Ways of making: producing artworks in the studio in response to experiential walking

This thesis includes a body of paintings, drawings and assembled objects that have been made in response to the Crossing England walks (2014 - 2018). This body of work is entitled The English Diagrams (2018). The research draws upon the varied perspectives of Fine Art, Performance Studies and Cultural Geographies, to examine the relationship between the activities of walking as art, and making in the studio. Drawing from experiential phenomenology, I set out a model for rigorous, reflexive, creative practice and map the looping affiliations between the embodied world of the walked landscape, the subjective terrain of the practitioner, and the fabrication of paintings, drawings and assemblage within the studio. This interdisciplinary study takes a neo-vitalist approach, tracking a series of walks on a single route across England. Artist and terrain are explored as integrated, the boundaries between them fluid or porous, Autobiographical story, personal mythology, and sediments of collective memory interred within the earth are drawn out by the sensory, somatic rhythms of walking, and through selection of specific materials found along the way. Through studying bodily, psychical and material fluxes and flows within the studio, the thesis considers optimal conditions for flow in practice, and scrutinizes interrelations between the space of the studio and the body/mind of the practitioner, during the production of drawings, paintings and assemblage. It explores how the fields, gaps, lines and folds of the landscape can be translated into a bricolage of visual and painterly languages that is as heterogeneous as the terrain it refers to. The research shows how a sustained and looping threefold process of walking, reflective writing and making can lead not just to new ways of fabricating, but of surveying and plotting human experience. This renewed, unified sensibility, is subsequently conveyed back outside to the landscape during new walks, offering altered perceptions and new readings of the landscape. This is a study with potential to be of interest for creative practitioners from a variety of disciplines, and to theorists and scholars of artistic process

Designing interactive newsprint

The possibility of linking paper to digital information is enhanced by recent developments in printed electronics. In this article we report the design and evaluation of a local newspaper augmented with capacitive touch regions and an embedded Bluetooth chip working with an adjunct device. These allowed the interactive playback of associated audio and the registration of manual voting actions on the web. Design conventions inherited from paper and the web were explored by showing four different versions of an interactive newspaper to 16 community residents. The diverse responses of residents are described, outlining the potential of the approach for local journalism and recommendations for the design of interactive newsprint

Field assessment for endocrine disruption in invertebrates

The scope of this chapter covers approaches for evaluating potential effects of EDCs in both aquatic (marine and freshwater) and terrestrial invertebrates. It addresses what we currently know or suspect about effects in the real world (particularly those at the individual and population levels), and the techniques required for their study. The objectives of the Field Assessment Work Group were to:- 1) Evaluate data on effects of endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) in invertebrates under laboratory and field conditions 2) Assess the usefulness of current approaches to environmental monitoring which can be used to determine exposure to and effects of EDCs 3) consider the background variability in invertebrate populations, life histories and environmental conditions, so that it is possible to discriminate effects of EDCs above this baseline 4) Develop an approach to the detection of effects, assignment of causality, sources and sinks of potential EDCs, and the biological and chemical tools which will need to be developed or exploited for this purpose 5) Recommend suitable biomarkers and endpoints of exposure and effects for endocrine disrupting compounds in invertebrates 6) Determine possible triggers or thresholds for field monitoring strategies and identification of causality of effects seen in the field 7) Develop a framework for monitoring in terms of what background, exposure and effects information is required and how it should be collected. 8) Build on the recommendations of the EMWAT Workshop concerning appropriate environmental monitoring strategies for EDCs

The Walkbook: Recipes for Walking and Wellbeing

Our public survey showed that more people walked during COVID-19, and walked more frequently. However, some people walked less, or their walking reduced over the various lockdowns. Many barriers or challenges to walking were identified by respondents. We have commissioned 30 artists from across the UK to contribute recipes to The Walkbook which address one or more of these research challenges including: bad weather, bored of walking, shielding, anxious, lack confidence, excluded, in pain, nowhere to walk, bored of walking the same route, cannot walk very far, frightened, lack time, can’t be bothered, isolated. We hope that The Walkbook provides people – individuals and groups – with inspiration to walk, and to keep on walking