Research Student Conference UCA Farnham

Time - Place - Space
http://www.ucreative.ac.uk/timeplacespace
17th April 2013

The OCA MA had been invited to this one day conference at our sister University, so I went along.
Of course, the OCA is very much the Cinderella sister that few people there had heard of - until now.
I was delighted to bump into a couple of people I knew from my degree at Middlesex. Simon Ofield-Kerr was a memorable Visual Cultures tutor then, really exuberant, skipping up and down while he lectured about flaneurs. He's Vice-Chancellor at UCA now. Another student from Middlesex and now doing a PhD and presenting a paper at the conference was Christina Lovey. She was so pleased I remembered her degree piece without prompting.

The conference was worthwhile - interesting, fruitful, and mostly well presented. It's a bit if a challenge to sit in an auditorium for several hours and concentrate, but I will try to transcribe my copious scribbles:

Dr Claire Pajackowska was the keynote speaker. Brilliant but hard to keep up with - talks about 3 concepts per sentence. Senior Research tutor at RCA.

Looking at creative research as transformational space.
There are different types of knowledge - tacit, embodied knowledge from childhood.
Research is the relationship between tacit and explicit knowledge.
Making as transformative space - Donald Winnicot
http://changingminds.org/disciplines/psychoanalysis/theorists/winnicott.htm
Making is an embodied encounter with materials, a generative relationship between the conscious and unconscious, an iterative process.
Barbara Hepworth sculptures - the process and material space.
Solid materials endure, are hard knowledge, are authorised.
Textiles atrophy, are soft knowledge, are unauthorised.
Different languages have different works for knowledge signifying soft and hard knowledge.
Kant - time and space are the two vectors of the real.
Now add the subjective
Femininity is associated with negative space and the void.
Hepworth sculpture had been donated to educational department and was placed in a school for years, and so it can't simply be contextualised as a gallery piece - it is public art.
Hepworth - mother/infant - maker materials - metaphorical relationships between hands and eyes.
Concern - to encircle, a spacial metaphor.
The emotional, the subjective, is inauthentic and yet the most valuable.
theoretical points, but experience comes from emotional before the verbal.
Louise Bourgeois - words, concepts metaphors, that prefigure congnitive concepts and cultural space.
Tension.
Waves of textile art:
Arts and crafts, as romantic reaction to industrialisation.
Then 70's feminism, reclaiming the personal, and remaking boundaries between public and private space.
Now, third significant wave - technologically driven revolution, away from crafts.
Also working with amateurs in art projects. Unpaid labour - the domestic space.
recycling, upcycling plastics.
Artist - Emma Shinkliff (?) encasing fabrics in recycled polymers -creative co-creation workshops. Research to counteract the empathy deficit in caring professions.
Suzie Norris Reeves - the fashion narrative .
Garments as a signifying system.
The culture of fashion includes trade - in opposition to academia?
But The Silk Route - bartering is the foundation of knowledge exchange.
Originally the Interpreter was the negotiator of knowledge.
How to include trade in art in its meaning.
Developmental /experimental art project in Uganda - plaiting, reimporting to the couture industry.
Moto Karanica (?). work invites touch.
Walls and screens can be touched - translated into sound in room.
Cross modal experience - synethesia - see numbers, hear colours, etc.
An embodied relationship - new experiences - fitted carpet that songs to you.
Tenere - to hold, maintain, entertain, pertain, obstain, contain.
Tentare - to try, tentative, attempt
Tensare - to stretch, tensile, tension.
the mother is initially a holding instrument - she responds, mirrors, in different sensory modes.
sight, sound - cross modal.
Thus meaning becomes attached to symbols.
Dependent on the empathy of the mother - it's play.
Holding and handling. Container.
Prehensile - hand and holding, apprehend, comprehend.
Tacit knowledge. The relationship between hand and eye - holding becomes a form of knowledge.
Winnicot - Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces.
Found objects / found concepts - concepts are there to be used.
Finding something is inventing it.
A plea to be allowing to researchers to find and use concepts.
Christopher Bollas - The Shadow of the Object.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Bollas
Psychoanalysis of the Unknown Known. free association books 1989.
The spirit of the object.
The research process is driven by rivalry, curiosity, the desire to know what others know.
The researcher is created by the research.
Repetition of making - measured by neuroscience - the synaptic pathway established.
Repetition and iteration - seen as a progressive spiral - ambiguous.
The rigour of research is in repetition, but in psychoanalysis repetition can be a symptom of distress and neurosis - re enacting trauma.
Neuroscience - strong indications of different brain areas way beyond simple left and right - the possibilities of reconnecting in limitless instrumental / noninstrumental forms of attention.
Due to rationality and value judgements.
Memory theatre - a spacial metaphor.
Holdong finds a form to become articulated.
Care homes - putting smell back in, oil, leather, tobacco, etc. Smell / memory triggers.
Louis Vitton shops have a leather spray but the bags are vinyl.
Generative process, the embodied encounter with materials
 vs iterative process - the spacial metaphor.
Parts of the self, edges, overlap.
Therefore every research / researcher significantly different - different overlaps.
Tolerance, affordances - design term - what materials can do.
New knowledge is now at the edges and borders of disciplines - multi disciplinary or cross disciplinary,
Noticing small annoyances - the area of the new.
A difference - new - original - contribution - research.
Creative practice also a social activity - work having a role - an emerging area, needs contextualising and a lexicon.
Social practice now not just 1970s activism, now post activism (?)

In summary this was a fascinating illustrated talk using examples from Barbara Hepworth, Louise Bourgeois and several RCA students, examining what research is, mostly in relation to textile art, and the waves of changes historically in that. Textile art always somewhat otherly to other art practice because of relationships to the domestic and to trade. Current research practice notices small inconsistencies between disciplines due to personal feelings, and therefore develops a unique contribution. Investigating the language of holding, and where experiences and concepts comes from before language.

...................................................................................................................................................................

Carol Quarini
PhD student
Subversive Stitching: breaching the boundaries of domestic time and space.

The gendered home - mid 19th century Britain - seen and unseen.
Uncanny, Gothic, domestic.
Net curtain metaphor.
Women - needlework and embroidery signifying skills, taste and morality.
To decorate and embellish the home.
Sewing - physical and moral femininity qualities.
But also gave pleasure and power and the means to negotiate.
Freud thought sewing brought on hysteria.
Sewing - feminine knowledge, the language of the cloth - a private language, sometimes women were more sewing literate than actually literate.
Writers such as Brontes assumed this knowledge and used it to reveal character.
Also Elizabeth Gaskell - wives and daughters.
esp Charlotte Bronte - Shirley - how women interacted over sewing.
Olive Shreiner novel - "Has the pen and pencil dipped so deep in the blood of the human race as the needle".
Elizabeth Parker sampler V&A 1830s - painful life story, hidden in plain view.
Cloth holds the sometimes unbearable markers of memory.
Janice Applen 2005 sampler - Albanian textiles not censored by Russians.
Major Alexis Casagli- 1941 POW sampler - contains morse code information - Fuck Hitler.
Quarini - Insider Information - QR code on net curtain. Conceals and reveals coded information.

...................................................................................................................................................................

Christina Lovey
The Liminal Space and its Temporality. A Pilgrimage into the Liminal. Re presentation of grief in film.

Cinematic time forces us to wonder what we actually mean by actuality.
Phenomenological Third Space - where film, film maker and viewer co-exist in a communal space.
Liminal - a sensory threshold, in an intermediate state, in between life and death.

...................................................................................................................................................................

Suzanna Round
The post-completion life of buildings.

Potential ways and impacts of seeing 60s and 70s buildings in the present.
In practice, highly designed buildings required ingenuity for use - DIY and adaption.
The social life of buildings - issues of isolation and location.
Modern ruins - what they represent at this moment in time.
Ruin - judgement or outcome.

...................................................................................................................................................................

Mahittichai Supatira - Bobby
Migrant as London's Storyteller: London in another dimension.

Architecture / migrancy - opposites.
Architecture / place - the vocation of the place.
Place /migration - changing the place and the nature of the place.
From / emigrant - To / immigrant
Narrative as an architectural pursuit. and methodology.
Archaeology - who when where
Anthropology - why how
Drawing always prior to construction -not after.
Architecture strongly linked to expression of cultural identity.

...................................................................................................................................................................

Grigoris Digkas
Topographies of Neo-hellenism in crisis, photography in exile.

Entopia - in art - cultural symbolism for natural landscape.
Topography - narratives, references, symbolism of national culture.
Topos - a physical space where someone returns, an area where the past makes its presence.
Paris Petridis - most published and exhibited contemporary Greek photographer.
Petros Efstathiades - BOC collective.
Architecture.Mary Douglas - purpose is for hospitality rather than protection.
Also architecture can be disorientating and inhospitable.

...................................................................................................................................................................

Michael Halpen
The contemporary re-signification of Minimal Art.

Martin Boyce, Karla Black - peripheral vision.
Space is neither an object nor a thing, yet it has a presence.
Mental space, Real space, metaphysical space all exist.
How the mind imagines space / How space is experienced.
Absolute space developed into abstract space - encourages contradictions.
Social space - guaranteed level of competence.
Social action is an expression of space - how society analyses itself.
Representations of space
Architects and urban spaces
Artists with scientific perspective
Creation of new ideas - expanding boundaries - imagination is the key.
Representational space.
Symbols / signs linked to hidden social life.
Time is in the heart of space.
Space plus time = lived experience.
Martin Boyce - no reflections
Michael Asher - installation artist - removes gallery walls, etc.

...................................................................................................................................................................

June Raby
The Ceramic Vessel as Holding Memory

Temporal constraint.
Memory and haptic experience.
People need transitional objects - not just comfort items for children.

...................................................................................................................................................................

Shan Ding
Relativity of Diet and Utensils: The Cultural Responsibility of Ceramics Design from the Perspective of Humanistic Time-Space Theory.

Cultural differences in Western, Chinese and Japanese food culture.

...................................................................................................................................................................

Summary of Conference

This has been a bit of an education in PhDs, and what they are. It all seems a bit mysterious, and of course it is very specialised. But now I do have more insight into what people are banging on about art research, what it is and how it is approached. I now see it's not a million miles away from what we are doing on the MA, and meeting other MAers from different UCA campuses was interesting. We are in something of an OCA bubble, but the truth is, everyone else is floating about also.

The PhD presentations were really variable. You would honestly think that by this stage the artists would have figured out how to present for 15 minutes effectively - but some people were desperately overtime, some read out endless script, describing images but not showing them, some didn't describe their terms or had slides running too irregularly, and so on. A couple had it just right, well measured, paced, keeping the attention and making it interesting to all. You've got to do yourself and your concepts a favour!

An exhibition accompanied - work in progress which didn't look like much without the attached ideas, but of course is heavily invested in research. Interesting challenge to show deliberately partly formed work.

19th April 2013