Creative Curricula: Developing inclusion projects informed by states of identity and alienation

This chapter is inspired by a series of dialogues I initiated as a visiting lecturer and researcher within a fine art department of a London university. This research, funded by the arts institution’s Widening Participation (WP) and Equality and Diversity department, consisted of a focus group, interviews and workshops, and was connected to an internal educational research study aiming to enhance the student experience. The project addressed personal narratives, our cultures, influences, and how wellbeing impacts on our practice as fine artists. In conversations with students and staff, we each reflected on our experiences of being fine art students and the influences and working environments that have characterized those experiences. Reflexivity is vital in trying to better understand alienation in an arts university setting. The sheer scale of some departments and the importance of staying connected to reap the benefits of a course and its resources can be a challenge for all fine art students and fine art educators. Difficulty is complex. A person may struggle with some tasks yet excel at others. As you are reading this, you may think that incredibly simple and obvious, but the point is, fine artists and fine art students are expected to excel at a myriad of tasks. As fine art educators, how can we ensure that a teaching style that values independent thinking also supports students as they develop in that environment

SCOPE New Photographic Practices

The photographic practices brought together for this exhibition and publication provide a broad scope of how photographic and lens based media may be used in order to have a visceral and conceptual impact. The methods on show demonstrate the way that artists might pick and choose from the approaches, processes and debates that have arisen through the medium’s history. This collection of work features film, video and photography that demand a renegotiation of the relationship between camera, subject and viewer. Visual Art Centre Gallery, Tsinghua University, Beijing, Chin

Discreet Works

This thesis asks how artwork considered as discreet, fragmented or fleeting can exist within an artistic discourse which values display, exhibition and public visibility. What has so far been lacking in debates on the discreet in art is the context of the artists’ own narrative and an analysis of the setting in which the discreet work takes place. To provide this narrative and analysis, the thesis uses an artist’s residency as an informal container or laboratory in which the behavioural aspects of being discreet can be examined. An art residency living and working amongst archaeologists in Greece is used to learn what “a light touch” means to the scholarly archaeological community in terms of their engagement with fragments, precious findings and artefacts. The research takes the form of “discreet works”, using photography, interviews, audio recording, and incidental encounters as expressed through autobiographical writing and narrative fragments. This research examines an approach to “being discreet”, more reflective of the practice of a science-based archaeologist in the laboratory, whose actions will rarely be portrayed in the resulting museum display, than of the artist whose works carry their visible signature. A key to understanding my methodology is provided in my discussion of Balboa, a dance which, paradoxically, ensures its own distinctiveness by means of subtlety and – most crucially – not appearing to draw attention to itself. My research in Athens, similarly, has used “undisplay” to disclose the distinctiveness of the artist’s presence and their behaviour in the context of a residency. This at times offers an artistic conception of the value of fragments that is the basis of archaeology. My research is aimed at arts practitioners seeking a framework for understanding art practices that use elements of containment in the service of a mode of display