. However, I came across lovely quote in one of the set texts, in which the author encouraged his students to discover “the thesis you are living and cannot see”  (McNiff, 1998, p146). I quoted this and explained it had given me the confidence to carry on with that line of enquiry.

I then moved on to talk about my practice itself and the three meta-narratives I’d identified - heritage, identity and process theory. Once I’d concluded I was dealing with these three quite broad categories, I realised that I didn’t have the time to start to read and research widely into each. I therefore decided to relate a piece of my work in each category to a current artist.

In the “heritage” category, I related a piece of my work which comments on the de-industrialisation of the UK (Yorkshire in particular) to the current piece in the British Art Show 8, “the Kipper and the Corpse” by Stuart Whipps. This deals with the closure of the Longbridge motor works in Birmingham.  (Colin & Yee, 2015, p120)

In the “identity” category, I related a manipulated image of my face to the work of the German collage artist Annegret Soltau. Soltau also uses images of herself and her family and manipulates the features to explore how body and spirit connect (Butler & Mark, 2007, p306). I also explained here that I use my own image to avoid ethical issues.

In the “process theory” category, I discussed how repeated quadrilaterals repeatedly appear in my work. I put this down to spending 25 years working in IT, coding repeatable computer programs and defining repeatable processes. I related some work from my current investigation into bricks – repeated quadrilaterals – to the recent public art work by Simon Fujiwara, “Aspire”, which is based on a brick chimney and represents the heritage of Leeds (and of course thereby also relates back to the “heritage” category) (Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, 2015).

By working this way I hope to be able to access the theories I need by researching more into these three artists. I thought this could help identify new and interesting leads, and hopefully bring the theories to life a little.

I’ve presented many times before and standing up and talking doesn’t really worry me. That said, the presentation came in slightly short of the allocated ten minutes, I think, probably due to the adrenaline rush that always accompanies these occasions. I received good feedback, that the presentation was very measured and controlled, and that is thanks to learning this important transferable skill in my previous life. One learning point for next time, though, is that I didn't put a bibliography into the presentation. It had never occurred to me to do this, to be honest, as it seemed it would just be a lot of small text.

This was the first presentation I’d done where I focused on images on the slides, rather than text. In my previous business incarnations bullet points had always been the order of the day. This time I went for images of my work and the work of others. I wasn’t sure how this would work, but it went well as far as I was concerned. Other members of the class seemed to be able to relate to what I was discussing and commented on some of the images afterwards, which was a confidence boost. I will use this image-based approach for the next presentation, too.