Graphic Content Warning; Personal and Political Traumas

The written portion of this thesis work is meant to address and further investigate the visual work created using mediums of print and found video. This artistic research has been interested in examining varying associations with truth, recollection, and evidence. This includes the recollection of public histories and news-media narratives as well as my own history and trauma. Through this work my aim was to create a deconstruction and revolt against how associations are formed, and how to understand imagery as information. This thesis first discusses my relationship to appropriated imagery, then connects and examines it through the addition of poetic elements and events from my own lived experience

South Africa: Artists, Prints, Community: Twenty-Five Years at the Caversham Press

This is the catalogue of the exhibition "South Africa" at Boston University Art Gallery

A Documentation and Analysis of Surdna Arts Teachers Fellowship Program (SATF): The First Decade 2000-2010

Based on documents, interviews, and site visits, reviews the design and impact of a program to boost teaching and learning quality at public arts high schools by supporting teachers' artistic and professional development. Lists issues for consideration

Normal Editions Workshop Newsletter, 2020-21

Annual newsletter for the Normal Editions Workshop, School of Art, Illinois State University.https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/new/1026/thumbnail.jp

Introducing advances in non-toxic intaglio printmaking at the Centre for Visual Arts UKZN through practice based research.

Master of Arts in Fine Art. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2018.This study investigated the reduction of hazards in intaglio printmaking through practicebased research of non-toxic etching and intaglio materials. Traditional etching techniques involve health, safety, and environmental hazards that can be minimised by using alternative non-toxic materials and processes. This study investigated the potential of using non-toxic intaglio printmaking methods in place of traditional methods at the Centre for Visual Arts (CVA) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). A review of literature on non-toxic intaglio printmaking revealed a gap in non-toxic research specific to the South African context. A case study of a Belgian non-toxic printmaking studio was conducted over a period of three months, which enabled practical non-toxic printmaking experience to be compared with traditional printmaking methods. Qualitative data was collected through artistic practice, observation, interview, and collection of artefacts. The non-toxic alternatives were found to be capable of achieving the visual effects generally associated with traditional etching methods and materials, while reducing the number and variety of hazardous materials present in the printmaking studio. General Systems Theory was used to analyse the ‘parts' which comprise the ‘whole’ etching system. The processes and materials used in etching were studied as parts with interrelations that are used as a means of artistic production. By isolating these parts and systematically testing alternatives, a non-toxic etching method was developed for the CVA. This practice-based research process resulted in a series of printed artworks. These works explored relevant themes including toxicity, disruption, the overview effect, and the impact of human activity on the earth system. The works incorporated traditional and high-altitude perspectives of mining waste sites which were identified as disrupted South African landscapes. In these landscapes, toxic chemical waste and extractive mining activities had changed the environment dramatically. The disruption of the landscapes depicted in the printed works is a thematic extension of the disruption of traditional printmaking methods through the introduction of non-toxic methods. This disruption improved safety by reducing chemical hazards in intaglio printmaking practice, and contributes to making this mode of artistic practice more sustainable

A poetics of repetition - theory and practice in/of printmaking: what are the methodological, epistemological and practical questions that arise from the a particular aesthetic practice

Why 'A poetics of repetition'? At its most crude, 'poetics' suggests a rule book with fixed protocols. The conventional institutional requirements of the PhD format comply with this part of the definition. However, at its best, a 'poetics' may be understood as performing that which it contains or describes. This is how the different elements that make up the present submission are conceived.The second part of the title identifies this submission within the broader field of printmaking and also emphasizes the main thrust of its contribution to knowledge. It accentuates the input of this project to a critical topology of the discipline through a discussion and development of relevant terms and processes. Above all, the subtitle signals that this PhD is firmly based in practice.The epistemological assumption of an inextricable link between theory and practice is methodologically demonstrated through the format of the submission. It consists of six parts. These interweave the visual documentation on CD of the production and installation of two solo exhibitions at the start and towards the end of the PhD with written sections which relate to the artistic practice.'Printmaking' is understood in the particular sense of my own studio practice in addition to its significance as a discipline in the wider artistic and cultural context. In terms of the former, the theory- practice relationship is exemplified through the emphasis on printmaking in the two solo exhibitions. Moreover, five chapters in Parts Ill and V respectively, including a report on the second exhibition, put printmaking at the centre of the debate.Another strand of the submission engages with issues posed by research in art and design. The question of the interrelationship between theory and practice is highlighted in two chapters of the submission (111.2 and V.2) in addition to a general contextual chapter on this topic (111.1). The concept of 'post- production serves to illuminate the role of time, writing, documentation and interpretation in a research process that is primarily focussed on the production of visual art.A lead -in to the multiple strands of the research is the concept of repetition. At one level, this key word refers to my particular aesthetic programme of the repetition of 'original' hand drawn marks through printmaking and the reproductive nature of prints in general. At another, repetition is understood more broadly in a Deleuzian sense as 'difference' and helps to conceptualise both the format and ethos of the submission

Normal Editions Workshop Newsletter, 2012

Annual newsletter for the Normal Editions Workshop, School of Art, Illinois State University.https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/new/1005/thumbnail.jp

Art and Medicine: A Collaborative Project Between Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar and Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar

Four faculty researchers, two from Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, and two from Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar developed a one semester workshop-based course in Qatar exploring the connections between art and medicine in a contemporary context. Students (6 art / 6 medicine) were enrolled in the course. The course included presentations by clinicians, medical engineers, artists, computing engineers, an art historian, a graphic designer, a painter, and other experts from the fields of art, design, and medicine. To measure the student experience of interdisciplinarity, the faculty researchers employed a mixed methods approach involving psychometric tests and observational ethnography. Data instruments included pre- and post-course semi-structured audio interviews, pre-test / post-test psychometric instruments (Budner Scale and Torrance Tests of Creativity), observational field notes, self-reflective blogging, and videography. This book describes the course and the experience of the students. It also contains images of the interdisciplinary work they created for a culminating class exhibition. Finally, the book provides insight on how different fields in a Middle Eastern context can share critical /analytical thinking tools to refine their own professional practices

Life Structures

The following document defines my creative journey as a fine arts graduate student at Rochester Institute of Technology. Through a series of personal life experiences I have selectively visualized a meaningful collection of prints on butcher-block paper. In addition, I have described positive print experiences at a previous school. This MA studies ultimately directed my search for a MFA program that would provide breath to my research investigations. Creative problem solving in Fine Arts Studio New Forms also contributed to my exhibited work in the Bevier Gallery at RIT. By rendering stills, I was able to capture my personal environment from digital video to select home and family images that best narrated my life story

Environmentally sensitive printmaking: a framework for safe practice.

This research is concerned with establishing a rationale which will link safe printmaking practices with artists' individual and sustainable creative practices, by investigating the preconception that printmaking practices may be limited by adopting such an environmentally sensitive approach. This has been investigated through a practice-led approach, which implicitly involves the researchers' professional practice as a visual artist printmaker. The cross disciplinary nature of this practice-led research has established that diverse and non-text based sources be included in the literature review. The resulting contextual review established the evolutionary nature of printmaking practices, the role played by individual artists perceptions of risk, and the limited ability of available literature to adequately link evolving and didactic creative practices to emergent boundaries established by environmental and occupational health and safety legislative criteria. There was evidently no theoretical framework for linking these apparently divergent criteria. The multi-disciplinary and practice-led context i. e. the research was generated by practice and carried out through practice, determined the range of methods employed: questionnaire, quantitative tests of materials; participation in, and initiation of collaborative case studies; documenting workshop practice and visual development of printed art works; and exhibition for peer review. These multiple methods and their complex interrelationships were visualised as a system of consequential actions, in order to externalise possible alternative actions and choices made by the researcher in response to this research. Analysis of these methods revealed that: the collaborative case studies and the researcher's own visual and practical response, established that a systematic revaluation of practice could link the idiosyncratic and individual creative practices to the use and selection of nonhazardous practices, which did respond to objective occupational health and safety rationale. This revealed the extent to which a systematic re-evaluation of 'established practices' may be synthesised into the working practice of the researcher and lead to the diversification of that practice - visually and practically. This process has resulted in the generation of a body of printed art works which implicitly embodied the hypothesis developed in this research; the development of a electronic database or 'morphological framework', which initiates a sequential examination of process at a structural level, collating, comparing and promoting previously un-considered alternatives based on a heterarchical model of risk. This process has offered tangible means of visualising the generative processes involved in making prints. The 'morphological framework' has implicitly linked the researcher's printmaking to a sustainable and environmentally sensitive creative practice, which is methodologically transparent and procedurally transferable