School of Art and Design

Analysing, Comparing and contrasting the use of bilingual public signage in the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom and other best practice examples that could enhance the signage discussed

An déanamh anailíse ar úsaid comharthaíochat poiblí dátheangacha in Éirinn agus sa Ríocht Aonthaithe is á gcúr u gcomparáid is I gcodarsnacht lena chéile is le samplaí dea-chleachtais eile a d’fhéadfadh feabhas a chur ar an gcomharthaíocht sin.

The dissertation explores contemporary portraiture by two well-known photographers who have used an ethnographic approach to their work. Beach Portraits by Rineke Dijkstra and Signs That Say by Gillian Wearing are analysed using theories outlined by Roland Barthes, Richard Brilliant and Julian Stallabrass. The ethnography of the late 19th century is known to be objectifying resulting in the “control” of the subject. The role of ethnography within these contemporary portraits is also seen as objectifying. Regarding objectification, representation and identity this paper explores the methods, origins, and approaches within the artists work. A number of their images are compared and discussed answering the following questions, are the methods they have used an effective way of revealing the subject’s identity? How can we have a universal method deal with the specifics of an individual and unique identities? How can these groups of works overcome or salvage uniqueness out of seemingly shared identities? The paper shows that by using the ethnographic method it suppresses individuality under social masking and self-representation. To overcome this dilemma the investigation reveals that the subject’s handwritten text from Wearing’s Signs series adds individuality; in other words, it is the text that dilutes the universality of the pose revealing their unique identities.

What we need now is a new view of life, one that reflects our indeterminacy - Jonah Lehrer.

My paper will share recent discoveries which are a direct result of my practice-led research into the transformative and transcendental possibilities within aleatory art. Taking inspiration from Eastern spiritual practices and the work of a diverse range of practitioners such as William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin, John Cage, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Sophie Calle, George Brecht and Luke Rhinehart, I suggest that giving ourselves up to the workings of chance can have a transformative effect on our outlook and on how we live our lives.
My exploratory art works take inspiration from the world of commerce and consumerism but are underpinned by theories of how indeterminacy and chance impact on our lives and our personal views of reality.
These works mirror products, utilising design and materials from commercial design and production. They are interventionist, interactive and need to be engaged with, and not just viewed. These works are not for the art gallery, but for the street, the office, the train and the home. They hide in plain sight, masquerading as commercial objects, disguising themselves in the language of what Debord called the consumer ‘spectacle’. 
I believe that by embracing indeterminacy we can learn to see our personal realities in a new way. We can use chance to escape from habit and repetition; we can learn to transcend our personality, our culture and ultimately ourselves.

An exploration of textural cut-ups. How ‘systematic derangement’ works in a creative environment, and how we can adapt the techniques to discover more about ourselves and our relationship with society.

This paper will share my recent discoveries which are a direct result of my research into creative idea-generation, and the textural cut-up techniques developed by the artist Bryon Gysin, and the writer,
William Burroughs.
Burroughs believed that controlling influences use the media to flood society with words and images that manipulate and contain us. By confronting this media narrative, by cutting it up and distorting it, he suggested that we could escape from its influence. I propose that we can take this further and extend the techniques to discover more about ourselves.
I will examine textural cut-ups through the creative methods of Burroughs and Gysin, but also by exploring the work of John Cage, Tom Phillips and David Bowie.  I will also discuss my own practical experiments in using the techniques of ‘systematic derangement’ to create insights and new directions.
My research has shown that ‘new’ ideas are discovered by creating connections. By linking random elements together we create new possibilities. My paper will discuss how this works in a creative environment, but will also explore its uses as a tool for personal development and decision making similar in form to the Taoist
I Ching.

Abstract
The relationship between achievement and feedback and the fact that effective feedback improves achievement is well documented (Taylor and McCormack, 2004; Hattie, 2007). This is especially true of written feedback. However in art and design education feedback will take place in an often emotionally charged face-to-face meeting where verbal criticism, both negative and positive, takes place in front of an audience. The forum for this feedback in art education is the Group Crit (Crit, Art Crit, or Group Critique) at which students are expected to present and perform. It is the students’ reception and perception of this oral feedback in today’s quality-focused context, which is at the heart of this study.
This article presents a study into the impact of verbal feedback on achievement in art and design education via a survey taken amongst 60 undergraduate art and design students, at the University of Wolverhampton in 2009/10. The survey collected both quantitative and qualitative responses and identified a fundamentally emotional and fear-focused perception of the Group Crit, one opposed to its supportive and bespoke dynamic intentions. A stress factor (Pope, 2005; Anthony, 1991) is created when personalised feedback is perceived as a negative (critical) reflection on the student performance (at the Crit), their self worth and esteem and not the work presented. Criticism, and by implication feedback, is perceived as negative, personal and subjective and fraught with contradiction and loss of ‘respect’ - in opposition to the students’ previous prescriptive and ‘objective’ educational experiences.

Travel and Representation Published by Berghahn Books  ISBN-13: 978-1785336027

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.
—A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, 1896

I walk landscapes. I make journeys. Landscape, journey: each is essen- tially a work of the imagination, brought into being by human inter- pretation and through the constructed languages of painting, poetry, photography and  lm. They are even more powerfully evoked in our memories. In art, travel – or more speci cally the nature of journeying through speci c landscapes – leads to the creation of individual nar- ratives that describe personal transition, even a sort of metaphysical trauma. This chapter describes being in a landscape as an empirical and also an objective experience: it o ers an analysis of the familiar, banal and anonymous in the everyday environment, which, through walking and serial revisiting, creates images. These images can be perceived as material evidence of being there or, alternatively, as a record of an emotionally expressive experience, essentially about the walker’s state of being while involved in the act of travelling.

Perambulist Somnambulist (2011–14), my project based on a series of walks twenty minutes from my home, is presented in images – images that create place-conscious narratives of the familiar, the ordinary. Each image records what is objectively there, what is being experienced, with its date encoded and recorded. However, simultaneously, these images are visually expressive recordings of the photographer’s own inner narrative, as mediated through chronological time in photographs that
136 • The Transient Gaze: Perambulist Somnambulist
are recorded and as expressed by serial revisiting. So, in Perambulist Somnambulist, both ‘being there’ and ‘being’ are expressed in each image, in each metronomic journey. The images are partnered with poetry, poetry that also has the same sense of distance and closeness.

The Extraordinary Ordinary – in Everyday Photographs of The Black Country

The camera records a truth of sorts. It creates documents of societies, economies and individuals, stored in  les and archives, which separate and determine what future generations will know and see of our history. When we say history we mean this current and shared moment: the ‘now’. The political history of now, where what we democratically record, archive and store de nes us. Photographs are perceived as one
of the most reliable and most truthful recordings of our culture, history and ourselves – the visual memory of our lives, where each image is a trace of our existence. If each picture is a story, then the accumulation of these pictures comes closer to the experience of memory. Since Kodak  rst created the simple camera in 1888, they reassured us that all we had to do was press the button and they would do the rest. Our time and our memories were safe; the democratic snapshot image was invented.

We take images because knowing who we were is
an integral part of understanding who we are. We reminisce and become nostalgic about the past, yet the minutiae of the everyday and the ordinary is not deemed worthy of recording and it is these living details, such as work and labour, as a testimony to our or any photographic social history, which are lost and not recorded. Images on their own do not have meaning but what we chose to photograph for the family album or social archives, focused onto similar and familiar events – the wedding, the holiday and celebrations including birthdays, graduation or retirement – becomes photographic norms, deviant truths. These events present themselves as different and unusual amongst the usual everyday. They rise up and it is through these we tell stories, choose to remember and it is by recording and collecting these images that we create meaning.