RESEARCH STUDENTS
Annette Mills
Title: The Intensive Journal Method: facilitating insights in creative practice.
This research investigates how the Intensive Journal Method, developed by psychologist Ira Progoff in1975, can be used by artists to catalyze the epiphany moment in creative practice. The Intensive Journal Method is a cohesive system of written exercises which employs a structured therapeutic method of reflection to clarify thinking; facilitate change in perception and provide future direction.
I will investigate how the use of a therapeutic framework enables the practitioner to gain new insights into the arc of their individual creative process (Pink, 2009) and how it can facilitate and sustain ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008) in their creative practice.
Basketry inherently re-presents the intangible cycle of continual adaptation, reinvention and transmission across time and cultures. My research will focus on how these elements can be made explicit and how insights can be facilitated during the creative process.
LouLou Morris
Title: Weaving as a meditation on, and evocation of, loss narratives
"Human beings are grieving animals" (McLoughlin, 2010) and although this statement occurs in the context of mourning death, other traumatic losses also cause grief and require a mourning process to be travelled and eventually resolved.
The content of this research will be guided by the stories told; there is no intention to presuppose or edit. This is a risky approach, but necessary for authenticity.
In order to keep the results as open as possible, narratives of all types of loss will be considered, those of disenfranchised grief being actively sought, as this is an area which seems to have been under represented in the literature. No particular belief system will be favoured, and sites selected will be away from usual sites of mourning. The aim is to generate art-objects, and set apart spaces to help the living with their journey through grief, not create monuments to the loss.
Jing Guo
Title: Lacquer As Skin: Contemporary Chinese Textile Art
This practice-based research will support a redefinition of the language of traditional lacquer by applying the characteristics of cultural specificity, using lacquer, to contemporary Chinese textile art. China is where lacquer art originated. The innovative practice of combining lacquer and Chinese contemporary textile art will explore the conceptual artistic thinking not bounded by established tradition. The research will have two outcomes: a written thesis, which sheds new light on Prown’s theory of material culture through the specific consideration of lacquer and textile, manipulated for artistic reasons in a cultural heritage context; and a body of new work by the researcher, which helps to illustrate this theoretical enquiry.
Peta Jacobs
Title: Within, Between and Beyond: an enquiry into ‘the fold’ as a model of non-linear interconnectedness through textile thinking and practice
Textile thinking can weave difficult concepts and questions raised by quantum physics together with an interrogation of materials to create artworks that present an interconnected, holistic position in concrete form.
Textile thinking is a means to analyse and examine ideas originating from quantum physics by translating them to sensory objects. Materials are folded together to become mediations of a set of ideas. The ideas are paradoxical and difficult to understand intellectually, however, my artworks communicate them by appealing to the senses and a gestalt perception.
Georgina Pierce
Title: Re-activating the textile archive through the interpretative object
This study focuses on the fabric samples and documentation of the furniture company Parker Knoll Ltd, part of the Frederick Parker Collection. This archive is an under researched and under theorised resource, particularly in a creative context. The anonymous and neglected fabric samples are unknown to the textile community and this will be the first critical study.
Mona Craven
Title: In-Between – Whitework and Indigo Resist. (tbc)
This research is situated in a space between cultural boundaries, metaphorically represented between an Indian whitework embroidery and the indigo resist-print cloth ishweshwe. The broader context is the intersection between textile culture, art and postcolonial critique.
Sangeeta Banerjee
Title: Transgressing the narrative: British West Bengali identity in contemporary hand weaving
This research explores contemporary expressions of British West Bengali identity and heritage through hand weaving. By focusing on the creative process, it articulates new understandings at the intersection of heritage, craft-making, ethnicity and narratives of identity and belonging.
It considers how contemporary identities have emerged out of more traditional practices and travelled across geographies. The study will be placed within the wider context of work on the British South Asian diaspora and by reflecting on my own practice I will undertake research through new weaving, exploring how identity evolves through an engaged textile practice.