Safely Infer
Under the Wire
Under the Wire
Twelve O' Clock Wood
Twelve O' Clock Wood
27 May 2006
The assignments
Links to the web postings for the assignments.
Assignment 1 web posting
Assignment 2 web posting
Assignment 3 web posting
Assignment 4 web posting
Assignment 5 web posting
Assignment 6 web posting
Assignment 7 web posting
Links to the documents downloadable from the Assignment Posts
Assignment1 document
Assignment2 is the Studio Log, part of this weblog.
Assignment3 document
Assignment4 document
Assignment5 document
Assignment6 document
Assignment7 document
Assignment 1
Assignment 1 is a version of a slideshow covering my work, including a short movie.
Download assignment1.mov
Assignment 4
Assignment4 is the ongoing visual database I'm keeping. A large PDF file can be downloaded, rather than printing over 170 pages:
Download assignment4.pdf
Assignment 2
Assignment 2 is the Studio Journal.
A category of this weblog comprises this journal.
You can narrow down the contents of this blog to just the journal by clicking on the following link:
Studio Journal Only
You may also narrow the contents down to just the assignments with this link
Assignments Only
assignment 3
You may wish to download this document to view it with proper formatting:
Download assignment3.doc
Key Texts (Research Methods Assignment 3)
Presenting a limited number of texts has forced me to hinge my arguments on just a few core ideas. This 'stripping-down' introduces a certain amount of mental mobility into my understanding of and presentation of my ideas, in the same way that speaking from basic notes rather than from a prepared statement makes for more lively presentation. Having a smaller range of tools to set up makes me think about what to do with them a bit more clearly.
Assignment 7
The tables charting my full bibliography and plan of work don't work properly here, and are not included so you may want to
where they are included, or read on for the text alone...
Project Proposal
Metaphorising practice: artists’ books as artistic strategies.
1Aims:
- To undertake a series of artists’ books as a form of reflexive research in parallel to and informing other research methods.
- To derive understanding of artists’ books practice through a reflexive comparison of my own artistic practice with data from case studies.
- To propose novel understanding of the field of artists’ books as artworks and as a form of artistic practice, in complement to the existing critical material.
2Background
2.1Theoretical/methodological background
2.1.1Key theoretical concepts
There are some key theoretical texts informing my research which I refer to in greater detail in the assignment called ‘Key Texts’. Briefly, the research picks up on themes that run through the work of Paul Ricoeur and Pierre Bourdieu to examine questions of intention and legitimacy in artists’ book and asks if books enable a certain conscious manipulation of legitimation and intention.
Assignment 6
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Assignment Six: Prepare a Case Study
Helen Douglas
In devising these notes I want to set out a number of the themes I have picked out in Douglas' work. Rather than looking at the visual aspect of her books exclusively, I have decided to quote extensively from the artist's writings on her practice, since they are unusually lucid and helpful. Since my research will bring me into contact with Douglas, I have looked on this case study as preparatory research to inform a critical position to her work which I can use in an interview situation.
I have set out my study under a number of related headings that express important themes in Douglas' work, proceeding very often from the ways in which the artists herself has described her practice.
On Inside and Outside
"Nature, landscape and the book surround me.
They are out there and they are all absolutely within me too.
Inside and out. I Live them." 1
The subjects of Douglas' practice also inscribe points in her artistic hermenuetic. The inside and outside are part of her metaphorical gear for drawing material into her practice. The concepts of inside and outside are mediated by the book, which makes concrete the work of enclosure and release that Douglas’ investigation is involved with. The inside and outside involved here are very particular, though: “I live them” the artist tells us, so her involvement is not merely with space in an abstract sense, but with place. The relationship that her practice engineers is between her environment in the Scottish Borders, and the places poetically constituted in her books.
" I have decided to speak from the book, the place of my making, the place where my expression is made concrete and where all three Nature, Landscape and the Book come together."2
The book is the external site of the process, of the hermeneutic, of all that thought and action. The visual hermeneutic, working on 'nature, landscape and the book' , shows itself as
- questioning spaces, presentation
- the book as an arena for spatial understanding. In its metaphorical enclosure place is transformed into identity and vice-versa.
- as connecting spaces and times in 'woven'/gathering movements.
- punning on 'bookness'= investigating, ironising and metaphorising its forms through narrative.
