Saddleworth: Responding To A Landscape - Exhibition Elliott Halls Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Martin Barnes Senior Curator of Photographs The Victoria & Albert Museum, London gives his view on Murray’s Saddleworth: Responding To A Landscape. Saddleworth is the result of a five-year creative journey by Matthew Murray, fuelled by his desire to build an extraordinary and entirely new body of work. This venture into landscape photography became an exploration, a personal study, almost becoming therapeutic to Murray, as he traversed his own private life changes. What evolved and then became paramount to Murray’s exploration of these ever-changing scenes, was how photography translated the landscape. Here his manipulation of natural and artificial light challenged the representation of the traditional landscape through both photography and painting. The result is a photographic odyssey, which captures not only the astonishing and beguiling beauty of this moorland landscape, but also the dramatic ephemeral changes caused by the season, or simply the hour that each image was taken. “I wanted to produce a series of landscape photographs that I believed to be beautiful in their own right and by doing so hopefully challenge preconceived ideas about the moor. Documenting the moors landscape as picturesque and beautiful, concentrating on light composition and nature reveals a true appreciation of the beauty of the moors, from wonderful long summer days to snow storms in the depth of winter. This is what Saddleworth says to me. Every trip I have taken to the Moors over the last five years has encapsulated each season, weather and cloud pattern, rain, sunshine, snow and the sense of the bitter cold of that emotive landscape.” - Matthew Murray 2017 “I quickly saw how amazing the landscape is and how the shadows and cloud formations can change quickly and drastically. It was only after viewing the very early contacts from my initial shoots that the photographs reminded me of the 17thCentury Dutch painter Jacob Van Ruisdael,whose work I had seen at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2006. Having never photographed a series of landscapes before this series, it was a massive departure from my normal portraiture and street photography work, the work developed overtime and was very organic. Shooting these landscapes it was clear that I was inspired by Ruisdael’s work.” - Matthew Murray 201

It would be a Pleasure : Augmented Reality and Engagement in a Heritage Context

The interchangeability, confusion and conflict of what constitutes audience engagement has a long history, with much disagreement concerning boundaries and definitions. Dewey states that it is a mistake to see the artist as active and the audience as purely passive, and argues that “the active engagement of the audience is required to fully realise any work” (Dewey 1934). This predates the notions of “interactive” or “participatory” as understood today, but highlights the longstanding appreciation of the role the audience plays in the consumption of artworks. A sentiment echoed by Duchamp (1957) stating that “the spectator adds his contribution to the creative act”. The research project presented at EVA 2017 seeks to offer a model for engagement, that of pleasure, which explores methods to motivate active participation

The impact of community-based arts and health interventions on cognition in people with dementia: a systematic literature review

Objectives: Dementia is a progressive condition, affecting increasing numbers of people, characterised by cognitive decline. The current systematic review aimed to evaluate research pertaining to the impact of arts and health interventions on cognition in people with dementia. Method: A literature search was conducted utilising PsychInfo, Cochrane Reviews, Web of Science, Medline and British Humanities Index databases. Seventeen studies were included in the review, including those related to literary, performing and visual arts. Results: The review highlighted this as an emerging area of research with the literature consisting largely of small-scale studies with methodological limitations including lack of control groups and often poorly defined samples. All the studies suggested, however, that arts-based activities had a positive impact on cognitive processes, in particular on attention, stimulation of memories, enhanced communication and engagement with creative activities. Conclusion: The existent literature suggests that arts activities are helpful interventions within dementia care. A consensus has yet to emerge, however, about the direction for future research including the challenge of measurement and the importance of methodological flexibility. It is suggested that further research address some of these limitations by examining whether the impact of interventions vary depending n cognitive ability and to continue to assess how arts interventions can be of use across the stages of dementia

The normalisation of drug supply: The social<i>supply</i>of drugs as the “other side” of the history of normalisation

Aims: Describes how the relative normalisation of recreational drug use in the UK has been productive of, and fused with, the relatively normalised and non-commercial social supply of recreational drugs. Methods: Semi-structured interviews with 60 social suppliers of recreational drugs in two studies (involving a student population n = 30 and general population sample n = 30). Respondents were recruited via purposive snowball sampling and local advertising. Findings: Both samples provided strong evidence of the normalised supply of recreational drugs in micro-sites of friendship and close social networks. Many social suppliers described “drift” into social supply and normalised use was suggested to be productive of supply relationships that both suppliers and consumers regard as something less than “real” dealing in order to reinforce their preconceptions of themselves as relatively non-deviant. Some evidence for a broader acceptance of social supply is also presented. Conclusions: The fairly recent context of relative normalisation of recreational drug use has coalesced with the social supply of recreational drugs in micro-sites of use and exchange whereby a range of “social” supply acts (sometimes even involving large amounts of drugs/money) have become accepted as something closer to gift-giving or friendship exchange dynamics within social networks rather than dealing proper. To some degree, there is increasing sensitivity to this within the criminal justice system

Cinegi Arts&Film, a Case Study: how it worked and what we learned

Cinegi Arts&Film (CA&F) was an action research project supported by Arts Council England in partnership with the BFI and delivered by Cinegi. The aim was to test how a digital distribution service could bring arts and cultural content, alongside BFI programming, to new and wider audiences as a shared experience in non-traditional venues, such as village halls, and in areas offering limited arts infrastructure and engagement. The CA&F service launched four bookings in January 2017. Screenings of titles from a range of arts organisations - from the Royal Opera House to Graeae theatre company - took place until May 2018. Alongside the findings detailed in TAA/Nesta’s action research report the project also taught Cinegi a great deal about working with existing networks for film and rural touring and about developing new venues and promoters for filmed performance. It uncovered challenges and has provided insight into what works well and what doesn’t. And it provided fresh insights into technical considerations in screening film – including business models, rights issues and film certification and classification, as well as issues arising from the technology used. Screening of filmed performance in non-cinema venues is a very new concept and CA&F is the first significant initiative in this area in the UK and indeed, as far as we are aware, in Europe. Although in the 17 months that the project was live it did not reach the number of audiences initially hoped for, the heartening response from the majority of venues and audiences that did use the service was ‘please can we have more‘

Researching Rural Housing: with an Artist in Residence

This article presents a unique amalgam across artistic research and rural sociology. We draw on a collaborative art residence programme between a University and an arts organisation in England, which invited an artist to respond to a highly contentious topic in rural England: housing development. The ambition for the residency was, firstly, to provide new perspectives on rural housing research, and, secondly, to provide a space for engagement between the local community, planners and academics. Through our interdisciplinary collaboration, we explore how Sander Van Raemdonck’s artistic process worked towards these ambitions. The artistic practice involved a walk with the local community, a peripatos, in a post‐industrial site proposed for housing development. Drawing on the artistic practice, the interdisciplinary team developed then a second walk, a ‘walkshop’, to mediate between housing/planning experts and reflect on the experience of the artistic practice. Following those artists and social scientists that already utilise walking as a method, we argue that the artistic peripatos can support a multi‐sensory way of communicating, a way to get ‘under the skin of a place’. More critically, we argue that artist in residence programmes provide rich opportunity to develop interdisciplinary research with artists