MA Week 80 – writing up and wrapping up; an end and a beginning

 

Reflection on the past 10 days, 10^th August 2017

 

A final etch

Most of my “spare” time since last week’s post has been taken up with preparing for hand-in, but I did get time to have one last day in the print room. I decided that I would like a souvenir of the “Movement” show at Left Bank Leeds, so I did a small plate etching of the venue. Etching and aquatint are teaching me a lot about composition and tonal values.  However, the foreground was still a bit light after the plate had bitten. I only had time to do that one ground on this plate, so I had to drypoint into it. This worked OK in the hatching of the shaded areas. The end result was pretty good for a piece that took just a couple of evenings to prepare then a leisurely day to etch and print. It was great to work without the pressure of trying to get something done for hand in – if it didn’t work, it didn’t matter. It printed up really quite nicely on the Somerset paper (soak well, blot well!).
 

Souvenir: of the exhibition at Left Bank and of happy days in the Print Room at College

 

Preparing for submission

Getting ready for the final submission has been a long process. It was quite exciting to see all my work together ready for mounting, but less exciting when I got spray mount onto the face of one of the aquatint prints and had a paddy of Biblical proportions (both situations were dealt with swiftly and smoothly by my in-house team).

 

Writing up the entire module’s practice holistically (rather than chronologically)  has, inevitably, yielded fresh insights. One of the more interesting ones is the creative tension between controlling a process and letting the process take its own course. Whilst experimenting with different types of paper for etching (see this week 79 blogpost), I’ve been making notes on soaking times and amount of blotting needed, plus ideas about how to ink and wipe the plates. I also made a test aquatint strip to try to have some control over how long to bite the plate for. This methodical, controlled approach is quite in contrast to the much looser process of monoprinting, where the colours and shapes drive the process. The inking of the “Gentrification” drypoint is somewhere between the two; part controlled inking and wiping, part monoprint. This then starts to give rise to thoughts of how these different approaches could cross over into one another.

It’s incredible to think that the MA is now at an end, but really it feels like a stepping stone to whatever comes next, rather than an “end” per se. That said, I was really sad when I left the Print Room today after saying goodbye to the staff. I’ve learnt a great deal over the two years, and in particular I’m amazed at the amount I’ve achieved in the past few weeks, especially as I work part-time too. It seems that since the start of June, all the hard work has started to pay off. I believe I now have a consistent practice, anchored in theories of place, psychogeography, identity and heritage,  that I can articulate visually and verbally, and which is of interest to others.

 
Next Steps

The first thing after hand in will be to have a rest, some time off from art practice completely, then come back to it afresh from September. I will obviously have to move my printing practice from College (no more big Rochat press! Aagh!). Hopefully I will move to Leeds Print Workshop, where there will be some familiar faces as some of the College staff and former students are members of the co-operative there. I’ve got a future reading list lined up, both theory and practical. I also want to do a lot of mark making to loosen up my style a little. Alongside this I will be keeping in touch with fellow MA-ers who have become my Community of Practice, and looking for opportunities to exhibit together.

 

Thank you very much

I would like to thank everyone who’s helped me along the way; my classmates – especially Sue, Carol, Mel, Paula and Larissa; Sharon; all the Print Room staff; Michelle; and of course, Nick, without whose support I wouldn’t be doing this. Thanks also to everyone who’s read the blogposts and found them interesting. The encouragement is much appreciated.  

Pressing publish on this post will be the last action of the MA bar the hand-in (and probably a few beverages thereafter). However, the blog has helped my reflective practice so I am intending to continue to blog but not as frequently, perhaps one or two posts per month.  

Signing off for now. Got something in my eye. Honestly.

 

 

MA Week 49 - meeting up with Mandy Payne, and the endless dissertation

Reflection on the past week, 30^th November 2016

 

Meeting the artist Mandy Payne

On Monday I had the real pleasure of spending the afternoon with the Sheffield-based artist, Mandy Payne. I came across Mandy’s work via Twitter and it really struck a chord. For the past four years she has been investigating the brutalist Park Hill flats complex in Sheffield, recording the abandoned urban spaces, the gradual boarding up of the complex, and the gentrification of part of it (see Mandy’s website). My interest in her work is fuelled by the fact that I was an undergraduate student in Sheffield many years ago and I remember the complex well, towering as it did (and presumably still does) over Pond Street Bus Station.  

Mandy was talked to me about her career, inspirations and working methods, which was really thought-provoking and insightful. She has had a previous career, as an NHS dentist, and her art career has taken off quite quickly. Whilst acknowledging that Mandy kept her creative work going alongside her previous career, which I certainly didn’t, this does give me encouragement that I can make something out of my artwork now if I persevere. A unique point of a lot of Mandy’s work is that it is on concrete, and she had to do trials to get repeatable results for the unusual substrate. This again was encouraging as I realised that my own testing and trialling is a part of the normal process of producing artwork and is not completely through my lack of technique! 

Mandy was interested in seeing the brutalist architecture of the University of Leeds so we went for a good wander around the campus. I often wander there on my own but it was different to walk and talk with someone else. Just as I pointed out my usual paths and interesting buildings and shapes, so Mandy pointed out things I’d never considered, and in some cases never even seen, and other shapes that I’d overlooked. I enjoyed the fresh set of eyes and I hope Mandy enjoyed my “guided tour”. We talked about how stimulating it can be to walk with someone who knows the area, but how we are all bounded by our own little rituals of whereabouts we walk and what we look at. We also agreed that you can go out looking for visual source material and find some really good inspiration, but quite often the most fruitful source material finds you when you’re not expecting it. Mandy had gone for a wander with someone in Sheffield and he had directed the walk to Park Hill flats. She had never been before but was immediately inspired. It’s the same with the Armley walk – it’s driven my practice either directly or indirectly since I did it 10 months ago.  

Although we both use the urban as source material in different ways, it was great to spend time with another artist with similar interests and the conversation never dried up! Mandy has kindly invited me to go down to Sheffield in the New Year to have a look at Park Hill flats and I will definitely be taking up the invitation.

The endless dissertation

The walk and talk with Mandy was a really refreshing break from the endless writing. Today I had an even more intense tutorial than last time. I have been having real trouble regarding how to discuss my chosen artists within the dissertation. There are three artists; Mandy, Rebecca Appleby and Stuart Whipps. I was considering whether I needed to include Whipps as he doesn’t have such a strong place attachment as the other two artists. Sharon has suggested that I should continue to include him and use his practice as a “link” to the other two as they are more relevant to me at the moment. I was also thinking of removing a summary of the similarities and differences between the artists’ practices, but Sharon again challenged me on this. I will try this and see how it works. I also had a tutorial with the specialist writing tutor, Karen, last week and she has suggested weaving the artists through the essay. It just seems like artist’s block of a different kind! 

Anyway I have made a breakthrough with the first part of it. I had written small sections on each of heritage, identity and place, and I was struggling to pull them all together. I woke up the other morning (they are all rolling into one now!) and realised that the point of the section was to argue how intermeshed they all are – so why was I separating them out? I’ve now re-written it as one section, starting with Ann-Marie Bathmaker’s “life histories”, rambling through identity, heritage and place, and coming back to Bathmaker. It feels a lot more comfortable now and hangs together quite well. 

One of the strangest things about that was that I fathomed out the exact way of rewriting it during a lunchtime walk on Woodhouse Moor. I usually walk there for half an hour most lunchtimes, but I haven’t been for ages, due to tutorials and meeting friends and being buried in the library. Woodhouse features strongly in the dissertation, as does walking, and it made me wonder why I hadn’t seen my lunchtime walk there as a powerful analytical tool rather than a nice-to-have while I am in this intense reading and writing phase. The same walk also revealed to me a bit of a hole in another section – something that hadn’t even got on my radar up to that point. 

All of this structuring and re-structuring means that I am now about a week behind where I wanted to be, so I will have to use my contingency time of the coming weekend, which is not ideal, but that’s what contingency is for.

 

 

MA Week 48 - Psychogeography and Being Human, plus the dissertation takes more shape

Reflection on the past week, 23rd November 2016  

The dissertation

I had a very intense tutorial last Wednesday, focusing on the second half of my dissertation, which deals with the Armley walk and its outcomes. As I mentioned last week, sense of place is coming higher up in the mix and Sharon provided a Guardian interview with John Berger this great quote (though about the Haute Savoie in his case, not Yorkshire): “This landscape was part of my energy, my body, my satisfaction and discomfort. I loved it … because I participated in it” (Kellaway, 2016, n.p.). I loved this and I am going to cram it into the dissertation somewhere as it really speaks to me about belonging to your place. 

From this I have been reading then writing and writing and writing. I had three days off – Friday, Monday and yesterday – and I’ve got the second half in better shape, but it has been a long slog. By the end of Monday I knew it wasn’t right but I couldn’t understand why. Then when I slept on it, I realised it was because the whole essay is about looking for Northernness, but I don’t overtly say I’ve found it (or not). So I’ve pulled a lot of the existing stuff together in a different way and now it mirrors the part about Northernness in the first half of the essay and hangs together much better. 

I’ve also been skimming Laurajane Smith’s excellent book, Uses of Heritage. There is so much food for thought in there and I think it might even have overtaken Harrison as my favourite heritage book. It is ten years old now, though. There’s a critical analysis of what I read in this blogpost. The most interesting concept is the “Authorized Heritage Discourse” (AHD), which is basically heritage based on the views of “experts”. She rails against this and argues, more or less, that heritage should be open to all. This resonates for me with this idea of “official” and “unofficial” discourses too. There is also interesting stuff about identity, memory and place, so lots of material to give voice to what I’ve been grappling with and to help me link it all together. She also talks about the sanitising of heritage. There’s an interesting-looking chapter that I’ve not read, about the heritage of Castleford, which I am hoping to get onto as I had a quick glance and there was some anti-Thatcher stuff in there – the individual speaking truth to power again as Bathmaker would put it.

 

Being Human: Urban Dreams (and Nightmares)

First Group Walk - discussing the renovation of Merrion House

The “Being Human” with Leeds Beckett took place on Saturday (19^th November) and was an interesting and fulfilling day. Unfortunately it was rainy so not many participants turned up. There were four short group walks around the City Museum, each around 40 minutes, with plenty of time to talk about the surroundings and share opinions. I was fortunate to go out on the first group with Dr Shane Ewen, an urban historian from Leeds Beckett. Shane knew a lot about the history of the area (the Wetherspoons used to be a Methodist Chapel) and this was supplemented by some of the participants. One participant works at the council and she was talking about the sale of the nearby council buildings, and explaining the shrinkage of the council to some international participants. She also explained that the somewhat killjoy bye-laws for Millennium Square are there to stop people from injuring themselves then suing the council. Another participant, Helen Clarke, used to be a tutor at the Art College and is now doing a PhD with psychogeographical elements so we are now following each other on Twitter. I helped out by pointing out the colours and shapes of the buildings and also the amount of text about, which people found interesting. 

 

 

Participants reading about the city and colouring some of the outline drawings

I then helped out inside, and there were people colouring in my drawings, though sadly not any children! We did make a kind of cityscape but I would have liked to take this further, with participants able to cut out different coloured shapes to describe dreams and nightmares. There was some lovely shading on the colouring though and an interesting subversion of Merrion House to NYC which talks of transgressing boundaries again. 

 

The "cityscape". The line drawing in the middle is mine!

 

By the time my next walk came around, the last walk of the day, there were only two or three participants but Zoë and I braved the rain with them. Zoë discussed the way the area is intended to be used and a little of the history of the buildings. We talked about the Merrion Centre and the fact it houses a disused cinema, and I contributed the tale of the research of one of our PhD students, who is visually depicting the currently-disused Merrion Hotel. Again people seemed to find something of interest and this was gratifying.

I was really pleased I’d had this chance to work with counterparts from Leeds Beckett and to position myself as an artist within the context of the day. It helped my confidence and I learned a lot. It was the first time I’d done any public engagement and it was a really good introduction to it as I wasn’t responsible for organising the event and could just get on with enjoying it. The event was being filmed for Leeds Beckett, and I was interviewed about my participation and my art for the film. The event generated some good feedback, with people citing increased curiosity about the city, increased attention to and appreciation of the surroundings, and a general appreciation of the time to walk and chat. I would agree with all of that.

 

And there’s more…

I’d emailed Sarah Taylor at College to ask about joining the “Crossing Borders” research cluster, and she kindly invited me to the opening of their exhibition, Pink Slip. I will admit I went more to meet Sarah than to view the exhibition, but meet her I did and am hoping to attend at least some of the cluster’s meetings once the dates are announced.

So, a busy week, and more to come!

MA Week 47 - Place seminar, more psychogeographical thoughts…and more dissertation

Reflection on the past week, 15^th November 2016

 

 

 

An interesting seminar on Tuesday lunchtime to start with. I’ve put a copy of my notes here. It was given by Dr Helen Graham and entitled “Restaging the Political Dynamics of Commons and Publics”. Some of it was a little bit beyond my sphere of knowledge but there were some very relevant and interesting points, summarised below.

Helen’s research area is heritage and she pointed out that it is concerned with the past and the future as well as the present. Looking back, we can see what pasts have contributed to our current present. Extrapolating forwards, we can try to predict what sort of future our current present might make. She considers heritage as a social process and as a means of generating ideas. This takes the ideas I’ve been working with, of heritage as having a cultural basis, and takes it further. It definitely moves it on considerably from the days of object-based concepts.

 Helen also alluded to histories pluralised beyond the “best rehearsed”, i.e. the official, which again ties in very closely with what I’ve been working on in my dissertation – the need to disrupt the “official”, over-arching narrative by telling your own version of events.  Different “pasts” can also give rise to different “futures”. She is currently involved in a project to use this technique to try to envisage the city in 2026. The intention is that the city will become more dynamic.

An interesting ethical point arose regarding the group she is working with. The group has a pre-existing Facebook group where photos and memories are shared. Full ethical clearance has been obtained for the project. However, there are probably people in the “yesteryear” photos who haven’t given their permission for the images to be used as they are passing by in the background or otherwise unaware that pictures are being taken. It did raise the disconnect between the “official” (institution-level) and “unofficial” (Facebook) archives. There is no control over social media and there is not yet enough history to judge its use. It made me slightly wary of what I’m blogging, and to be more mindful of exactly what photos are showing.

Anyway, I was heartened to see that my reading on heritage had yielded some fruit as the ideas I’d gleaned were reflected back to me via Helen’s talk. It was interesting too that the idea of “official” and “unofficial” came up again. The talk provided confirmation that my thinking about heritage is along the right lines.

 

 

Millennium Square 1

 

I had a day of dissertation on Thursday then an excellent weekend away, but it was back to it with a vengeance on Monday preparing for the upcoming Being Human event on Saturday 19^th. I went out at lunchtime to take some photos of the area we’ll be investigating, around Millennium Square, and promised myself it would just be a quick rush round the buildings, no more. Of course that soon failed and I moved on to taking photos of all the text and signage. There is so much text, telling you what you can and can’t do, how much stuff costs, trying to entice you in for a drink… it put me in mind of a future project that abstracts text as well as shapes. I also did a couple of line sketches for use in the planned cityscape and which kids can use to colour in if needed. Those and the images have gone off to the event organiser, Dr Henry Irving at Leeds Beckett.

 

Millennium Square 2

On Tuesday I had the pleasure of meeting up with Dr Zoë Tew-Thompson again. I had managed to squeeze in reading one of the chapters of her book, “Urban Constellations : Spaces of Cultural Regeneration in Post-Industrial Britain” and there was much to discuss. The chapter is a psychogeographical reflection on the Sage building on Gateshead’s riverside. Old areas of the city have been destroyed to allow it to be built, thereby erasing the past. But the past is never fully erased. Oral histories, life stories, emerge to disrupt the shiny new present. The stories may not be officially, factually correct – a street name may be wrongly remembered, for example – but this does not serve to lessen their worth. It simply reflects the everydayness of life, of remembering and re-remembering.

 

The new Sage building also provided something that wasn’t previously there; a view over Gateshead’s riverside. So elements are revealed in the same way that elements are hidden. By walking we can become aware of these different viewpoints and vantage points, and this can tell us something about our attitudes and identity.

One striking thing about the chapter was the way it is written. Zoë had effectively used her theoretical underpinning as just that – a layer onto which she placed her own experience and her own argument, pulling up her theorists into her own explanations and conceptualisations as needed.  This was informative to me regarding my dissertation as I’d been trying to get lots of different theorists for fear of relying too heavily on one. This helped me see a different viewpoint – rather, that the main theorists can be called upon throughout the essay and this can help the continuity.

 

Under (re)-construction, much like my dissertation

My dissertation is starting to make more use of sense of place, much like Zoë’s book chapter, and I have compared two articles about this here. The more I read, the more I realise so many of these theories are intertwined and they become more (rather than less) difficult to separate. In a way I consider this to be inevitable as everyday life doesn’t break down into silos, does it?

MA Week 45 - an emerging structure for the dissertation

Reflection on the past two weeks, 1^st November 2016

Nothing visual to share from these past two weeks, unfortunately. A combination of a couple of days away then picking up one of these bugs that’s going round meant I didn’t get into the print room. I did, however, join the new Leeds Print Workshop and had my induction and that made me want to get printing again. There are also lots of interesting buildings around there so I have earmarked that area for a bit of a wander as soon as I have time, whenever that might be. 

Most of my “spare” time has been spent on structuring and editing my dissertation. As I mentioned in my week 43 blogpost, I’d realised that the structure wasn’t correct. I’d written it as a kind of series of analyses of different theories and techniques – heritage theory, identity theory, psychogeography – then I was struggling with relating this to my own practice. I’ve now moved things around such that the theories form a backdrop to the Armley urban wandering I undertook back in February, and that wandering and its outcomes are the body of the essay. I then move on to describe that the theoretical perspectives and the wanderings form a methodology. Possibly methodology is a bit too grand a term, but it’s a working method that works for me. 

I’ve been quite surprised at exactly how much work it’s taken me to do this restructuring. I’m used to writing business reports and to putting together an argument. However, having to reference and evidence everything in an academic essay is much more time consuming than I’m used to. Writing the dissertation as an introduction, three chapters and a conclusion is odd too. The chapters are only two or three pages long so they are not really called “chapters” in my head. Siloing the information is proving problematic too. I can only think that it’s one of these things that would be easier the next time you did it. 

Anyway, I now have the first draft that actually has some proper flesh on the bones, so to speak, and though it’s woolly in places, it does have the basic flow of what I want to say. It’s about 5000 words and the target is 6000-8000 so it is well on its way. I’ve got to the point where I’m so close to it that I need a couple of days away from it as I can’t tell whether a paragraph is rubbish and needs deleting or whether it is crucial to the argument. I have a tutorial with Sharon on Thursday 3^rd November so hopefully that will give me a bit of clarity.

 

I am aware that I am still relying heavily on a small number of books and I discussed this with Karen, the academic writing tutor. She advised me that you don’t necessarily need to “compare and contrast” but you do need more than one author’s supporting ideas within the essay. She told me to envisage it like being in the room with your “favourite” authors for a day. After that you would want to hear some other voices and ideas. I liked this viewpoint. Whilst I was doing the restructuring, I deliberately didn’t read any further texts as I wanted to concentrate solely on the structure. The next tasks will be to start reading again, and possibly to think of other forms of research, although time remains of the essence.

 

 

MA Week 37 – ups and downs

25th July 2016: reflection on the past two weeks : ups and downs

Firstly, some good news: my paper was accepted for the “Grim Up North” symposium. Hurrah! Now the hard work begins. Actually I’m quite looking forward to it, as I think I’ll learn more about my practice and hopefully I can use at least some of the ideas in my dissertation (which I’m not quite looking forward to).

In a further “Grim up North” vein, I paid my first visit to the People’s History Museum in Manchester, specifically to see the “Grafters” exhibition of photographs of workers. I’ve written a post about this. I also paid a short visit to another part of the museum which deals with post World War 2 social history. There was quite a bit about Thatcher, the unions and the Miner’s Strike. To a certain extent it made my blood boil, re-living the deindustrialisation of the North, but I knew it would. One of the positive things I took from it was a reinforcement of my idea of today’s everyday being tomorrow’s heritage (the presence of a “Rock against Racism” badge cemented this). An enjoyable visit which I doubt will be my last, especially as their riverside café serves good food at decent prices!

I was on annual leave last week and had hoped to get into Print Room a couple of times. However, a combination of an ongoing family problem and a leaking boiler meant I only got in there once, which was a downer. I did some further monoprinting, with mixed results. I worked a little bit into the blue and yellow ones from week 33, and did some black and red ones.

On a roll : taking over the print room with my monoprints

My ideas of using shapes based on the buildings that I’d seen on the Holbeck urban wandering didn’t work brilliantly well. The shapes soon got overly inky and this produced messy prints. I think really I was straying into the realms of screen printing or lino cutting. I also tried really hard with my registration technique. It’s better but still needs a lot of work.

I did a drawn monoprint in red into a couple of the blue and yellow ones and that worked OK. I need to think a little more about the positioning of the drawing in relation to the original shapes, though. The most successful pieces came from using some old combs to scratch into the ink and then layering these up in different colours. This gave lots of interesting texture and variations in colour.  I liked these pieces and could see them developing into part of a bigger piece. I also paid more attention to inking the plate. I rolled the ink out onto the work surface then inked the plate, rather than rolling the ink directly onto the plate. This allowed me to get a smoother inking. Still work to do, but getting better!

Monoprint plus acetate

Stuck at home, I experimented a little with collaging acetate pieces of some of the Holbeck photos onto a couple of the prints. These worked OK and I can work into them again. I also etched another drypoint plate but won’t get the chance to print it until this coming Friday. Aaagh!!

MA Week 35 - Etching and a different kind of abstract (2)

Reflection on the past two weeks – 11^th July 2016:

Etching and a different kind of abstract (2) 

The other thing I’ve been working on this past fortnight is my first ever conference abstract. I’d heard about a symposium called “Grim up North” via social media. Its topic is Northern heritage and identity, which I have of course been researching. It’s aimed at MA and PhD students and postdocs, so it was a foregone conclusion that I should have a go at submitting an abstract. 

Preparing the abstract was quite challenging but interesting. I followed my usual approach of reading the question (i.e. the call for papers (CFP)) and working up a response. I had enough confidence in my writing ability to know that if I kept drafting, something would eventually appear. It took a lot of grouping my thoughts, though, and to get out those 250 words I had two or three lots of initial scribbles plus six or seven drafts.

 

How to write an abstract - the long way

One of the initial hurdles was trying to focus in on what I wanted to say. It took a while for me to realise that I didn’t need to submit an account of everything I’ve been doing, but rather focus on just those bits that overlapped with the CFP. To help strengthen my submission, I read back over this blog, in particular the posts on heritage as a critical perspective from Harrison’s book . I’ve also got some part-formed notes about identity from Bathmaker’s book, Exploring Learning, Identity & Power through Life History & Narrative Research, that helped.  

I’ve also recently read a really relevant paper by Annemarie Murland, Migration and Sense of Place: re-contextualising felt experience through creative practice. (Edit: now discussed in this Week 36 post).The gist of this paper is about translating the embodied experience of a place into visual form. Murland talks about the feeling translating itself into the marks she is making. This was something I think I would have eventually arrived at, with my deep, black, scratchy marks, but Murland articulated this hitherto half-formed thought.  This unlocked the final piece of the jigsaw, namely the fact that you can depict a lived (felt/embodied) experience in a non-figurative way and the marks can say more than a figurative depiction could do. 

The next bit of editing was the style. I’d written in the first person, but thought that wasn’t right. I read Murland’s abstract of her own paper plus the abstracts of a couple of others I had previously printed off, and suddenly the style came to me, and this strengthened the text a good deal. 

Finally I sought the opinion of three people whose views I respect; my colleague Jenny, who teaches skills including academic writing to PhD students and postdocs; my colleague Liz, who is also a lecturer in Fine Art; and my long-suffering tutor, Sharon. Each of them gave me some useful insights. Jenny pointed out that I had a disconnect in one paragraph – easy to do when you’ve done so much editing. Liz gave me some deeper insights into my comments about use of colour and also some useful references about that topic. Sharon pointed out some repetitions and advised me to read the abstract out loud to myself. I edited it then read it in my head, and thought it sounded OK. When I did finally read it out loud, I was amazed to find repetitions I’d missed. I’d never heard of this technique before and it is so simple and useful. 

The abstract is reproduced below, and was submitted yesterday. I don’t know if it will be accepted or not. Whatever the outcome, I think it has been a really useful exercise for me. It’s helped me to hone in a little further on what I’m doing and how, and I’ve learnt some good lessons about abstract writing along the way.

 

Using wandering and visual response to investigate Northernness: How did I get here?

“The North” exists not only as a physical entity, but also as a lived experience for the Northerner. How can this embodied experience be investigated and depicted using visual methods? 

Within the various stages of deindustrialisation - the decay and rebuilding of urban Yorkshire - lie the roots of the heritage and identity of many Northerners, myself included. The search for our roots can be depicted visually; the transformation of the urban landscape forms a rich source of visual material. Heritage and life history perspectives can be used to articulate stories of the places, people and objects of the North. By combining these theoretical perspectives with urban wandering, it becomes possible to visually describe the embodied experience of living here.  

This combined approach opens up an immersive, visual research method which gives rise to visual responses. Looking, observing and connecting with the built environment and its peoples, past and present, brings a sense of place, of being and of belonging. As today becomes tomorrow’s heritage, so this visual research adds to the pool of collective memories.  

The creative outcomes generate a personal visual language of Northernness, deepening understanding of identity, self and heritage. The urban landscape reveals new shapes and colours, repurposed through the choice of marks and materials. Abstract, non-figurative artworks invite the viewer to share the embodied experience without the pre-conception that might be suggested by a figurative image. Colours come into play: black and white suggests the grim industrial past. Vibrant colours depict the embodied experience of the present and hope for the future.

 

 

MA Week 20 - Academic Writing

Academic Writing  -  4th March 2016 

 

 

Some theory and some practical tips surrounding academic writing in this useful session. 

Karen talked about academic writing as an integral part of research by practice, referring to it as a "thinking tool" and a "reflective tool". There is a tendency amongst students of visual art to see writing as an add-on, and as I've mentioned I often find it a stress as I juggle and struggle to get visual work finished. However, Karen did say you have to get it into its place, and by doing shorter and more focused blog posts, I think I'm starting to get the hang of that. That said, once I get into something that really interests me, I can spend hours reading - even skimming - and thinking and writing a reflection. I suppose this is the use of writing as the "tools" that Karen referred to. It seems logical that a reflection on a piece of visual work would go hand-in-hand with creating that work. This is fine, as long as I acknowledge the time that needs to be allocated to it. 

Academic writing needs to reference knowledge, discourses, practices etc other than your own, but it must acknowledge that I am the author, with my own viewpoint, which hopefully will be well-argued and backed up by references. You need to consider what you will write and how you will write it before you start out. Fair comment. To this end, Karen suggested thinking of a title for a piece of longer work then unpicking that to identify different themes. Each theme can then have its own "research folder" of whatever kind and this can help reduce the confusion, although we agreed you "have to have the confusion before the clarity" and this applies to both visual and written work.  

Karen also provided some "grids" for building up bibliographies. One could be in each of the above research folders, along with a list of quotes. A literature review is also useful - a few sentences about each book you’ve identified and how it will be helpful. A book can be reviewed for this by reading the back cover and contents and having a skim through. For my own part, I did try using grids before but put the quotes in them, not just book details, so they got unwieldy more or less immediately. I went back to writing by hand.  I am pretty strict with myself about writing down book references and page numbers when making notes and I think this works OK for me on the scale I'm currently working.  

Any written piece needs to have boundaries. Reading that you’ve done that goes wider than this can be summed up in a few sentences so the reader can understand the writer has a breadth of knowledge. Also think about the reader. What information do they need in order to understand the context? A further consideration is whether to write in the first person or third person. I don't fully understand this debate ( it wasn't possible to go into it in detail) so I think I will need to ask or find out more about it later on. 

Karen also provided some further info about quoting, paraphrasing, referencing etc. This will be of use. It was really good to get some concrete practical support material to help with writing, although I don’t feel that I’ve had too many problems with it to date, other than the time factor.