Showing papers in "Journal of Writing in Creative Practice in 2010"

A connective model for the practice-led research exegesis: An analysis of content and structure

Abstract: Since the formal recognition of practice-led research in the 1990s, many higher research degree candidates in art, design and media have submitted creative works along with an accompanying written document or ‘exegesis’ for examination. Various models for the exegesis have been proposed in university guidelines and academic texts during the past decade, and students and supervisors have experimented with its contents and structure. With a substantial number of exegeses submitted and archived, it has now become possible to move beyond proposition to empirical analysis. In this article we present the findings of a content analysis of a large, local sample of submitted exegeses. We identify the emergence of a persistent pattern in the types of content included as well as overall structure. Besides an introduction and conclusion, this pattern includes three main parts, which can be summarized as situating concepts (conceptual definitions and theories); precedents of practice (traditions and exemplars in the field); and researcher’s creative practice (the creative process, the artifacts produced and their value as research). We argue that this model combines earlier approaches to the exegesis, which oscillated between academic objectivity, by providing a contextual framework for the practice, and personal reflexivity, by providing commentary on the creative practice. But this model is more than simply a hybrid: it provides a dual orientation, which allows the researcher to both situate their creative practice within a trajectory of research and do justice to its personally invested poetics. By performing the important function of connecting the practice and creative work to a wider emergent field, the model helps to support claims for a research contribution to the field. We call it a connective model of exegesis.

Writing through design, an active practice

Abstract: Stemming from a collaborative research project ‘designing, writing’, this article outlines preliminary findings to the various ways that design practices and design processes contextualize and explicate an intellectual proposition, i.e. how design contributes to advancing knowledge. The overall aim of the research investigation is to disseminate current understanding and best practice on the relationships between designing and writing and their mutual interest in speculation, expression and research. While most discussions around this topic adopt one of two (often polarized) distinct positions – the written text as sole authority and a design object’s capacity to be read as a cultural artefact – our investigation looks at various media of design articulation directly linked to design as a system of inquiry including but not limited to diaries, diagrams and choreographic notation and comics. These media expose a potential to ‘write’ through design and expand design research as non-linear, theoretical and yet practical tools. JWCP 3.1 art Preston and Thomassen_045-062.indd 45 6/21/10 9:25:32 AM Julieanna Preston | Aukje Thomassen

The cave: writing design history

Abstract: The beginnings of design histories are inconsistent. While industrial design histories tend to begin with European industrialization in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, other design disciplines claim a longer genealogy. Art, interior design and graphic design narratives each claim the Paleolithic caves in Southern France and Spain as their mythical birthplace: Altamira, Lascaux and/or Chauvet are used as a conventional starting point in standard textbook histories. A close analysis of the beginnings of several conventional design histories provides a starting point for addressing the cave’s place in design history. While historical writing is rarely considered as a poetic practice, in this paper, I will examine the poetic construction of the cave as a space for both the projections of contemporary ideas about design and, more importantly, as the starting point of a narrative that anxiously binds progressive civilization to specifically European cultural roots.

Out of our minds: exploring attitudes to creative writing relating to art and design practice and personal identity

Abstract: The following is taken directly from the abstract. This research project, now at the end of its third and evaluative year, primarily seeks to support Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE) art and design students' critical/reflective awareness and literacy skills through creative writing as relating to multidisciplinary art and design practices, and offers help to develop confidence and greater ownership of learning and participation in dynamic group activities. Through the undertaking of activities, learners explore the relationship between words and pictures and consider the intersections and boundaries where these art forms cross and meet.

Reflect on This

Abstract: In this article we reflect on reflection. To do this, we share examples of pedagogic approaches used in undergraduate performance programmes at York St John University that re-situate reflective practice within creative practice. For example, we explore the creative, multimodal use of a catalogue document that two of the authors used to encourage students to reflect as part of the B.A. (Hons) Theatre level 2 modules entitled performing the self & artist as witness. These modules aim to encourage students to consider themselves in some sense auteurs of themselves and their art practice. The case study illustrates that we need to go beyond the familiar if we are to be reflexive about the role of reflection in creative practice education.

Transparency or drama? Extending the range of academic writing in architecture and design

Abstract: This is a pre-print of an article published in Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 2010 published by Intellect. This version is reproduced under the journal’s author licence agreement. http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=154/

Gender and discipline: publication practices in design

Abstract: Design research and writing began to appear in scholarly journals over 30 years ago, coinciding in Australia with the transition of Design education into universities. Concurrently, a significant increase in the number of women in what could be considered a male-dominated profession and emergent discipline actuated feminist-informed ‘women and Design’ writing. While this writing raised important questions about gender and Design, it is generally not cited in Design literatures that do not have a specifically feminist focus, and as this article will attest, publication and citation rates demonstrate the dominance of men in positions of influence in scholarly Design journals. This is particularly problematic for female Design academics and for the field in the current audit climate in universities, whereby state-funded research output is measured by citation analysis systems. Drawing on feminist and Foucauldian theorizations of power and knowledge, and supported by an empirical audit and analysis of gender distribution in publication in two scholarly Design journals, I argue first that scholarship as a form of social practice in new professional fields such as Design is complexly disciplined and problematically gendered. Second, I argue that further empirical research, and new and different kinds of feminist-informed writing that attend closely to issues of gender, is required to productively disrupt and reconceptualize Design scholarship as it is currently practiced. Comment [u1]: Please confirm the changes made to this sentence. Comment [OU2R1]: Change accepted

Here and there: an artist's writing as aesthetic form

Abstract: Developing the recent interest in ‘art-writing’, this one-act play explores one aspect of that area: specifically, an artist's writing. The monologue adapts Mieke Bal's notion of art history, written from the place of its objects, to invoke the idea of an artist's writing as writing by and as an artist. Contending that this is writing as aesthetic form, the play's ‘Speaker’ proposes that an artist's writing is distinct from other forms of discourse about art precisely by virtue of its aesthetic dimension. The speaker defines ‘aesthetic’ via Hegel's notion of the arts as a symbolic discourse in which the signifier is visible, and ‘motivated’ by its signified. In a Hegelian scheme, this makes the arts inferior, and hence makes the task of defending aesthetic writing, which takes up the rest of this drama, all the more urgent. The case is made with reference to pedagogic pragmatics, cultural politics, ethics and therapeutics: Barthes' ‘pleasure of the text’ – with which the text concludes.

Creative visual art storytelling and concept development

Abstract: This article presents practice-based research in visual arts undergraduate subjects. Pedagogical approaches in the Visual Arts strand of the Bachelor of New Media Arts (BNMA), School of Creative Arts (SoCA) are outlined as motivational strategies, where stories emerge as the basis for issue-driven projects. Curriculum design was based on the premise that visual artists in a university will access specific software programmes to suit their interests and skills. While students are required to build on skills and knowledge, the lecture programme targets creative art projects with emphasis on conceptual development and digital presentation. Teaching to develop individual pathways in creative arts practitioners at tertiary level has demonstrated benefits and students provided strong appraisal in student feedback for teaching (SFT). Lectures present ways that artists consider a story, along the lines of a plot or storyboard, providing scope for the concept that the character is to expose. Hull and Katz (2006, Crafting an Agentic Self: Cases Studies of Digital Storytelling, 41:1) refer to storytellers becoming their agentic selves in terms of personal development. One subject combines ideas about storytelling with contemporary visual arts and, in the context of relational aesthetics (Bourriaud 2002), connectivity occurs between visual and issue-driven art. The subject design involves broad issues as well as reflexivity, and merges with the scenario of how artists become involved with exposing universal concerns. Students demonstrate potential for research in artworks where visual interpretation of characters involves storytelling and documentation. Artists' statements contextualize the work on display. Students reference web links and identify Computer Learning Technologies (CLT) crucial to their work. They write about software and links to online tutorials to explicate new knowledge and technical advancement.

Writing experiments with a lateral leaning

Abstract: The drawing and writing experiment that I offered at the Centre of Learning and Teaching in Art and Design (CLTAD) conference in Berlin, 2010 is related to my Ph.D. research (based at Leeds Metropolitan University). The research centres around what I am calling the lateral or supra-rational sides of designing processes. While the term lateral was originally made popular by de Bono (1967) in his book Lateral Thinking, its association in the research project embraces the kinds of thinking and making connected to ideation, visualization, intuition and other elements of a sphere of practice that are harder to contain and evidence within orthodox Humanities approaches to academic research. Schon (1983) in The Reflective Practitioner, Law on Beyond Method: Mess (2004) and tangentially, in terms of contemplating a network of practice, Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis (1992) have all further influenced my research. The research project's particular portrait of processes emerged, in a first stage, from interviews with design students, designers/tutors and young designers in Leeds and at the Royal College of Art. The second, more speculative stage of research asks what might happen if such subject matter and such modes of practice are imposed on writing culture. The drawing and writing experiment in Berlin was a hands-on exploration of the theme of Observation.