Practice Research PhD Symposium (Oct 5th 1–5pm)
The University of Leeds Annual Practice-led PhD Symposium is a joint initiative between the Schools of Design and Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies. This year it will be held back in person on 5th October from 13.00 – 17.00 in the Grass Studio, Clothworker’s Central, in the School of Design. Please email Dr Judith Tucker j.a.tucker@leeds.ac.uk if you would like to attend, as numbers are limited.
This year, thanks to the generosity of CEPRA we have an external keynote and respondent: Professor Nina Wakeford artist and sociologist from Goldsmith’s College, London.
Programme (see below for abstracts)
1.00pm Welcome from Dr Judith Tucker, Design and Professor Chris Taylor, FAHACS
1.10 – 2.00 Keynote: Professor Nina Wakeford, Goldsmith’s College, Who Needs Methods? Chair Dr Judith Tucker
Session 1: Chair, Dr Judith Tucker
2.05 – 2.20 Hondartza Fraga, Design, Saturn and Melancholy, Again
2.20 – 2.35 Tom Poultney, FAHACS, Making Internet Friends
2.35 – 2.55 Yun-Ling Wang, Design, Redefining Formosa: Exploring the notion of the hybrid in art practice and its relationship between botany, post-colonial identity, and contemporary society in Taiwan
3.00 – 3.20 Tea and Coffee 
Session 2: Chair, Professor Chris Taylor
3.20 – 3.35 Barbara Urrutia Badilla, Design, Typographic Landscape
3.35 – 3.50 Clare Carter Osbourne, FAHACS, Maternal stratum: landscape, motherhood and the garden.
3.50 – 4.05 Marielle Hehir, Design, On Shaky Ground: Land, Paint and Change
4.05 – 4.20 Yuting Cai, FAHACS, Transgenerational Traumas: The Concept of Chineseness in a Shared China
4.20 – 4.35 Adela Glyn-Davies, Design, Visualising Complexity: Mapping Belonging Through Parameters OfIdentity Shifts, Inclusion And Space
4.35 – 5.15 Concluding remarks and discussion: Professor Nina Wakeford
Abstracts
Hondartza Fraga, Design, Saturn and Melancholy, Again
There is a great difference between still believing something and believing it again. Still believing that the moon influences plants reveals stupidity and superstition, but believing it again indicates philosophy and reflection.
–– Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The collection of Cassini raw images –nearly 400,000 unprocessed images from this space-research mission– is the object of my artistic research. My project arises from the conjecture that the ontological and aesthetic complexities of the Cassini raw images deserve deeper attention. Such attention is given through an artistic research methodology and has a twofold agenda. The project examines on the one hand a thematic reappraisal of Saturn and melancholy, and on the other the mutually transformative relationship between artistic practice and its source material.
What are implications of drawing with the Cassini raw images of Saturn? How can drawing practice negotiate the tensions between artistic process and thematic content, between the technological and the hand-drawn? How might art practice offer new apprehension(s) of Saturn and melancholy? What is the significance of contemporary discourses of melancholy for drawing practice?
While melancholy and Saturn are doubtlessly still thriving as objects of study, their once-profound association has lost currency – for good reasons. This thematic trope, in turn, is both anchor and catapult for the tensions that arise between the techno-scientific origin of the source material and the process of artistic interpretation. My presentation will focus on my work Saturn and Melancholy, a diptych in which a handmade drawing is juxtaposed to its mirrored copy digital photomosaic. Abstraction, rawness, and resolution are the conceptual pillars explored and expanded against a range of critical discourses including philosophy, psychoanalysis, art history and the history of medicine.
Tom Poultney, FAHACS, Making Internet Friends
The research project explores the relationship between internet memes and traditional folk art. There are aspects of the production, distribution and aesthetic of memes which seem to align with traditional folk art practices. Like folk art objects, memes are often unsophisticated, unauthored artefacts that create and define communities and establish cultures. Memes often appear amateurishly made, scruffy and unfinished. This sloppiness of production provides an index link between the creator and viewer. The rough aesthetic enables the meme to retain many of the artefacts of the human labour that went into it’s production. These artefacts of evidenced physical processes establish the authentic human production of a digital artefact in an online space. The artworks produced for this project explore the ways that these folk art sensibilities are appropriated by the creators of memes to communicate the human production of the digital artefact.
The works presented in this symposium are particularly informed by a certain type of recurring post. It is common for users to flag the content posted by bots on social media as being inauthentic, and non-human. They do this by identifying a bot and testing the limits of the it’s algorithm or database until it exposes its weakness or inauthenticity. Once the limits of the automation have been found the results are then shared with the group to demonstrate the bot’s inability to effectively display authentic human characteristics, whether that is emotion, critical judgement, or the ability to comprehend and respond to nuanced communications. This exposure of the limits of the automated and the digital by internet users has existed since the advent of social media, and continues to be an important part of online culture. Through this exposure of the automation the user is signalling their own authenticity and humanity within the digital space.
Yun-Ling Wang, Design, Redefining Formosa: Exploring the notion of the hybrid in art practice and its relationship between botany, post-colonial identity, and contemporary society in Taiwan
In my practice research, I focus on the concept of “hybrids” through an exploration of issues of identity, post-colonial society, and artistic practice in Taiwan, using orchids as an example. The very concept of hybridity is imbued with identity (Sarup, 2002), and the hesitation and unease that comes with hybridity are prevalent in modern society. To address the issue, I use different types of the methodology employed within artistic research and the bricolage approach, including looking, reading, writing and making. Using an autoethnographic approach, I explore my family’s contradictions between colonialism and post-colonialism and the impact of my hybridity background on my family. The orchid acts as a bridge between my grandmother, my mother, and me, which offers a way of developing my research. This research also showcases different artists’ perspectives on “plants, memory and trauma”, as well as contemporary and conceptual artworks, exploring “colonisation, hybridity and identity” in their artworks in order to clarify and situate my research.
In my practice, I interrogate the relationship between humans and plants through orchids and tiny hands as the subject of my work. This creative process of interweaving labour with being a post-colonial artist is perhaps partly the process of searching for self-identity. I link the colours and shapes used to the hybridisation of orchids and the flourishing and fading of life, as are the waxing and waning of self-consciousness and contradictions in the complex cultural context of Taiwan. As the viewers look at the work, they will find hundreds of tiny hands all over the orchid, as if waving or struggling. Underneath the beautiful surfaces is an inseparable relationship between humans and orchids. Full of small hands are a symbol of human desire and possession of the orchid. I cut out the shape of the hands and folded them upwards; the roots of the raised hands are still attached to the orchid and represent human attachment to it.
When light is cast on the work, the beautiful orchids shine and make the shadows sway on the wall. The light coming through the small transparent hands and mapping on the wall brings shimmering spots to the black shadows. The flow of light and shadow seems to freeze time in the present, and the human presence appears small against the enormous orchids. Using light and shadow to reference the contradictory relationship between Taiwan and China, my work highlights the complex and paradoxical questions of my personal and cultural identity. These issues arise from the uncertain international status of my home country of Taiwan and the conflicts and contradictions regarding hybridity. My artistic practice research is arriving at new conceptions of myself and, importantly, a broader Taiwan.
Barbara Urrutia Badilla, Design, Typographic Landscape
This presentation looks to explore how an idea of the 'typographic landscape' helps to understand ways in which designed words —or visible language— are part of a wider semiotic network which connects aesthetic or stylistic features to other meanings. These are mostly materialised in our responses - those everyday social practices and learned behaviours through which ideology becomes present in a range of everyday encounters and the production of discourse around community and identity.
By considering the 'typographic landscape' as a specific practice of design as a communicative act, the presentation will review a range of work (by myself and others) which argues that seemingly neutral or harmless stylistic acts of typographic design are in fact instances of a specific social semiotic mode, programmed to connect graphic design with social linguistics and human geography with the potential to impact on culture and behaviour in a variety of ways.
Clare Carter Osbourne, FAHACS, Maternal stratum: landscape, motherhood and the garden.
An autoethnographic approach to exploring a specific landscape of the Anthropocene, through the lens of motherhood. I aim to investigate the role of motherhood (or mothering, defined as a performative practice in later feminist theory; eg, Chandler) and the physical and thought processes of re-wilding a landscape. My research through creative practice will be site-specific, focussing on a garden and extinct forest on the Canary Island of Lanzarote; a place where I first became a mother. The island is also a UNESCO biosphere, which has been attributed to the creation of heritage sites by native artist Cesar Manrique comprising of gardens, museums and public sculptures. Manrique’s role in protecting the landscape of Lanzarote could be perceived as a performative, mothering practice; by establishing these links between motherhood, ecology and aesthetics, my research will uncover the possible impetuses that lead us to care about landscapes and how this shapes the way we dwell within them. My creative practice - ranging from music composition to printmaking, installation, text and video - has consistently focussed on exploring a sense of place and phenomenological interpretations of dwelling. The research I have been engaged during my recent MA Fine Art has found a locus in the garden as a site of social and creative mediation between the domestic and the wild. Within the PhD research period, I intend to spend approximately one year living with my family in Lanzarote and learning about the indigenous flora and precolonial dwelling in the region of Haria. Here, attempts have been made by a British and Canarian scientist to create a self-sufficient wildlife garden with only indigenous plants, along with the resurrection of an extinct forest of pre-Ice Age trees (Laurisilva). With their cooperation and time spent dwelling in the environment, I will gain a deeper understanding of the materials and systems involved, of which will inform the outcome of my practice. I also intend to work closely with another existing organisation on the island, Arrecife Natura, that is re-wilding socio-economically depressed areas of the city. Through this research I will create a documentary about re-wilding in Lanzarote, and work towards an exhibition that proposes a future heritage site for the extinct ghost forest. Through the creative process of autoethnographic storytelling, my aim is to discover and articulate visual links between the systems of care inherent to motherhood and ecology within this environment: a landscape-orientated anthropology of care.
I will underpin this practice-based research with further relevant ecocritical, phenomenological and anthropological texts surrounding tourism, architecture and ecology (Ingold, Latour, Morten, Haraway, Tsing, Heidegger, Lippard) and historical research of precolonial dwelling: before Hispanic colonising and British tourism altered the landscape and economy of the island. Furthermore, the paucity of theory surrounding motherhood and ecology will be addressed; I will begin by learning about existing feminist texts about motherhood (Chandler, Butler, Kristeva) and discover creative practitioners whose work embodies narratives engaged with motherhood and landscapes from an ecological and geological perspective.
Marielle Hehir, Design, On Shaky Ground: Land, Paint and Change
My practice-led research explores the relationship between painting and place, how these distinctly different experiences resonate with one another, and how the practice of painting can offer new understandings of place. The place I study is the land and materiality of the canal network of Greater London; an edgeland where the wild meets the built environment (Farley and Symmons Roberts, 2012). This presentation will discuss how an expanded collection of materials is crucial to the painting research in relation to my investigation into the materiality of the canal. Images of the paintings will be shown as I look at the ways in which traces of the land come to be embedded in the paintings through processes of making, and how in turn subsequent visits to that same place might then be experienced and understood differently.
Estelle Barratt has argued for recognition of artistic practice-led research as a crucial alternative mode of knowledge production, by situating personal interest and experience in lived experience (2007). The once distanced perspective of the canal as an edgeland, has for me become an intimate, lived, immersive experience. I live on a narrowboat and frequent this site daily - I am part of this ecology. The chance to look slowly and closely has led to the revelation of the aesthetic and material qualities that constitute the canal network as emblematic of the Anthropocene. As relationships between humankind and the landscape are emphasised during the Anthropocene, the lived experience of the canal network provides specific knowledge of the present and changing or changed conditions of the site.
A discussion of the practice research will be weaved together with questions raised by the theories which have come to be important to this exploration. My engagement with the site is a very personal one, which is open to the phenomenology of matter (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1945.) Keeping this mode of perception in mind, I will discuss New Materialist ideas - Jane Bennett’s notion of ‘thing power’ in relation to what she calls Vibrant Matter (2010), as well as Barbara Bolt’s theory of The Performative Power of the Image (2004), - and how this contemporary line of thought relates to the Romanticism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Specifically, I will introduce the notion of Earth-Life painting, (Erdlebenbild), coined in 1831 by Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869). I will show how these disparate theories are linked through their emphasis on the act of close-looking, and an awareness of the enmeshment of matter, and the interrelation of other elements which have an effect on perception. The emphasis of this discussion will be on exploring the relevance and importance of this mode of perceptive experience in the context of the Anthropocene, and what painting can do as part of this experience.
Yuting Cai, FAHACS, Transgenerational Traumas: The Concept of Chineseness in a Shared China
Chineseness is a flow and ongoing notion between identity and having a sense of belonging. This practice research investigates how the notion of Chineseness as a shared identity has caused issues of belonging and hampered effective communication among different Chinese communities. The research specifically articulates how, for the Hong Kong people, a shared Chinese nation has become a question of belonging rather than identity. The study employs an autoethnographic methodology using collage and montage to develop the theory and practice, and explore the relationship between Chineseness, belonging, and identity. An analysis of Chineseness through historical events such as the Cultural Revolution (1966 -1976) and Nanjing Massacre (1937) reveals the relationship between montage and traumas. It also demonstrates how trauma has become transgenerational under different Chinese governments and its influence on 'Chineseness' across generations. Specifically, the study explores how reframed policies through three government regimes – the late Qing dynasty (1911); the Republic of China (ROC) (1912–49); and the People's Republic of China (PRC), established by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949 – affected the issues of Chinese identities under the concept of a shared China and perpetuates transgenerational traumas. The study begins with a critique of the patriotic education system in mainland China and how the PRC governmental policies negatively affect the knowledge of the Hong Kong and Taiwan people and the Chinese diaspora and their perception of a shared identity with mainland China. It details how an investigation of the issues of a shared Chinese nation and identity could be understood while exploring how governmental policies regulate what 'being Chinese' means. The study also points out a question about the future of China and parallels the traumatic effects of the 2022 COVID lockdown issues in Shanghai and the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976). This autoethnographic study intends to add to the critical discourse of distinguishing between a Chinese identity and the concept of ‘Chineseness’, which may have induced transgenerational traumas, especially among different Chinese communities outside mainland China.
Adela Glyn-Davies, Design, Visualising Complexity: Mapping Belonging Through Parameters Of Identity Shifts, Inclusion And Space
With the increased involvement of designers in matters of public discourse, local communities and policy making [1-3] – parameters of inclusive design have moved more prominently into the roles of leading frameworks utilised by practitioners [4-6]. Following on from the Social Turn [7] the imperative to challenge values and attitudes to design [8] and its societal contribution was further demonstrated, resulting in a push for communities to take part in the creative process to produce positive engagement, environments, and systems for all [9]. Inclusive design aims to generate solutions to disaggregate and remove barriers to involvement and eliminate separation [10-11]. The term accessibility is often mentioned as a descriptor or enabler of a design becoming inclusive, yet accessibility alone does not generate cultures of participation, relatability, or true inclusion. The preposition that accessibility points in a system’s periphery count towards the design being deemed inclusive, is one of the main issues within enquiries of system imbalances [8-11]. Whilst designers focus on generating accessibility points catered to as many needs as possible, what remains is a vast neglect of what happens to people once they are inside the system. Lacking relatability and processes of active exclusion push people’s established and shifting identities into places of othering. Far beyond just inclusion, a design that considers one’s intrinsic need to belong, could generate the acceptance of an individual as a part of the system and affirms their full identity to produce greater motivation to progress [11-12] This emerging awareness of cultivating belonging within inclusive design raises considerations for solutions that target urban, migrant communities, where matters of identity are accentuated [12]. This presentation will present a short overview towards a Design for Belonging in complex systems, operating on systems thinking practice and explicated through visual data mapping, which in the context of this particular study - focusing on experiences of people with complicated migration/immigration or refugee background.