Train return Harrogate to Falmouth= 16 hours + Pedare conference 8 hours = 24

Wise Men “A fact: You will always feel like your work isn’t good enough. As a salve, or simply as a way to stay sane, be in the world. Ride the train. Listen to strangers. Occasionally, if you’re brave, speak to them. Walk in the city you live. Pay attention. Don’t bother with taking notes, or buying fancy notepads. Try to remember as much as you can. Have just enough confidence in yourself to not be an asshole. Then, get up and go to work and try again.” taken from…Stuart Nadler http://www.timeout.com/newyork/things-to-do/fifteen-successful-authors-share-their-best-writing-tips 

After, I guess, what must be 17 years…I returned to Falmouth! having studied illustration at the Woodlane campus in 1994, the place of course looked different, the sleepy Cornish town as I remember it, is now set within a contemporary facade of cool bars and restaurants….hip!! and so back to the reason for travelling North to the South, spending 16 hours on an aching bottom to the point of being almost delirious-was to attend the Pedare (pronounced Pe-da-re) conference held at The Exchange, Penmere. 

To provide some background information… ‘Pedare’ is the Centre for Pedagogic Arts-Based Research. It’s community is made up of educators, academics, scholars, researcher and practitioners, their focus is to generate leading research in e-learning, pure pedagogic research, performance based pedagogy and visual thinking within the arts curriculum- ‘We explore the creative curriculum generating leading edge teaching and learning methods, practices and insights that contribute to and inform education practices and policy’…Perdare 2013

 

Workshop 1 Visual Thinking led by Rob Bloxham from ‘ORB’ creative agency http://www.thisisorb.com/

The first part of this session was to get into partners, one to tell the story, the other to draw it and then re-tell in 30 seconds. (the aim here was to see how much you were able to remember through visuals). The 2nd part of the session required us to get into groups of 4 and apply drawing’s only to come up with a number of ideas exploring a particular brand. Our Brand was called ‘Glide’- life made simple…the concept behind this was life could be made sooooooooooooooo much easier if students who use ‘Glide’ for help with financial matters, i.e. paying bills etc would be much happier students?. We decided to come up with an app called Sim-ple which required 5 players to sign up and become one of the household issues, the game would resolve in the student being directed to ‘Glides’ webpage and sign up??? something like that anyway…

 

Workshop 2 Interactive Spectatorships Led by Dr. Dario Llinares and Dr Sarah Arnold

Taken from Pedare website…Interactive Spectatorships is a project funded and based at Falmouth University. It aims to investigate the effect of social networking technologies, and the attendant influence of new digital cultures, on film studies pedagogic practice specifically and film spectatorship generally. We aim to explore the potential forcommunications media such as Twitter to be deployed as a interactive tool for facilitating students’ critical engagement and discussion of indicative viewing. 

This was a great session, and valuable to my research, it looked at encouraging students into a situation where a screening of i.e. Jackie Brown, Catfish, Moon etc with aid of twitter could be used as learning tool. Its focus -a multi-tasking platform that enables students to express him or herself through ongoing commentary that is in real time rather than an after thought discussion with tutors and peers. Further, a student used in this pilot did note that he watched it again (alone) without any distractions and although may have not been discussed in a group situation was talked about with other cohorts for up to a week later…whether we think this is a good idea or not is questionable? but the aim here is not to take away the notion of watching a film, that little place of worship, where the screen poses itself as a bright shiny god-like figure. Instead, it is about enhancing teaching and learning to watching media, in this case using twitter as a quiet mode of communication to act and respond in real time. 

 Workshop 3 Screen Writing- Everything but the Movie led by Neil Fox 

note to myself- Must watch Casablanca!! Again another interesting session…the focus here was to work with ‘haiku’ a Japanese poetry form that uses just a few words to capture a moment and create a picture in the readers mind. Thus a tiny window into a scene much larger than itself. We all had to write one and later read aloud for others to guess…ok this was mine.

‘intense relationships and lobsters in a pan,

large framed glasses, androgyny, exhibition of dialogue, 

attraction, love and comedy ingenious’

 

Wise Men “A fact: You will always feel like your work isn’t good enough. As a salve, or simply as a way to stay sane, be in the world. Ride the train. Listen to strangers. Occasionally, if you’re brave, speak to them. Walk in the city you live. Pay attention. Don’t bother with taking notes, or buying fancy notepads. Try to remember as much as you can. Have just enough confidence in yourself to not be an asshole. Then, get up and go to work and try again.” taken from…Stuart Nadler http://www.timeout.com/newyork/things-to-do/fifteen-successful-authors-share-their-best-writing-tips 

After, I guess, what must be 17 years…I returned to Falmouth! having studied illustration there at the Woodlane campus in 1994, the place of course had changed, and for the better! what I remember as a very laid back sleepy town, with too many pasty shops and ‘Trago’ department store has had a make over; the old docks now have a contemporary facade of cool bars and restaurants. And so the reason for travelling North to the South, spending 16 hours on an aching bottom to the point of being almost delirious; was to attend the Pedare (pronounced Pe-da-re) conference held at The Exchange, Penmere. 

 

To provide some background information ‘Pedare’ is the Centre for Pedagogic Arts-Based Research. It’s community is made up of educators, academics, scholars, researcher and practitioners, their focus is to generate leading research in e-learning, pure pedagogic research, performance based pedagogy and visual thinking within the arts curriculum- ‘We explore the creative curriculum generating leading edge teaching and learning methods, practices and insights that contribute to and inform education practices and policy’…

 

Workshop 1 Visual Thinking led by Rob Bloxham and others

The first part of this session was to get into partners, one was required to tell the story and the other to draw it and then re-tell in 30 seconds. The 2nd part of the session required us to get into groups of 4 and apply drawing only to come up with a number of ideas exploring a particular brand. Our Brand was called ‘Glide’ life made simple…the concept behind this was life could be made easier if students which to Glide for help with financial matters, i.e. paying bills etc. We decided to come up with an app called Sim-ple which required 5 players to sign up and become one of the household issues, the game would resolve in the student being directed Glides webpage and sign up??? something like that anyway…

 

Workshop 2 Interactive Spectatorships Led by Dr. Dario Llinares and Dr Sarah Arnold

Taken from Pedare website…Interactive Spectatorships is a project funded and based at Falmouth University. It aims to investigate the effect of social networking technologies, and the attendant influence of new digital cultures, on film studies pedagogic practice specifically and film spectatorship generally. We aim to explore the potential forcommunications media such as Twitter to be deployed as a interactive tool for facilitating students’ critical engagement and discussion of indicative viewing. 

This was a great session, and valuable to my research, it looked at encouraging students into a situation where a screening of i.e. Jackie Brown, Catfish, moon etc with aid of twitter can be used as learning tool. A multi-tasking platform that enables students to express him or herself through ongoing commentary that is in real time rather than an after thought discussion with tutors and peers. Further, a student used in this pilot did note that he watched it again (alone) without any distractions and although may have not been discussed in a group situation was talked about with other cohorts for up to a week later…whether we think this is a good idea or not is questionable? but the aim here is not to take away the notion of watching a film, isolated, within the confounds of darkened room, a place of worship, modeled on a theatre, instead it is about enhancing teaching and learning to watching media, in this case using twitter as a quiet mode of communication to act and respond in real time. 

 

Workshop 3 Screen Writing- Everything but the Movie led by Neil Fox 

note to myself- Must watch Casablanca!! Again another interesting session…the focus here was to work with ‘haiku’ a Japanese poetry form that uses just a few words to capture a moment and create a picture in the readers mind. Thus a tiny window into a scene much larger than itself. We all had to write one and later read a loud for others to guess…ok this was mine. any ideas??????

‘intense relationships and lobsters in a pan,

large framed glasses, androgyny, exhibition of dialogue, 

attraction, love and comedy ingenious’

Heidi Donohoe 

Writing in Creative Practice: Towards Academic Publishing

Piecing the jigsaw together… WRITING PAD

This interesting and thought provoking workshop focused on creative writing and how it can be turned into writing for academic publication. Nancy de Freitas, associate professor at AUT University, New Zealand and Editor-In-Chief of studies in material thinking, presented to us the context of material thinking practices, thinking about methods and insights on good structure, clear writing and style as an underpinning to research, processes, images, objects and spaces. Alkie Groppel-Wegener led genre in crafting academic writing, you can follow her on http://tactileacademia.wordpress.com/

To view full posting please go to http://heididonohoe.blogspot.co.uk/

References: 

Gavin Melles and Julia Lockheart, Writing purposefully in art and design: Responding to converging and diverging new academic literacy  http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/02/28/1474022211432116

Nancy Roth, Writing as pretext: On the way to an image  http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/9/2/256

Robert Nelson, Toward a history of rigour: An examination of the nasty side of scholarship,  http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/10/4/374

Brian Paltridge, Sue Starfield, Louise Ravelli and Sarah Nicholson; Doctoral Writing in the Visual and Performing Arts: Issues and Debates

 

Ellen Wynn

Watching 24-hour live media coverage of the 2010 Chilean miners’ rescue brought memories rushing back to fine artist Ellen Wynn.

Her father worked at Markham Colliery in Chesterfield when disaster struck the pit in 1973 and 18 of his colleagues lost their lives.

Footage of the Chilean rescue struck a chord with Ellen, who has been teaching at Hull School of Art and Design since 2004, and led her to develop theories about the idea of the spectacle in relation to disaster, rescue and her own artistic practice.

Alongside her teaching practice in Critical and Theoretical Studies, Ellen practices fine art.

Ellen’s teaching has primarily centred on 3D design, graphics and architecture and she regularly attends lectures and exhibitions to update and extend her knowledge.

A fully trained architect, she practiced architecture before developing her interest in fine art.

Currently she is researching a follow-up to a 2002 one-woman show at Red Gallery, Inform.

Inform 2 centres around TV coverage of the Chilean miners’ rescue.

For Inform, she combined newsprint and media imagery with everyday domestic items, thereby instilling the artworks with literal and figurative additional layers of meaning. At the time, Ellen said:

“By distorting or changing their expected context, household objects such as blankets, chairs and newspapers are transformed into works of art which aim to awaken an interest in the relevance of news in our routine lives and to question, even threaten, our domestic comfort zone.”

Now, she says:

“Inform was partly a personal response to the media coverage of 9/11. Distant and ‘unlikely’ events create anxiety, fear and euphoria, which distort the core of our everyday reality”.

Poststructuralist and postmodernist theory runs through all of this work. Exploring the way events are mediated through our TV screens as an assumed reality is central to Inform 2.

Craft in relation to fine art played and still plays a large role in her work. When she was young her mother worked from home as a milliner and curtain maker, and she taught Ellen to sew. The process of hand-stitching represents independence, comfort and control which form a strong juxtaposition with the subject matter she tackles.

Inspired by her response to the Chilean miners’ rescue, she hopes to exhibit Inform 2 in 2015.

“This work will reference my early paintings,” Ellen says. “Using textile craft techniques to labour and ‘upholster’ the canvas and in particular to reference to the home environment, I will explore the status of craft in relation to painting and in particular the language of embroidery.”

Focusing chiefly on materialising painting as object, she plans to use the TV imagery that captured the collective consciousness during the rescue.

Ellen says:

“In relation to my role as a HE lecturer, I would like to enrich my teaching through my practice and to establish research interests in relation to my work.”

A larger range of Ellen’s work can be seen in her online gallery HERE:

Helen Graham

Signs, symbols and mythology inform ceramist Helen Graham’s work.

Using handmade porcelain and terracotta forms, she creates thought-provoking works on themes such as politics, feminism and advertising.

Her current practice is a progression from her MA in Visual Arts.

Creating hand-built forms from Southern Ice porcelain – a “very white, very translucent and very expensive” material – Helen imposes recognisable contemporary symbols on to handled flasks that reflect Classical and pre-Classical history and mythology.

Helen says:

“I am interested in themes such as gender and semiotics, and aim to create a visual narrative through inlaid decoration. Some are obvious comments; others are more obtuse and open to interpretation.”

Forms are created to reflect Ancient Near Eastern and Greek designs and decorated with, for example, female and male symbols for toilets, mixed in with religious imagery such as a bishop’s mitre. Helen designed this work to question the current Pope’s pledge to address world poverty while rejecting women’s reproductive rights, and refers to it as a commentary on Christianity’s uneasy relationship with women.

“We live in a culture where women’s lives are determined by the ways in which they are perceived,” she says. “And yet, at the 2013 United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, the term “reproductive rights” was removed, such is the strength of the Vatican lobby”.

“I am fascinated by archaeology and ancient sites and am a complete trainspotter for pre-Christian imagery. Many pre-Christian religions had female deities but Christianity either maligned them, or appropriated them and their festivals.”

Other recent works include a series about the 2012 Olympics, depicting Jessica Ennis and a female Iraqi archer,

“it’s a comment about passivism and women as products”, says Helen.

She is currently building her practice in preparation for the pursuit of a PhD.

Prior to her MA studies, Helen completed a BA (Hons) in Art and Design at Bradford University, specialising in ceramics and print-making (1989). She worked on a Creative Workshop Scheme and, in 1990, won a Princes Trust grant to investigate Portuguese ceramics, such as azulejoes and decorated majolica ware.

Helen was a founder member of Prospect Mill Studios in Thornton, Bradford. She is a qualified and experienced silversmith and holds a PGCE qualification. She has been teaching at HSAD since 2000.

She exhibits and sells her work widely, most recently at the British Craft Fair, Dean Clough in Halifax and at Gallery Eleven in Hull as part of a Northern Potters’ Association show. Upcoming exhibitions include a display in the North York Moors visitor centre at Danby; the Lillian Coleman Gallery in St John’s Wood, London; and The Meeting Room at South Square Centre in Thornton, Bradford, in November.

You can view Helen’s ceramics at: www.helengraham.org.uk.

Steve Woodford

Contextual Studies lecturer Steven Woodford has lectured at the Hull School of Art And Design since 2006. He is an MA graduate from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, where he studied Fine Art.

Steven currently teaches theory to all levels of the BA (Hons) Fashion and Textiles cohort, as well as the MA Creative Practice students, and potentially all art and design disciplines at dissertation level.

He describes fashion as one of the most immediate forms of personal expression and identity, saying: “It is a daily questioning of ‘who am I?’, which we all answer through a careful negotiation of self-expression and group conformity – whether you consider yourself to partake in the fashion system or not.”

Such enquiry of fashion and textiles as social phenomena frames the teaching of Steven’s theory on the BA (Hons) Fashion and Textiles degrees.

Steven’s current research interests include the analysis of menswear and masculinity throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

“Since the mid-1990s, menswear has undergone its most radical developments in a century,” he says. “Hegemonic masculinity has been continually challenged via wider socio-political shifts regarding gender and the status of masculinity. However, both menswear and masculinity remain under-researched and underwritten subjects within the field of fashion theory.”

Naomi Bolser

Based in Harrogate, Naomi has an impressive career track record. She has been involved in the production of art video since the late 1980s; is dedicated to art education; and has been teaching since 2000.

Inspiring students is key to Naomi’s educational philosophy.

“In the past, my community work has taken video production to people who wouldn’t normally have access to it,” she says. “I worked with community groups and individuals to create videos about issues that were important to them.”

Naomi has created video art installations, backed by grants the Arts Council and South West Arts.

“I’m doing a practice-based PhD at Leeds University,” she says. “This involves researching and building archives of Women’s Independent Moving Image Practice – it’s about exploring art video and its context.”

Asking Is There a Tradition of Women’s Independent Moving Image Practice? Naomi’s PhD research focuses on women’s roles in avante garde, art and experimental production, within both the historical and contemporary contexts. She aims to re-examine non-mainstream productions in light of recent feminist scholarship; and to build a canon of women’s practice for exhibition, that will include her own work. Naomi Is working towards an international exhibition in 2015.

“One of the most important aspects of this process is how the discipline and rigour of studying for a PhD informs my teaching,” she says. “It’s been extremely beneficial.”

Her personal archive of work, including an award-winning MA Super 8 video project, Timepiece, will form part of the research.

Timepiece was picked by contemporary art directory, Axis, to be one of its “MA Stars” in 2005.

Danielle Treanor, of Axis, says on the organisation’s website: “She gently instigates a genuine interaction from the viewer. She expects us to confront that strange epistemic distance that ‘film’ creates between the material and the mind’s eye and in doing so cleverly calls into question innate consumerism and ready acceptance of a mass media memory machine.”

Naomi has a degree in Cultural Studies from North East London Polytechnic, an MA in Video from Middlesex University and an MA in Fine Art from Leeds University, where she specialised in digital and super 8 moving image production. A Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, in 2011 Naomi started a practice-based PhD at the Institute of Communication Studies, Leeds University.

Other works – Walk In The Park