The focus of these sessions is on sharing your research and critical writing. You are asked to give a 6 – 8 minute verbal presentation (we will time it) to a small group of MA Fine Art students and staff. We would like you to talk us through your current research through your critical writing and contexts. You should illustrate your presentation either with a PowerPoint or with reference to images/videos in your online platform. 

Please use these as a guide of areas to cover in your presentation:  

• Introduce your research question/core subject 
• Discuss your key themes and the specific focus of your research  
• Outline relevant contexts and critical debates and how they inform your research 
• Discuss your methods of research and approach to critical writing  
• Consider the ways in which you will develop your critical research going forward  
  

This is an opportunity to receive and give feedback to help you with your Unit 2 critical reflective writing. 

Introduce your research question/core subject

I am intrested in what happens when we experience an art piece, I don’t like the word as work as it carries connotations of labour.

I think that we should be able to immerse ourselves passivly or activly and be left with something, a residue after just a glance or after a long and medivive stare.

This residue may well be considered knowledge but for that to have happened we will have had to reflect or to do as Confucius suggests:

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

With these thoughts in mind have set out to create curious Memento Vivre, Talisman – happier and less austere than their cousin the Memento Mori that we see in churches and other places that we go to nourish our spirits.

I nearly called them Memento Morris, to remind us of his many quotes about art for all And his many reminders to include art in the everyday, and the everyday in our art.

Morris wanted art and beauty for all.

Dexter Dalwood in a interview during his tate liverpool exhibition talks about the artists who find it hard put everything that intrested them in to their paintings unlike song writers who don’t seem to have this particular struggle, he is of course both a musician and artist. The way he makes his paintings from collaged images is a process that I feel could help me pull together everything I would like to include in each of my paintings.

I feel I am one of those artists and I am now heavily researching ways of making my meaning clearer and including my thoughts within my stuff – as Dexter Dalwood so perfectly puts it.

I have found a rich source of research with the spoken word, the retelling of greece tales courtesy of Natalie Haynes allowing the female characters and female rage to take center stage once more, after having being pushed back for centuries. radio and pod casts have been very informative and fun to listen too as I paint or do the family laundry. Start the week has enlightened me on bubble theory, physics and libraries just to mention a few episodes, the great women artists pod casts by the lovely Katie Hassle, have inspired me with wonderful tales of women artist so long ignored.

This sort of research has punctuated my more academic forms of research – talks which have delved in to the depth of pedagogy, philosophy, in illustrious places of academia such as our own Oxford and Cambridge, Durham and Leeds along with international reports that look in the arts and thier place in our lives and education.

Along with many brilliant straight from the artist, talks at UAL.

All believe that the arts has an important role to play in a happier healthier society, and that the carer and creator are central for a successful outcome.

I am researching the everyday, and domestic, and how magic thoughts feed and nurture, how they inspire our minds and souls along with those who carry out these tasks. Be they carried out by the virtuous eve or her less palatable counter part Lilith personifying female rage. I am looking to convey the magic that I see and feel every day that makes me wonder and imagine. I say day loosely as I love the night too and the rain, and the way it creates mist to rise from the ground as it has long done since the birth of time and the birth of man.

from cave paintings to film to the digital this wonder has always been there and I would like to successfully catch and redeliver this wonder and awe. As Anias Nin said to experiance life twice or as Rebecca West said to raise a cup and taste life .

How and where, is what I am researching now, looking at the stainglass windows of Rossetti and morris to the interiors and output of the Omega work shops along with elevated items in tales, and cultures such as Pandora’s jar, Eve’s apple or the Korean moon jar. I have rediscoved the simple doilies my gradmother crocheted along the jams and bottled fruit we made each year in her kitchen and my grandfathers camera has just been unboxed which I would like to use to take photos of our family now.

How to arrange my output, my creations and entice my audience to ponder and take a moment to feel, that ratatulie moment (return to a good time)that is my question.

I would like to give those away from home or those without, a momentr livre, a bit of domestic magic to start their day, Rather like the refugee painter Oscar Kocosha who visitied the national gallery every day to obtian respite from his homesickness and troubled thoughts so far from home.

Or create a place like Monet who, created a garden to paint to create ‘the refuge of a peaceful meditation in the center of a flowering aquarium’.

Female rage/virtue /moon/vessel/Penelope, Beyoncé, Lilith, eve, pandora are key to my research.