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- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2018
JAWS: Journal of Arts Writing by Students - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2018
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Interview with Nik Wakefield
More LessAbstractOur guest editorial takes the form of an interview between the JAWS editorial team and senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, Dr Nik Wakefield. A lot of time is dedicated each issue to discussing how we can peer review and publish practicebased work, and Dr Wakefield has allowed us great insight in to these issues through the discussion of his practice below.
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Through the lens of a jewellery practice: An inquiry into photographic representation within a practice-based Ph.D.
More LessAbstractIn the context of a practice-based Ph.D. programme, photography plays an important role within the written thesis. Starting from the recognition that both photography and jewellery can be understood as having a dual nature, in that they can both function as subject and object, this article explores how photography can change the physical object. A practitioner of photography and jewellery can create a complex inquiry when engaging with both mediums. This article considers how each medium can be considered a form of practice in its own right and how each has the ability to change presentation and viewership.
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Ulysses and I: Joyce as a catalyst for graphic practice
More LessAbstractThis article will focus on elements of my graphic design practice that consider how text can inspire, be used with and act as imagery. I discuss my master’s project, an investigation into a reader’s response to text and a traditional graphic application of that research. This second project was made in collaboration with Joseph Haigh, a fellow student at Manchester Metropolitan University whose research is concerned with typographic landscapes. I consider how my haptic perception of the book has influenced this later work and how it continues to inspire my recent image-based responses.
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Between the screens: Screen-printing moving images
More LessAbstractThis article aims to set out key themes connecting screen-printing and the moving image with the hope of initiating a dialogue between the screens. I first reflect on how these connections were instigated in my creative practice before conducting a brief study of theoretical and critical responses to Andy Warhol’s silkscreen canvases and silent films, aiming to propose a relationship between these bodies of work. This reveals two pairs of paradoxical themes that carry across the two media: motion and stasis, and immediacy and distance. After considering where I locate my practice in relation to Warhol’s, I culminate my thoughts by presenting and reflecting on the results of a practical experiment in which I insert my screen-printed video frames back into their cinematic motor.
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Contingency as video research strategy
More LessAbstractThis article outlines the potential for contingency to operate as a methodological strategy in video practice using the examples of my own research into appropriation. My approach repositions appropriation practice away from gestures of critique and towards more nuanced strategies that focus on questions of meaning and extend ambiguity into practicable artistic methods. This is outlined in the network of influences and involvement and materials that formed my video project, Poor Old Horse (2016). Accordingly, contingency is positioned as a network of potential from which meaning forms precarious alignments and is accelerated through contemporary conditions of digital exchange.
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Gavin Turk’s many personas: Who What When Where How and Why is he?
By Jack FlorishAbstractGavin Turk uses many personas in his work, but who is the artist behind the art? To answer this question, this article takes a recent retrospective of Turk as a primary source. Through analysis of this work, and through comparison with artists such as Tracey Emin and Cindy Sherman, we see how Turk operates behind the persona and his effect on both the art world and the audience looking at his art.
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Playing politics: The state of the arts in the post-museum context
More LessAbstractDuring the last decade, the evolved agency of the artist and the efficacy of art interventions within the urban landscape have been significantly debated in response to the fields of cultural policy; artistic practice; and academic discourses – and how those within these fields acknowledge the evolving interactions between practitioners and their publics within the post-museum context. Through theoretical criticism of empirical case studies, this article foregrounds the participants within the transmission from art programming to public art in a manner that considers the processes contained within this transmission and their dissemination into production as the continuous loop of a public art intervention that is concerned with the ideals surrounding the post-museum.
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A story about a drawing
More LessAbstractThis story about a drawing narrates the inner world of the page and its populace of lines, their struggles and their peace, and how all this internal drama hangs contingently on the vast physical and historical world that it is a part of. The story is extrapolated from video essays in which I film myself hurriedly attempting to verbalize fragments of the accelerated decision-making process accentuated by my flitting wrist while drawing. Talking Drawing is a method of historical restoration taking place at the site of the moving hand that questions what its choreographic inheritance has to say about the plethora of semantic decisions explicit in the drawing.
There turned out to be very little I could glean of my hand’s wisdom; it scarcely seems attached to me, so possessed is it by the gestures of other artists, those I have never met and many of whom were dead long before I was born. But just as sagas, which through a few stories retold by narrators excavate a genealogy of Nordic heroes and outlaws, the hand that draws is the hand that lives to tell the tale of those that came before it. The singular drawing as narrative, as history, is considered here as an iteration in an evolution concerning hands, eyes and lines spanning enormous timescales of innumerable individuals. This enormity is emphasized in order to appreciate the economy of a drawing, which contains all this history effortlessly, and whose ingenuity far surpasses my imagination. The following account, both technical and narrative, attempts to locate points at which the pragmatic approach in drawing appears inseparable from semantic concern and meditates on the relationship that these decisions have with the identities of the artist, her ghosts and readers of drawings.
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