Reminiszenzen der Erinnerung

Coutts made Reminiscences of Memory during a six-month International Fellowship at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral at Bad Ems, Germany. Famous for its healing waters, Bad Ems was frequented by Caspar David Friedrich and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and was a magnet for artists and musicians seeking cures. With her accumulative, layered method to writing and filmic narrative, Coutts explored the visualisation of memory through film, drawing upon literary texts and artworks from the time of the town’s heyday to the present. The film re-maps and overlays fragments of re-appropriated works that examine the mechanisms of memory and decay. Focusing on the historical relationship between the environment and mental health at this location, Coutts produced a work wherein the visual is overlaid with a text – as with subtitles – telling the story of a woman’s uncertain memory of a man losing his mind. Reminiszenzen der Erinnerung contains re-fashioned excerpts from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), re-enactments of scenes from Hollis Frampton’s film (nostalgia) (1971) and Fellini’s Amarcord (1973), the latter filmed twice to involve non-professional actors and musicians sited in Germany and the UK. Reminiszenzen der Erinnerung was first shown at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral (2010) as part of a group show of the eight selected Fellows and was featured and reviewed on the German TV channel Mittelrhein (2010). It was screened in the group show ‘Doris’ at StedeFreund, Berlin (2010), and included in Coutts’s solo exhibition, ‘Millions Like Us’ at Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London (2011). The work was selected for the Salon Video Prize at Matt Roberts, London (2011). Accompanying the show at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Coutts’s bookwork Thought Sequence (Argo Books, Berlin, 2011) introduced an additional narrative layer to her research, retelling Walter Benjamin’s story ‘The handkerchief’ (1932)

Publicly Accessible Toilets: An Inclusive Design Guide

This guide has been developed from an inclusive design philosophy. It aims to incorporate the needs, aspirations and desires of people of all ages, abilities and ethnicities, who will become the future users of its design outcomes. ‘Publicly accessible toilets’ refers to all toilets that the public can access without having to buy anything. This includes those in shopping centres, parks and transport hubs, as well as the public toilets and community toilet schemes provided by the local authority

Speculative Objects

Speculative Objects is an ongoing series of art works that incorporate text and object. The unfinished nature of this series is integral to O’Riley’s ideas of the open-ended as being a key element of Fine Art research. These works feature associative inscriptions determined by an object’s function or purpose. For example, here is a bench that was used to seat viewers of a 2-hour animation of an orbit around the moon. This was inspired by Michael Collins’ Apollo 11 mission during which he orbited the moon alone, while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the lunar surface for the first time. An animation was made using data of the moon’s surface collected in 1994 by a spacecraft called Clementine, so named after the folk song, Oh My Darling Clementine! O’Riley’s bench features the first words of the song engraved onto its surface. As an ongoing project made up of a number of elements or instances, the works question the form an artwork can take. The language of art is speculated on, scrutinised and extended by being projected through and inscribed into, particular objects. A work from this series was included, together with a text by O’Riley, in a book dedicated to Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at University of Oxford: Assimina Kaniari & Marina Wallace (eds.), Acts of Seeing: Artists, Scientists and the History of the Visual, London: Zidane Press, 2009 ISBN 978-0-9554850-8-4. A selection from Speculative Objects was exhibited in Spring 2011 at the library of Chelsea College of Art & Design

Standing and Running

This exhibition at Marsden Woo Gallery, London (2012) consisted of 12 hand-built ceramic works presented on three large plinths. Emphasis was on the application of colour through pouring slip, and then glaze, across the pots’ surfaces. This exploitation of superimposed fluid shapes/trails led to greater compositional risk and improvisation. Extending Britton’s concern with aspects of the ‘container’ and its representation through the broad history and culture of ceramics, this group of works explored the idea of flow and liquidity through form and surface. The new pots were larger than previous works; Float was Britton’s largest horizontal form made to date. Initially, a number of red clay bodies were tested for their fit with slips and glazes within the normal firings of Britton’s buff clay pieces. A series of vertical jars were constructed, some in buff clay and some in red. Britton’s return to red clay followed a residency at the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Japan (2010). These upright forms were rectangular or oval in cross-section, or a combination of both, and the pieces were animated by cylindrical ‘pipes’ that alluded to conduits, ornaments, limbs, spouts, handles. The second series were plate-like forms on flared bases, likewise in both buff and red clay. The red and buff versions echoed each other in quasi 'pairs', though each was a discrete object. The individual title of each pot made reference to water, as did the exhibition title. A critical essay by Brigit Connolly was available in the gallery. The exhibition was previewed in Crafts Magazine and reviewed in Ceramic Review and the Australian magazine Ceramics Art and Perception. The pot Watershed was later shown in the exhibition ‘The Perfect Place to Grow: 175 Years of the Royal College of Art’ (London, 2012-13); Outpour is now in the ceramic collection of the V&A Museum

Foroba Yelen: Portable Solar Lighting and Sustainable Strategies for Remote Malian Villages

‘Foroba Yelen’ is a conference paper recording the case study led by Hall of a design enterprise project in Mali that investigated how designers can co-design and develop portable, sustainable solar lighting for remote off-grid Malian villages and how this can ultimately assist in an overall national-level strategy for slowing the rural urban migration patterns of West Africa. The project had a positive impact on the local community by enabling sustainable local lighting that helped maintain cultural practices, encouraged enterprise and facilitated education. The lights would be rented out by villagers and profits used to construct new lights designed to use locally sourced materials, construction techniques and components. The research builds on existing expertise of cross-cultural collaboration by the lead author (Hall 2009; Hall 2010; Hall 2012; Hall 2013), and describes the technical and cultural challenges faced by designers working in this challenging context – in particular, the challenge of whether to use imported or locally sourced technologies, locating suitable making processes and issues of deploying co-design methods across cultures. Impact is demonstrated by improvements in the social life of villages through public lighting as part of a strategy for slowing the rural–urban migration patterns and helping to maintain food production in the countryside. New knowledge, including methods for sustainable development, communication by remote design teams and design pedagogy, is presented in practice-related activities by designers in international collaborations. The range of project communications was mapped and diagrams generated to identify the most successful remote communication platforms. Following the project completion, the work was exhibited at the Royal College of Art (2011) and featured in three articles in Lighting Design (2012), Axis (2012) and New Design (2012). The project was funded by the eLand Foundation in Switzerland, Nakumatt Holdings in Kenya and Philips Lighting in Holland

Dress Behind Bars: Prison Clothing as Criminality

Research for this sole-authored book was undertaken during AHRC-funded Research Leave (2007). It represents Ash’s expertise as a dress historian and interest in the history and current organisation of prisons, which evolved from her teaching experience in Holloway women’s prison and Wakefield top security men’s prison in the 1970s. Crossing the disciplines of dress history, social history and film studies, this is the first book to examine the history of prisoners' clothing. Focusing on UK, American and European prison clothing, this history analyses waves of reform, sandwiched between regimes of punishing clothing restraints. Prison clothing, as Ash demonstrates, raises issues of regional, colonial, post-colonial, gender, fashion and class variations, contested by collective, political and individual tactics devised by inmates to survive and subvert cultures of punishment. This book is based on research into penal history, dress history in relation to uniforms and corporeal identity, criminological debates, oral histories, and 19th- and 20th-century prison art and literature. Material from correspondence and interviews with prisoners, prison reform groups, those who work as designers in prisons, and curators of prison photography and dress informed the study. To demonstrate the value of the clothes themselves to researchers, Ash also wrote an article for the Journal of Design History on ‘The prison uniforms collection at the galleries of Justice Museum, Nottingham, UK’ (2011). The book was reviewed by journals including Journal of Design History (2011), British Journal of Criminology (2011), Textile History (2011), Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology (2010) and Crime Media Culture (2010). Related talks included ‘Prison clothing as political resistance’ at NCAD Dublin (2010). BBC Radio 4 made the book the focus of an episode of Thinking Allowed (2009), and Ash was interviewed about women prisoners' attitudes to uniforms and prison clothing for ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2013)

Chance and Improbability

‘Chance and Improbability’ is an article featuring in a peer-reviewed online journal, Flusser Studies. It focuses on the role of the improbable or unexpected in relation to art practice and discusses the impact of these concepts, drawing on the work of philosopher Vilém Flusser. Digital code and the visual representations it enables are now ubiquitous and the article attempts to excavate some of Flusser’s thinking in this respect and relate it to current practices in the field of art. The article discusses Flusser’s notion of the ‘technical image’ and that one’s role as an artist or cultural producer is to work against the tendency of machines to standardise and homogenise, to strive for the improbable as opposed to the probable. Drawing on the developing interest in Flusser’s work, it provides a resource for artist/scholars and features quotations from an unpublished Flusser manuscript, ‘Between the probable and the impossible’, from the Flusser Archive at Universität der Künste in Berlin (previously at Kunsthochschule für Medien, Cologne). The article also includes reflections on O’Riley’s bookwork, Accidental Journey

An Incomplete Archive of Unfinished Ideas

This work was an installation created for the exhibition ‘Memoranda’, shown at the Crafts Study Centre, Farnham in 2011. Curators Tessa Peters and Janice West invited Potter and three other artists to consider and respond to the archive of the Crafts Study Centre at UCA Farnham. The works produced were shown together with a selection of archive objects as the exhibition ‘Memoranda’. An accompanying publication contained essays by Daniel Miller, Dr Glenn Adamson and the curators, as well as interviews with the participating artists (2011). Potter’s ‘An Incomplete Archive of Unfinished Ideas’ was underpinned by collections research in the Craft Study Centre Archive. The final piece was informed by material Potter found there: a collection of ceramic test pieces produced by Lucie Rie and Edward Johnston’s instructional calligraphy (‘56 ‘A’s made as wrongly as possible’). In the ‘Memoranda’ interview, Potter discusses collections’ social role as classificatory mechanisms and their inherent capacity to divide completed objects from the processes of their making. Potter’s response highlights ‘elimination’ and ‘incompletion’ as intrinsic to making practice. Twenty-five containers for rejected experiments were carefully constructed and labelled; these invited viewers to consider craft as a form of memory and notation, rather than purely the skilful construction of objects. Potter offers an encounter with the truth of error, and underlines the role of process as a journey towards knowing. The work questions contemporary craft culture, which validates the artefact through the critics who endow it with ‘cultural capital’. ‘Memoranda’ was reviewed in Crafts (2011), an magazine (2011) and Museums Journal (2011) amongst others. A seminar was held during the exhibition, where Potter discussed working with the archive and the development of her response

The Stag Without a Heart

The Stag Without a Heart explores the potential of the perpetual film loop and the complexities of the narrative drive. It was the outcome of an AHRC-funded Practice-led and Applied Research Project Award (2009–10). Croft collaborated with Booker Prize-nominated writer Deborah Levy to adapt Aesop’s Fable #214, ‘The lion, the fox and the stag’ into a circular monologue. The resulting allegorical tale of corruption, deception and the desire for power is delivered in the style of a classical Hollywood ‘mise-en-scène’, alluding to black and white American crime cinema. By undermining narrative conventions and laws of continuity through employing a seamless loop, Croft subverts the construction of on-screen film space and coalesces discrete forms of language and, as such, the spectator’s expectations. Croft placed significant emphasis on traditional filmmaking production values, incorporating cinematic hallmarks into a visual art context. His rigorous methodological approach can be identified by his use of 35mm film stock, professional actors, pronounced cinematography, a stylised film set, a large crew and an emotive musical score. In so doing, the film distinguishes itself as its own genre of filmic practice, an interdisciplinary enterprise further indicated by its accessibility to viewers in environments ranging from the contemporary art gallery, the museum installation, and the looped video screening within a moving image festival. The film was exhibited and screened in public institutions and galleries including MuHKA, Antwerp (2011), Raum fur Gegenwartskunst, Linz (2011) and Cornerhouse, Manchester (2012). It can be viewed on the The Stag Without a Heart website, which was developed with AHRC funding: http://www.stuartcroft.com/thestagwithoutaheart/index.htm The website includes a critical essay by Steven Eastwood, ‘The repetition of repetition’. Croft also convened an AHRC-funded research seminar (2010) on the project’s central themes, including papers from David Heinemann (Middlesex University), Deborah Levy, Janice McLaren (Photographers’ Gallery) and curator David Thorp

Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990

‘Postmodernism’ was the final instalment of a 12-year series of V&A exhibitions exploring 20th-century design. It examined a diverse collection of creative practices in art, architecture, design, fashion, graphics, film, performance and pop music/video, which the curators, Pavitt and Adamson (V&A/RCA), identified under the common theme of ‘postmodernism’. The exhibition assessed the rise and decline of postmodern strategies in art and style cultures of the period, exploring their radical impact as well as their inextricable links with the economics and effects of late-capitalist culture. The exhibition comprised over 250 objects, including large-scale reconstructions and archive film/video footage, drawn from across Europe, Japan and the USA. It was the first exhibition to bring together this range of material and to foreground the significance of pop music and performance in the development of postmodernism. Pavitt originated and co-curated the exhibition with Adamson. They shared intellectual ownership of the project and equal responsibility for writing and editing the accompanying 320-page book (including a 40,000-word jointly written introduction), but divided research responsibilities according to geography and subject. The research was conducted over four years, with Pavitt leading on European and British material. This involved interviewing artists, designers and architects active in the period and working with collections and archives across Europe. The research led to the acquisition of c.80 objects for the V&A’s permanent collections, making it one of the most significant public collections of late-20th-century design in the world. The exhibition was critically reviewed worldwide. For the Independent, ‘bright ideas abound at the V&A’s lucid show’ (2011). It attracted 115,000 visitors at the V&A (15% over the Museum’s target) and travelled in 2012 to MART Rovereto, Italy (50,000 visitors) and Landesmuseum Zürich, Switzerland (70,000 visitors). Pavitt was invited to speak about the exhibition in the UK, USA, Poland, Portugal, Ireland and Italy (2010-12)