MA Week 20 - Heritage Show + Tell Presentation

Heritage Show + Tell Presentation - 1st March 2016 

Well, how DID I get here?

My submission for the University of Leeds's "Heritage Show + Tell" was accepted and I was pleased to be able to present my research and practice to their audience. The Heritage Show + Tell exists to showcase aspects of heritage in Yorkshire, particularly research, learning and outreach. The idea is that you talk for three minutes with three slides. There are 5 or 6 speakers and afterwards everyone mingles and chats over wine and twiglets (yes, really). 

I spoke on the theme "How did I get here? Using heritage for creative practice". I explained the three strands of research by creative practice: 

• Research through practice - producing visual outcomes. I mentioned my twin narratives of identity and industry and showed visual pieces relating to these. 
• Research into practice - articulating the theory that underpins your practice. Here I mentioned Harrison's theory that heritage is based on people, places and objects, and how I have these three things: myself, my foremothers and forefathers; my place in Leeds and Yorkshire; and my manufactured industrial objects. Therefore my practice is underpinned by a theoretical perspective of heritage.  
• Research for practice - I showed images of my generative wandering to Armley and talked through these. I went past my birthplace, "found" a mill which brought into play textile heritage, saw used and derelict factories, photographed the Armley gasometer and spent time considering the railway which brought power and prosperity to Leeds.

Third slide

On my third slide, I showed some of my responses to the wandering and invited people to chat to me afterwards.

 

I said most of what I wanted to say, but was hit by a technical hitch partway through the second slide. The animation of my 5 images started ok and 3 appeared, but the other 2 didn't. A bit of clicking backwards  and forwards brought up the full 5 images, but a similar problem beset the final slide. This threw me although I tried not to let it show. I essence I had broken my cardinal rule; never present without first running through the slides on the kit you're going to present on. I just hadn't been able to do that.  The Show + Tell was talking place in a new venue and the organisers were having problems even getting the presentations onto the kit. It was a "smart screen" so the control was through the "projector screen" on which the presentation was running, so there wasn't even a PC to get to, to take the animation off. A lesson learned - don't put animation into slides unless you know the venue you'll be presenting at!

The audience for this particular evening was a bit different to previous audiences. There were not so many students - there are often a lot of MA students from the University of Leeds - and more members of the public. I had a good chat afterwards with Elaine Evans, another of the presenters, who teaches Fashion at the University of Leeds. We were talking about the longevity of clothes from the 1960s and 1970s and the throwaway culture of today. I also talked to another lady from Leeds City Council who likes trains and architecture and she showed me some fab pictures of Budapest bus station that she'd taken recently - brutalism and yellow buses! She also said she thought my image would weave up into a nice teatowel. That gave us all a laugh.

This was a good experience for me. It moved me away from my work persona and placed me as an art student. Another presenter kindly videoed me on my phone and I have reflected on the event. It was a first step back on the way to public speaking and as such I think it was positive. I can learn not to put animation into my slides (which is something I always do, to try to keep audience interest). I would like to be able to present a poster or short paper next, so I need to keep any eye out for opportunities to do this. I really enjoy the Show + Tell. It's always a really interesting and entertaining night and I was glad to give something back to it.

MA Week 9 - Professional Context Presentation

Presentation 2: Professional Context

I gave my second presentation on 27^th November, this time looking at “professional context".
 

I decided to start out by talking about the creative industries, cultural capital and some facts and figures, all of which I pulled from my week 7 blog post . I talked about the USA and Italy as international players, then brought it down to the UK, then to Leeds. As it’s unlikely I will be applying for funding abroad any time soon, the USA and Italy topics were quite conceptual for me, rather than contextual. However, we had been briefed to look globally and this seemed to me to be the best way to do this. The most interesting thing was the discovery of the small grants offered by Leeds Inspired.

 

I then talked about where I fit in. As I mentioned in the week 7 blogpost, I need to undertake two main steps: get networking, and thereby identify opportunities; and get creative! I identified 5 networking opportunities as examples for the purpose of the presentation:

• Twitter – where I’ve already “met” some artists, including the Leeds-based ceramic artist Rebecca Appleby

• FCK LDN website – they blog on all things cultural outside of London and I have just sent them a re-written version of my Linder blog entry
• Curator Space – they have had some interesting call outs but for a lot of them I just haven’t got the body of work
• Creative Networks events at Leeds College of Art – a really good way to meet people, everyone is mingling and happy!
• University of Leeds Heritage “Show + Tell” – again a great way to mingle and meet. I have also contacted the organiser to ask about the call out for papers for the Spring 2016 date. I really would like to do a paper (if you can call 3 minutes a paper!) at this. I have a couple of ideas: bricks (as per my current investigation) and wanderings (as per a paper my tutor heard at a conference – where you walk, then stop and observe)

I also showed a picture of me exhibiting at my Access course final show. I think the things I have done hitherto are quite “white cube gallery”, but if I can get going with doing some of my printing ideas – if – I think they could go in a more industrial setting. I stressed I need to get creative. And I gave an open invitation to collaborate!

 I finished by talking about my current investigation into bricks, a nascent collaboration between myself and the writer Christina Croft – a conversation with Christina led me to think about bricks and this led to something definite for my MA proposal –and about Linder’s collaborations for the British Art Show 8, with Kenneth Tindall, Max Sterling and Dovecot studios (see previous reference).

I thought the structure of the presentation worked well, and it came in at just under 10 minutes, the allotted time. I did seem to get through it a bit quicker than when practising at home, though. Perhaps I spoke quicker than I expected due to a bit of stage fright. I would have liked to have said more about my own context but I really feel I am at the very start of this journey, and I didn’t want to put things forward then end up not doing them. In contrast, other people on the course seemed to have lots of professional practice already under their belts. But I am where I am. For me, it would be really interesting to do the same exercise again in a year’s time.

There was some interesting group feedback. The gist of it was to get to know what’s going on locally and get involved. For example, pop-up events, online communities, studio space. So the Heritage Show + Tell would be one example, but what others could I get involved in? You also need to think about separating out your subject and your approach. I took this to mean that you need to think about positioning what you are doing as well as doing it. Another point was a “knowledge audit” – know what you know, and own it. For me, an example was suddenly finding I could undertake a creative collaboration with a longstanding friend.

I feel that, by identifying my 5 networking examples, I am starting to think about this, and act upon it, more importantly. If I can start to produce some creative work, that will be another part of the proverbial jigsaw. These are all factors that will need to be incorporated into a plan for the next term of the course.

 

MA Week 8 - Presenting my presentation thought process

I’ve been working on my “professional” context presentation, and thought it could be useful to share the way I work. It’s a kind of unstructured structuredness somehow!

Everything I do starts off with a kind of fag packet approach. I have to write things down to get the thought process going. Then I do kind of spider diagrams and scribble on these in layers… so perhaps my often-layered creative work has the same root somewhere in the primordial soup of my brain. So the approach to this presentation was the same, as shown below in pages from my notebook. I then started researching actual facts and figures and pulling these together.

 

 

Then the structure itself started to become clear to me. I grouped the ideas around central themes. This is also always a facet of how I work. The notebook page below shows this. It’s interesting that what I scribbled below wasn’t too far from how the actual presentation turned out.

 

These are a couple of other pages starting to note what needs to go with each slide and to work out how the networking and collaboration bits were going to fit in. At this stage I was doing lots of drafting and moving around of slides. It took a while for this middle bit of this presentation to settle into place.

I worked on the content of the slides and the script at the same time. This helped me to get a feel for what I could and couldn’t include, given the timeframe of 10 minutes. To be quite honest, I’ve done lots of presentations in my previous professional life so I had an idea at the outset how much material I would need to generate to fill, but not overfill, the time.

The scripts and slides have now been incorporated into my week 9 blogpost on the presentation, so anyone reading this can see how it finally turned out!

MA Week 6 - Presenting Work for Assessment

Reflection on taught session, Friday 6th November 2015

Presenting Work for Assessment

Some really useful stuff in this session from Annabeth.

Signpost your work

You need to signpost your work so that both internal and external examiners can find their way through it. If you think something belongs in both the Research Methods and Professional Context module, you will have to write it up in two different ways as a piece of work can only be marked once. It’s a good idea to summarise and label your work so that it’s very clear to the examiners.

This threw me a bit. I’m fine with signposting my work, or presenting it any way that’s needed, but I’d understood from previous talks that the work we’re doing this term would be viewed holistically and that it was OK if the two modules mingled together. After all, it’s the  one person, me in this case, doing both and having one set of thought processes. My classmates pointed out that I should be able to easily split my blog posts between the two modules, but I think it will mean some rework, which means using time, which is in short supply at the moment. Ho hum. I also need to go back and tag my blog posts with the relevant module name, which I hadn’t thought of doing, but that shouldn’t take too long.

All that said, the point was then made that you do need to be able to “synthesise” the modules, i.e. cross-reference them as you move on. I need to bear this in mind in future but I don’t see it as an issue. In fact I think it is a positive thing as it acknowledges that you are trying to form a holistic view of your practice.

Think about how you present your work for assessment:

·         If you’re a sculptor or VJ, film your work, your process, your studio. Get a YouTube channel and put bite-size videos up, then signpost the examiner to key clips of them.

·         Use audio clips of you articulating your thoughts, if you wish, but don’t expect the examiner to listen to the whole lot – again, signpost the main clips.

·         Get good photos of your work.

·         Document critical moments.

·         Don’t forget to document the learning outcomes as well as your artistic outcomes.

·         Reflect! Reflect!

I feel comfortable with this. During the Access course I documented and reflected on everything. The points I do need to think about are the quality of my photos, so I need to chat to my tutor about this. What is acceptable for journals? And is my reflection at the correct level for Masters? I’m also making frequent reference to learning outcomes, checking my work and progress against them, so again I’m comfortable with that. I just need to keep it up!

Investigate recent advances in your own field

For example, the latest thinking on feminism. Doing this had been mentioned before. I’ve been trying to check publication dates on books to see how recent they are, particularly if an issue is very current (the state of the creative industries is a recent example I’ve been researching). So I’ve started to become aware of this. Another to keep in mind.

Annabeth also suggested TED talks and the identification of conferences you’d like to attend. This was useful as I hadn’t really thought in this way. Something to take on board.

Think professionally

Start thinking about your community of practice, and get on with identifying organisations you can partner with and who can fund you. How can you partner with these? How are you going to pitch to these? Do you need to think about quantitative methods, e.g. getting some facts and figures?

I’ve started thinking about networking as a way into this. I need to also start building a body of work to use with organisations. There is much more thinking I need to do about this; I need to develop that thinking as I move through the course, particularly as my attention turns back to the more creative angle. I hope this will occur as a natural development.

Conclusion

I’m comfortable that I’m already covering at least some of the points raised. I think this is a blog post that I need to keep referring back to as I progress through the course, as a kind of checklist, until all the practices become second nature.

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.