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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

Download assignment7.doc

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.

Assignment 5

You may wish to download this document with the proper formatting rather than reading it here: Download assignment5.doc

 

Assignment 5: curate virtual exhibition of five artists including me.

 

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Borders of Identity

 

In creating this exhibition I have employed criteria that have come from my ongoing critical engagement with my practice. I'm always asking questions of it: What am I doing? What is its place in the world? What are the characteristics of the artworks? This is an ongoing process that takes place all the time, in every decision I make, to a more, or less-conscious extent. It is a hermeneutic process that continuously informs my sense of myself as an artist. It can take a more formal turn when I write about my work as I am doing here, and elsewhere in my studio journal, but I'm conscious of its place in the way I approach individual pieces of work, individual drawings. That critical judgement, and the interpretive bias that emerges as a result of my concentrating on the things I find useful and informative to my practice exists equally in the things I choose to look at, and in the things that I read. What strikes me other's work is that which strikes a chord in my own practice, in sympathy or in contrast. The ongoing gap between what I respond to and what I do is the gap of the hermeneutic process of working-through-practice. It's why I keep doing it: there is always something un-done to respond to.

 

What I have done to create this virtual exhibition, with its intention of providing a basis for a comparative analysis in the form of a catalogue entry, is produce a number of statements about how I currently characterise my work. I've used these to select artists whose work I think reflects on some of these same criteria, either sympathetically or critically.

 

  The criteria I have employed are:

 

•     historical/literary sources- there is a use of historical/literary material or background  
•     interpretive- there is a conscious effort being made to interpret the found and historical imagery and situations  
•     gamespaces- there is a sense in which the work establishes a place of operation within which the play of the interpretation works out  
•     identity- the work deals with questions of identity: postcolonial, gender and sexuality, etc  
•     narrativity- the works use character and plot to allow meaning to unfold with the effect of narrative

 

 

The artists whose work I have chosen to explore these critera with are:

 

•     Helen Douglas: Illiers Combray  
•     Roni Horn: Doubt by Water  
•     Peter Greenaway: Luper at Compton Verney  
•     Isaac Julien: Vagabondia

 

  Finally, I have chosen my own book The Remembrancer as a representative piece of my work for comparative analysis.

 

Before discussing how these criteria or themes work across the exhibition, I will take the works one by one, saying how they feature some of the criteria, and exploring some of the links between them. The sections below are my 'catalogue entry'.

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