Reflection
on taught session, Friday 15th January 2016
Creative
Practitioner Presentation
This was a really
interesting talk in which Amber spoke about graphic design and about her
current research question, “How can the principles of sustainable practice be
applied to graphic design printmaking?”
Amber described
her research journey. To get to her current research question, she has taken
quite a circuitous journey. At the start, graphic design – her specialism - is
client-led and there is always a push to sell the client something else, to make
more money. The driver is economic, rather than aesthetic or sustainable. She
had been influenced by the manifesto “First Things First” by the graphic
designer Ken Garland (1963 – published 1964 in the Guardian). Garland and the
other designers who were signatories to this argued for the removal of the fast
pace and triviliased production of graphic designs due to the “saturation of
consumer selling” (hard to believe they thought that 50 years ago. It would be interesting
to see what they thought of advertising these days!) They felt that graphic
design could be used for the betterment of society, such as signs, manuals,
education and publication, rather than being associated exclusively with
branding, as we often perceive it to be.
Via her love of printing
she became involved in “slow” printing – manual letterpress for print festivals
and the like – but realised she was wasting paper and using oil-based inks
which were not recyclable. From this she sought to understand how printing
could be sustainable and yet still aesthetically pleasing. She looked for ways
to move away from the need for speed and the level of waste that surrounds graphic
design.
This led her to
consideration of the “Slow” movement, which originated with “slow” food
(organic food that’s in season and is definitely not “fast food”). High Street
stores subscribe to the idea of “fast fashion”, with garments that have a
6-week life cycle in the store and that are poorly made, not designed to last
and probably not ethically sourced. “Slow fashion” considers where a garment is
made, what it’s made from, what design inputs it had, how long it will last and
so on (so like in the olden days… made in Britain!).However things are
expensive – but they’re exclusive. In both cases it is a case of supply and
demand.
Prompted by
discovering that paper pulping is the 3rd most-polluting industry, she
decided to start out making her own paper. Although professionally she works
digitally, she decided to go back to sustainable manual processes. She worked
in her kitchen, as in a cottage industry, and started to make her own dyes
using very old recipes. She collected rain water in pots in her garden so that
her demand on the environment was minimised. Eventually she made some paper she
was happy with! Eventually Amber arrived at her research question. How could
these principles be applied to printing? It leads to the wider economic
question, can these principles be applied to a commercially successful
practice? As she had previously mentioned, there is often a tension between
economic considerations on the one hand and the aesthetic and creative will of
the artist on the other.
Amber acknowledged
she felt a conflict between research and making. I have certainly felt that.
Sometimes I’ve felt a scramble to find an artist that I can claim has
influenced me or who has some other thing in common with my work. Other times I
have felt the urge to continue reading and researching on a theme that seems to
be emerging, but some creative pieces need to be done or written up in the
creative journal. Again and again I wonder if it’s possible to marry research
and practice fully, or if one always has to be minimised at the expense of the
other.
She mentioned she
had used grounded theory to develop a structure for what she was doing and
collecting. She identified “codes” such as “cottage industry”, “slow fashion”,
and was able to group them. This began to show her how research and practice
come together. I found this quite exciting as this is what I did last term (see
week 3 post). As with Sam’s presentation last week, Amber needed to make a
coherent case out of her practice and her interests. This really resonates with
me. The pieces I am producing through my creative experimentation might seem
disconnected but they all make sense to me. The challenge is to make them make
sense to someone else, particularly in the academic sense.
Amber had displayed
her paper samples as an artwork, pinned up on a board, but then put them in a
book to show her PhD supervisors. This raises the question : who are you
collating this for? My classmate Carol had brought in a book with plastic
pockets to show us some of her work for a crit. The work could be removed and
displayed some other way. So a question for me: Does everything have to be in a
sketchbook/creative journal? Are there other, better ways to collate my work
and submit it? Amber also pointed out your work forms an archive. Via the way
you collate it, it might be chronological, or you might have sorted it some
other way to show some other narrative. What are my archives? What are my
narratives? Do I need to revisit my archives – or even the small amount of work
I’ve done this year – to check my narratives are what I think?
I was really gratified
that Amber was willing to share her research journey. I could find a lot of resonance
with the issues she was describing. It also raised a lot of interesting questions
and other angles to consider. It helped me see that some of the issues I’m
grappling with may not be due to my lack of experience, but that they are
common to many practitioners who choose to undertake an academic investigation
of their practice.
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