Jerwood Contemporary Makers 2010

The Jerwood Contemporary Makers 2010 exhibition is the third and final in a curated series intended to give voice and profile to some of the applied arts world's most playful, thoughtful and skilled artists, at a valuable point in their development. The selectors and curators of 2010's show, Hans Stofer (chair), Richard Slee and Freddy Robins have negotiated their carefully made curatorial decisions not based on the use or function of the objects seen in the show, but on their inherent value as things

Jerwood Contemporary Makers 2010

Jerwood Contemporary Makers showcases work by the new generation of UK makers. Selected by Hans Stofer (chair), Richard Slee and myself, the exhibition investigates the notion of making by bringing together a broad range of work from across craft and the visual arts. Twenty-nine makers took part, each exhibiting one work and receiving an equal share of the £30,000 prize fund. Supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation. A catalogue in the form a newspaper broadsheet was produced with an essay, ‘The Making Game’ commissioned from Jeanette Winterson. A series of Monday evening events accompanied the exhibition. These included Emmanuel Cooper (ceramicist and craft writer) in conversation with Hans Stofer, Richard Slee and myself also a panel discussion exploring the notion of amateur making, chaired by Stephen Knott, (PhD student, School of Applied Art, RCA) with the research student that I supervise Emma Shercliff, (PhD student, School of Fashion & Textiles, RCA). At the National Craft Gallery, Kilkenny, Ireland I conducted a gallery tour and delivered a lecture and workshop on Curating Contemporary Craft alongside curator David Littler. The exhibition received considerable press including Crafts, July/August 2010 (Dr.Jessica Hemmings), Design Week, 27 May 2010 and The Independent, 29 June 2010 (Michael Glover)

The Nature of Things

Stofer created an installation for ‘The Nature of Things’, a joint exhibition curated by Sarah Griffin at the Artists’ House, New Art Centre, Wiltshire (2012). The Artists’ House is a contemporary cottage in the grounds of the New Art Centre (http://sculpture.uk.com/about/). Originally built as a residence for artists working in the sculpture park, it is now used to display exhibitions of domestic-scale works of art. ‘The Nature of Things’ presented a juxtaposition of domestic household items with larger-than-life creations inspired by the ambiguous nature of the displays at the Centre itself, where perception oscillates between display, art, nature, accident and intent. Stofer’s installation took over the bedroom on the house’s ground floor, where he unpacked a personal miscellany, turning the room into a sort of confessional. He filled the room with personal items and collected ephemera – tenderly remaking the most (seemingly) inconsequential materials into jewellery and autobiography: a mixture of found objects made meaningful through artistry and intention. Stofer thus handed over and exposed what appears to be a very private space to the viewer, inviting intimate scrutiny of an interior world and evoking the feeling that the viewer is somehow intruding into a personal space. ‘The Nature of Things’ was reviewed by Sara Roberts in Crafts (2012): Roberts described Stofer’s installation as ‘insistent, edgy and energetic. Found objects are deployed in new object narratives, cut and graffitied, bundled and bound…objects are collected and amassed, not to be revered, but to be altered and “improved” and introduced to other objects, brought together in dissonance. Process is evident; material is delivered with a wry twist.’ It was also reviewed in Wallpaper (2012: http://www.wallpaper.com/art/the-nature-of-things-at-artists-house-uk/5633)

Thing, Tang, Trash

Stofer produced a series of seven new pieces of work for the international ceramic exhibition ‘Thing, Tang, Trash’ at the Permanenten, The West Norway Museum of Decorative Art, Bergen (2011–-12). The exhibition was initiated by curator and ceramic artist Heidi Bjørgan in a collaboration between Bergen National Academy of the Arts and the Art Museums of Bergen. It was part of ‘Creating Art Value: A Research Project on Rubbish and Readymades, Art and Ceramics’ (www.k-verdi.no), which received support from the Research Council of Norway and was part of the Research Programme on Assigning Cultural Values (KULVER). The frequent closure or relocation of European porcelain factories has created a new situation for everyone who works in the field of ceramics. While studio ceramics used to be the antithesis of industrial production, a new kind of art and design have emerged in which the old oppositions between machine-made/handmade, mass production/singular objects and industry/craft/art no longer apply. Stofer’s works used broken ceramics as a readily available raw material, treating the debris left over in abandoned factories as the raw material for new artistic narratives. The works created expressed his interest in the act of repair and the symbolism associated with broken objects and object re-birth: not so much ‘upcycling’, but seeing the ‘stuff’ we are surrounded with as raw material to build from, intellectually and physically. Stofer presented a paper entitled ‘Biting into a cherry does not prepare you for the stone’ at ‘Making or Unmaking? The Contexts of Contemporary Ceramics’ (Terminus Hall, Bergen, Norway, 2011), a conference organised to coincide with ‘Thing, Tang, Trash’. The exhibition attracted a total of 7,160 visitors. It was reviewed in the Norwegian Art Yearbook 2012 and in Bergens Tidende (2011), and featured in Bergensavisen and Brostein

Neuland Magazin

Stofer is a regular contributor to Neuland Magazin, contributing 13 articles since its inception in 2010. His essays have explored diverse topics including ‘Thames or not Thames’ – the impact of the temporary removal of the Thames from the tube map in 2009; ‘Chewing gum’ – gum as a permanent keeper of our DNA and its potential for cloning; ‘It doesn’t rain money in London’ – the invention of the umbrella and James Smith & Sons; ‘Kunst ist Herrlich (Art Is almighty)’ – a review of the first solo show of the Swiss-born artist Urs Lüthi at Gallery S O in London. Neuland is an online journal published every two months. It acts as a new and independent platform for discussion and exploration of new territories of thinking. It aims to promote different ways of sharing knowledge through a condensed and interdisciplinary format. Neuland has gained a reputation as an innovative online platform for new ideas and as a new model of online journalism. Stofer’s articles are written in a distinctive narrative format, with the intention of offering a close-grained observation of aspects of life in contemporary London. Their innovation lies in the concise format and juxtaposition of image and text, using words as image/pattern, a strategy which invites the reader to reflect further and ‘read between the lines’. A recent innovation has been the adoption of alternative presentation conventions, such as postcard and text messaging formats, in order to create ever more concise ways of conveying meaning. As a direct outcome of the publication of the Neuland series, Stofer was invited to give a lecture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich (2013). The lecture, ‘To make a mark’, further explored the theme of the need to make our presence visible (a subject addressed in several of Stofer’s Neuland articles)

Informal, Non(-)formal, or Free-choice Education and Learning? Toward a Common Terminology for Agriscience and Ag-STEM Educators

Education professionals must re-examine the use of labels for education and learning in diverse settings in light of new understandings of how people learn and updated goals for broader interdisciplinary work. The varied use of the terms informal education, nonformal education, and formal education draw distinctions that serve to divide, not unite, those working to support a wide variety of learners for similar agriscience education goals. What in Extension education is nonformal learning is informal learning in science education. Juxtaposing informal learning or nonformal learning with formal learning also serves, in the eyes of some outside the profession, to devalue the learning that actually predominates human learning, at least in terms of time and opportunity. Education privileges the facilitator, not the learner. One potential new term for consideration is free-choice learning. By breaking down silos, working across disciplinary boundaries, and embracing common terminology that puts the learner at the center, a profession of educators can better leverage resources, increase visibility, and ultimately, support constituents

From the Top: A Practical Approach to Ethical Decision Making

The lack of ethical decision making in organizations has resulted in corporate and individual financial trauma, bankruptcies, indictments and convictions of CEOs. Recent research shows that ethical decision making has not increased despite legislation to correct behaviors that led to the business failures of the past decade. The research indicates that unethical behaviors are abundant and that corporate cultures lack ethical support mechanisms. Theorists have created models to promote ethical decision making by focusing on a range of areas from communications to corporate culture and the actual decision making process. Although each is valid, what is lacking is a practical model that is easy to integrate into existing business processes. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to develop a practical model that moves ethics from philosophy to practice by defining the role of the CEO, infusing the decision making process into the organizational culture, and embedding the decision making into the strategic planning process

Flotation Deinking of Offset Printed Newsprint Versus Letterpress Printed Newsprint

With the ever-increasing threat of insufficient virgin pulp to supply the world market of the future, a renewed interest in deinked pulp as a supplement has begun. Although this solution seems to be very practical and inexpensive, it is not without its many problems, one of which being its environmental impact. This problem along with others can usually be solved in time as can be represented by the development of flotation deinking. This process and others like it are increasingly replacing the old washing method which has a history of being a high energy and water user. The method of flotation deinking is relatively new and so this field of study is wide open to research and new ideas. The purpose of this paper is twofold. The main intent is to discover the differences, if any, in flotation deinking of newsprint which has been printed by two different processes, letterpress versus offset. The concurrent study is the evaluation of some current market flotation chemicals of which two of them with the best results will be used for the bleaching study of this experiment

Adverse Health Effects of Intestinal Parasitic Infections in Rural Peruvian Clinic Patients

Intestinal Parasitic Infections (IPIs) pose a significant global health concern. IPIs annually contribute to 3.5 billion infections and 450 million illnesses worldwide. In hyperendemic countries, IPIs pose a significant economic and health burden, especially in rural areas. IPIs have many routes of transmission and cause a wide range of symptoms associated largely with poor health, impeded growth, and worsening of secondary infections. Such diseases are widespread in poor communities living in the Peruvian Amazon. This study aims to describe common chief complaints, diagnoses, treatments, as well as behaviors and practices associated with IPIs presenting in clinic patients. As part of a volunteer health initiative, free medical clinics were held in four communities in the Loreto region of Peru, where 30 patients in each clinic were surveyed for this report. In these four communities, data was compared between moderately poor (MP) and very poor (VP) villages. Data analysis included descriptive statistics and comparisons between the MP and VP groupings. Risk preventability related to IPIs was also explored based on gender, education, literacy, and transmission variables. It was determined that 65% of clinic patients had an IPI (MP: 54%, VP: 76%). Practices and behaviors linked to water, food, sanitation, and zoonotic sources were significantly varied between MP and VP communities. Of the study participants, 67% of MP and 73% of VP were prescribed antiparasitic medication. Socioeconomic status and education were prime indicators of disease susceptibility. In hyperendemic countries like Peru, IPIs need to be further investigated for focused public health intervention strategies

Comparing Experts and Novices on Scaffolded Data Visualizations using Eye-tracking

Spatially-based scientific data visualizations are becoming widely available, yet they are often not optimized for novice audiences. This study follows after an investigation of ex-pert and novice meaning-making from scaffolded data visualizations using clinical inter-views. Using eye-tracking and concurrent interviewing, we examined quantitative fixation and AOI data and qualitative scan path data for two expertise groups (N = 20) on five versions of scaffolded global ocean data visualizations. We found influences of expertise, scaffolding, and trial. In accordance with our clinical interview findings, experts use dif-ferent meaning-making strategies from novices, but novice performance improves with scaffolding and guided practice, providing triangulation. Eye-tracking data also provide insight on meaning-making and effectiveness of scaffolding that clinical interviews alone did not