University for the Creative Arts

About: University for the Creative Arts is a education organization based out in Farnham, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Politics & Computer science. The organization has 85 authors who have published 120 publications receiving 722 citations. The organization is also known as: University College for the Creative Arts & UCA.

Clyde Hopkins: Abstraction as experience

Abstract: Hopkins’ painterly abstraction reflects on a universe of disordering contingencies in everyday experience, questioning how painting can refer to such qualities of experience without engaging in representation. The immediate act of placing paint on the canvas extends to metaphorical concerns with process: how to maintain that sensation of immediacy if repetitions occur within a sequence of gestural responses. Hopkins’ work adopts different approaches at different stages; degrees of immediacy remain a consideration while attachment to a variety of motifs develops. Paintings remain continuously open to change as more reflexive approaches to the ironies of maintaining immediacy in re-presentation emerge. Resources are both visual and philosophical: the questioning of logic with ‘associationism’ found in the writings of David Hume and influencing Lawrence Sterne, a fascination with Spanish painting and its influence on Robert Motherwell, who was in turn influenced by A. N. Whitehead.

Enticing new growth

Abstract: As an artist, designer and cultural historian, my work is concerned with integrating thought with material creativity. By relating science to methodology and learning strategies, somatic, experiential awareness comes to the fore. New scientific evidence about our neural network enables us to return to the body of experience we already have; learning to respect the understanding that physical actions engender in the mind, fulfilling our potential by acknowledging the sensory, emotional and rational parts of ourselves. The apparent chaos of the senses, avoided for so long in the rational sciences, is essential for growth, creativity and knowledge. The overarching dependence on analytic thought over felt experience denies its essential relationship to growth, creativity and knowledge, with profound implications for our society. By taking the vessel or container as a research tool and merging David Kolb’s experiential learning diagram with neuron development, the importance of valuing all routes to knowledge ...

Worn: Footwear, Attachment and the Affects of Wear

Abstract: In a culture preoccupied with newness and a fashion system largely predicated upon it, what is the significance of the worn and used garment? What is our attachment to clothes which are marked through use and why do they have the power to affect us so deeply? How are our relationships to clothing produced and maintained through the embodied and bodily practices of wearing, maintenance and repair? Through a focus upon a single garment, the shoe, this book seeks to explore broader questions about the embodied experience of wearing and the affect of the worn. Using anthropological and psychoanalytic theories of attachment, value and exchange, this book investigates wearing as a reciprocal relationship between two agents - the wearer and the worn. It presents an exploration of how, through use, the mass-produced is made unique, and powerful; of the power of the marks of use and wear. Originating in a practice-based methodology which placed wearing at its centre, this book seeks to explore the outcomes and experiences of wear. Through the process of making, wearing, and photographing shoes Sampson sought to uncover the materiality of our relationships with the things we wear. She presents the act of wearing, the embodied experience of clothing and the body together, as a tool for developing knowledge, of ‘being in’ or ‘being with’ rather than observing from outside. Accompanied by Sampson’s evocative close-up images of worn shoes, this book presents a poetic exploration of the experience of wearing and a call to reconsider the value of the marks of use and wear.