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NCAD Postgraduate Yearbook 2011
NCAD Postgraduate Yearbook 2011
NC
AD
Postgradu
ate Yearbook 2011
Spine 14mm
« ‘Gone to the dogs’ Image from Nigel Cheney textile and quilt exhibition, NCAD Gallery 6th – 28th May 2011
NCAD Postgraduate Yearbook 2011
3 « ????????
First published in 2011 by
NCAD – National College of Art and Design
Coláiste Náisiúnta Ealáinte is Deartha (NCAD) is a recognised college of the National University of Ireland (NUI).
© June 2011. All rights reserved NCAD, the artists, authors and publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Publication Coordinators: Prof. Siún Hanrahan, Head of Academic Affairs & Research and Margaret Phelan, Administrator, Research & Postgraduate Development, NCAD.
Design: Language, www.language.iePrint: Character Print
Edition of 650
« Mick O’Kelly, Urban Space and Models of Sustainability.
6 Preface
9 StudentResearch
10 Students Completing 2011
15 MA – Design 25 MA – Design Sustainability 29 M.Litt – Education 31 MA – Visual Arts Education 51 Master of Fine Art 83 MA – Art in the Digital World 101 MA – Art in the Contemporary World 109 MA – Design History & Material Culture 125 PhD – Fine Art – Sculpture 127 PhD – Fine Art – Media 129 PhD – Visual Culture
131 StaffResearch
155 Projects&Events
Contents
Preface
As Ireland’s leading site of research and postgraduate education in art and design, NCAD has initiated and continues to develop a multi-faceted research and innovation infrastructure in support of critical and creative engagement with a range of audiences and contexts: from the academic to the entrepreneurial. Key to this critical and creative engagement is the dynamism and commitment of our postgraduate students. Across the range of postgraduate programmes offered by NCAD we seek to enrich and challenge the practices and understandings of our students, and to be enriched, challenged and renewed as a College through their insights, critique and energy.
The first part of this yearbook showcases the work of students who are graduating at Masters or Doctoral level this year, and gives no more than a glimpse of the vibrant critical engagement of our students within their particular area of study, in support of each other’s development and in expanding disciplinary boundaries. The work of some students is not presented within the yearbook; in relation to the MSc Medical Devices Design, this is testament to the innovative and highly valued nature – conceptually and commercially – of the outcomes of their study.
In cultivating and meeting the challenges posed by its postgraduates, the active participation of staff at the cutting edge of national and international research and practice is crucial. The second part of this yearbook – offering a glimpse of the research interests and activities of individual staff members, and brief reports on a range of initiatives across the college – suggests something of the research culture and infrastructure driving the development of NCAD.
One of NCAD’s most significant developments in this academic year was the forging of an Academic Alliance with University College Dublin. Embarked upon in recognition of enormous academic potential, the alliance is unfolding through the engagement of researchers and academics across a range of domains of shared interest, and involves both shared teaching and collaborative research.
For NCAD, the heart of this alliance lies in a vision for an expanded academy, oriented toward the world and acting with others to make a difference through the creativity, innovation and energy of art and design.
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NCAD’s vision is to be in the world and to speak and be heard in the culture, in the economy and in the society. In celebrating the work of these students we are confident of the contribution they will make to the renewal of our culture, economy and society.
Prof.SiúnHanrahanHead of Academic Affairs and Research
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Student Research
Students Completing 2011MA–Design
Pedro Bretas Mary Fannon Lesley Kelly Mary Plunkett Suzanne Rogers* Julie Connellan Deirdre Gorman* Gwendoline Lettis* Richard Quin*
MA–DesignSustainability
Kate Cronin Darragh Kirby
MSc–MedicalDeviceDesign
Tim Briggs* Catherine Dean* James Jackson* Diarmuid Kelly* Alec Lillis* Gangling Liu* Adrian McDermott* Peter Murphy* Owen Ryan*
Amy Sanfey* Daragh Walsh*
M.Litt–Education
Máire Davey
MA–VisualArtsEducation
Maria Broderick Katy Fitzpatrick Martina Jones Charlene Lawlor Nora McGrath* Claire Murphy Martin Yelverton Susanna Carr* Paul Hickey* Aoife Keogh Lynette Lambe* Colin MacAulay* Finola McTernan Anna O’Herlihy Fiona King
11
MasterofFineArt
Miranda Blennerhassett Roderick Bradshaw Aisling Conroy Claire Duffy* David Eager Maher Rosaleen Gartland* Kathy Herbert Blathnaid Ní Mhúrchú Dee O’Shea Daryl Slein Nicole Tilley Maureen Buckley Ella Burke Louise Croke Gabhann Dunne Joseph Noonan-Ganley* Amanda Graham* Myra Jago Shane O’Connor Louise Peat
MA–ArtintheDigitalWorld
Zsofia Berenyi Jen Darcy Nora Duggan Eimear Fitzmaurice Jules Hackett Andrew Healy Michael Higgins Nicole McKenna Roisin McNamee
MA–ArtintheContemporaryWorld
Alan Boardman Pauline Clerkin* Jade Dillon* Adrian Duncan Nicola Kennedy* Fionn Kidney* Cabrini Lynch Laura MacGowan* Laoise Meek* Catherine O’Carroll* Kirstin Simpson* Naomi Byrne* Nicholas Dolan* Colette Doyle* Marion Kelly* Laura Keogh* John Lonergan* Vanya Lambrecht-Ward Margaret McLaughlin* Siobhan Mullan* Magdalena Wieckiewicz*
MA–DesignHistory&MaterialCulture
Sara Daley David Devitt Liza Foley Aifric Iremonger-Mooney Hannah Mullan Teresa Reilly Máire Walsh Miriam Ugarte Abollado
13
PhDinEducation
Glenn Loughran*
PhDinFineArt
Sarah Dunne – Sculpture Collette Nolan – Media
PhDinVisualCulture
John Buckley* Moran Been-noon* Declan Long* Tim Stott* Ann Wilson
*Does not appear in yearbook
15
MA – Design
This project aims to study the concept of mass customisation and how to collaborate with interactive design in order to promote tourist regions in Brazil. It is a multidisciplinary project, which involves: art direction, concept design, illustration, interface design, branding, animation, functional design and technical realisation.
The challenge is to create a meaningful digital experience so that it becomes more than an image, more than words and more than a brand itself. By expanding into the realm of emotions and feelings it is hoped to engage the user with a personal online journey that is effectively more captivating and fulfilling an experience. The web application allows users to create a virtual travel experience to Brazil, explore touristic cities and share their experience with others.
A considerable part of the work required in-depth research into Action Script 3.0. The capability of this powerful programming language makes it ideal for building an intense, interactive Internet application.
It has been developed: a research into mass customisation and digital configurators (in games and websites); a moodboard to guide the creation of the interface identity; a brand identity reflecting the concept of the website; a research in colours that express ideas such as:
tropical nature, “Brazilianism” and beach culture; a configurator that allows users to “customise a Braziilian travel experience”; 21 different illustrations/animations for the configurator interface; a detailed “navigation tree’ of the entire website; a research into flash video capability; some video footage of different beaches to use in the background of the homepage; the conception of the “exploration by map interface”, the main purpose of which is to allow users to explore different touristic cities by interacting with a map; a research into action script 3.0 (loading, tweening, events, functions, array, variables, liquid stage and xml); a huge map illustration for the “exploration by map interface”; keypoint animations for each city featured on the map; the gathering of content (images and text) for the 12 coastal cities that are being featured; the development of an easy to use navigation system for the whole website; the conception of the “outcome interface”, whose main purpose is to allow users to get more information about the selected city; and finally but not least the writing of more than 4000 lines of code, which makes this site rich in animations and functionality.
Mobile: 087 949 9291
www.bretasdesign.com
Pedro Augusto Bretas
17
MA – Design
WalkDublin–AwayfindingdesignprojectconcernedwithfindinganIrishsolution
A successful wayfinding system is designed to facilitate the completion of a journey within the public, built environment. It must be centred on user needs, ensuring immediate communication, instil user confidence and enable ease of access. Clarity and consistency of information, transparency of public transport modes and the reduction of clutter by means of a planned system gives the positive impression of a place that is eager to show all that it has to offer.
A problem analysis of Dublin city centre revealed that street clutter from an ailing sign system and congestion of traffic are contributing factors to an environment that does not welcome pedestrians. Recent statistics from Fáilte Ireland (2009) show that the majority of tourists come to Ireland to experience Dublin city centre (by foot) and this accounts for 54% of the total tourism revenue. To encourage repeat visits Dublin city needs to become a walking city.
DefineMy aim is to develop a coherent wayfinding system for pedestrians that can operate within the rules of standardisation without losing a sense of individuality specific to Dublin City.
ConnectDublin is a compact city. Main cultural attractions are within walking distance. This is not communicated well which led to the design of schematic maps which would provide an immediate understanding of the city parts and, supported by detailed street maps, aid the planning of a visit to the city.
IntegrateA new wayfinding system is currently being introduced to the city. It consists of directional fingerposts, street maps and combination panels, strategically placed throughout the city centre, eventually replacing the old brown signs. To maintain visual continuity, I propose to integrate narrative signs (connected with the schematic map colour code) that will function as walking trails. This will strengthen the new system whilst creating intrigue and encouraging exploration. The visual language is influenced by Celtic interlacing patterns and illumination. The design is contemporary and flexible in order to maintain long life. The proposed wayfinding system will integrate with the new directional system and will function as a city guide and learning experience.
Mobile: 085 163 4057
Mary Fannon
19
MA – Design
RefiningSpontaneity
My MA research was preoccupied by Formalism rather than the translation of a personal or social concept. I wished to explore the language of abstract forms and develop an instinctive or spontaneous way of working, while deconstructing and interpreting the process.
My research was driven by the juxtaposition of architectural lines and sculptural form, an element found in contemporary shoe design. The work would transform a two dimensional line into a three dimensional form. The continuous exploration of line, movement and form allows different expressions and variations of this idea.
This new body of work consists of a series of 3D forms that captures a spontaneous linear movement. Each form evolved from the same template but the fluidity of the line is unique. This challenged the material and my technical skill.
Each curvilinear form has various viewpoints; there is no back or front, left or right, top or bottom. Soft whirling lines move around a void to encourage the viewers’ eye to follow. The aim is to achieve gentle movement that looks free and unforced; the line should have a life of its own. The value of understanding this is contained within the form.
Lesley Kelly
21
MA – Design
NightPrayer:AContemporaryBookofHoursThroughLetterpressandPrint
The books of hours were the bestseller of Medieval times. Famed for their decorative initials, elaborate miniatures and floral borders which surrounded the text of the breviary; a series of psalms, hymns and scripture readings designed to fit in with the natural rhythm of the day and provide a framework by which the monastic life was supported. Made for the laity rather than those in religious life, they varied from small pocket-sized prayerbooks for the masses to highly skilled and beautifully bound large manuscripts that were produced for an individual wealthy patron.
The aim of my MA research is to produce a contemporary version, based on this idea of the illustrated prayerbook and using the text of Compline or Night Prayer, the traditional prayer at the end of the day and the last of the ‘hours’. Selection of the text was made with the advice of a number of religious and lay people who use the prayers in their daily life.
An additional motivation was to further my knowledge of print-making, and particularly letterpress in the Visual Communication Print Workshop. In producing a limited edition of twenty
books I used a number of printing techniques and gained skills and experience in these fields as well as in bookmaking and binding. The illustrative sections include etchings, five colour reduction lino prints and hand–gilded relief plates. Decorative numerals for the psalms pages were printed using wooden type.
Through selecting the text, designing and making the final piece I hope I have produced a interesting, functional and beautiful book. The final piece is a personal expression of my own interests in print, art, design, books and religion.
www.maryplunkett.ie
Mary Plunkett
23
MA – Design
MaterialMeaning–Artefactascarrierofsharedculturalmemoryincontemporaryjewellerydesign
This research is an exploration of the potential alternative functionality of jewellery as carrier of cultural memory resulting from the re-assessment and subsequent subversion of traditionally accepted value criteria ascribed to jewellery. The starting point for the research of this masters came in the form of questions which arose in relation to personal and collective identity, migration, location and dislocation. The work examines how shared cultural memory is bound to material culture and the way in which memories are triggered by the senses. The practical manifestation of the research seeks to open a dialogue between the object, the wearer and the observer. The pieces harbour narratives in their materiality and form which invite the observer to make a connection between what is being said and the viewer’s own personal experiences and associations. The research discusses the efficacy of a craft based design process for the realisation of work which carries multiple layers of meaning. I argue in favour of craft in today’s society and explore its importance and relevance as a means of accessing shared cultural memory in order to express
ideas and open new dialogues between individuals.
Peat, tinsmithing, Bronze Age artefacts and the aesthetic of the Irish agricultural environment represent the four main sources of inspiration for the practical work of this MA. The cultural, socio-economic and sensory associations connected with these materials, crafts and forms offered me a rich tapestry of meaning from which to draw in order to create this body of work.
« ‘Models for rings, brooches and neckpieces’ Paper, 2011.
Julie Connellan
25
Introduction
The aim of the study is to evaluate materials available for recycling, design new products based on these materials and set up a community based enterprise. This is a joint venture between the Market Development Programme for Waste Resources (rx3), the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) and facilitated through the Rediscovery Centre.
BackgroundOver 99% of paper gets exported for recycling as there are currently no paper mills in operation in Ireland. 24% of serviced households in Ireland have brown bins but we are currently at risk of failing to meet our EU targets for the reduction of biodegradable waste going to landfill.
ObjectivesThis study will explore how design can help reduce the volume of biodegradable waste going to landfill by encouraging best practice among householders. This can be achieved by increasing user participation and solving the common user convenience issues associate with food segregation such as bad odours, flies and maggots. The objective is to design a 100% compostable one day kitchen caddy for all biodegradable household waste. At the end of each day the caddy is sealed put in the brown bin or
home compost and a new unit is brought out for the next day. This product will be made from paper recyclate with the hope of reducing the volume of paper being exported for recycling and the volume of biodegradable waste being sent to landfill. Manufacture of this product will be achievable in a community based setting requiring minimal investment capital. The product will then be marketed to the Irish consumer with the potential for future export.
Mobile: 00353 87 966 2167
Kate CroninMA – Design Sustainability
27
MA – Design Sustainability
The idea of designing and prototyping an educational recycling playground where recycling would become a fun, active and educational experience for children arose from collaboration between NCAD, RX3 and the Ballymun Rediscovery Center, Dublin.
Based on the research undertaken into recycling, education and play, these three elements of the playground will be combined to best meet the needs of the children undertaking the Discover Science Programme at the Ballymun Rediscovery Center. The playground must provide high levels of play for the children while having a clearly positive effect on their knowledge of and attitudes towards recycling.
The playground will be designed taking account of the different means by which children learn; the many aspects of the child’s personality and their various intelligences and stages of development. It will recognise the social, emotional, physical and cognitive functions of play in children’s lives, the different forms and types of play and the nature and importance of inclusivity. It will also take account of the significant value to children of playing in a natural environment.
Proposed concepts included equipment manufactured from recycled materials and, alternatively, discarded objects – natural and manufactured – reused as play items.
The final playground will be composed of specially designed play equipment through which the children take part in both simulated elements of the recycling process and in real recycling activities.
The simulated recycling will involve role play as objects to be recycled and then negotiating play pieces that recreate different stages of appropriate recycling processes. These activities are designed to raise their awareness of recycling and its potential to produce new products. The children will also take part in actual recycling of plastic and paper. They will control and operate the customised recycling equipment and will end up with products to take away. As part of the sustainable ethos of the playground they will also be involved in producing energy to run the recycling equipment.
Changed economic circumstances and a potential sponsor have meant that the playground has changed from being designed for a fixed area to being transportable. This is a significant change to the project and opens up further future possibilities for the playground including travelling to schools and outdoor events.
Darragh Kirby
29
The purpose of this research is to explore how an integrated framework at local government level could encourage participation in culture and aid the development of a creative society. It is intended to test the hypothesis that participation in the arts with the aid of local authorities can nurture creativity at local level.
Local authorities have only recently – with the advent of the 2003 Arts Act – been required to write a plan for the arts. Local authority cultural provision has been growing since the first arts officer was employed in 1985 and now often leads the way in areas such as public art, festivals, arts and health and arts education.
Creative economy and cultural tourism are relatively new phenomenons that now appear to take precedence over societal and community objectives in current policy documents. Evidence of the social impact of the arts has now been shifted to concerns as to how to quantify culture in economic frameworks. The discretionary basis of arts funding within local authorities is viewed by many as leaving it vulnerable to budget cut-backs. As Throsby advocates there must be a balance found between the economic and cultural value of the arts in society.
This thesis explores the three themes of local authority arts provision, participatory arts and creative economy. Through questionnaires, interviews and a literary review of the emerging themes, data supporting the use of an integrated policy framework at local government level emerged. Such an approach could strengthen and unify this area of public service provision and lead to a more creative society.
Máire DaveyM.Litt – Education
31
MA – Visual Arts Education
AnApproachtoteachingthestrandunit‘LookingandRespondingtoArt’
This research is concerned with the Looking and Responding to strand unit of the Primary school Visual Arts curriculum with an emphasis on the strand ‘paint and colour’. Outlined below are two questions I sought to address.
1. Given an approach to the teaching of the strand unit ‘Looking and Responding’ and accompanying resource material, will teachers be more confident in its teaching?
2. In teaching visual literacy and an approach to looking, are children able to engage with and ‘read a painting’?
A group of primary school teachers were surveyed to establish what type of resource they felt would best support their teaching. A focus group followed the results of this where specific content for inclusion in the resource book were identified. Based on the results of this I developed a resource book, which included an approach to its teaching, together with a CD of images.
Action research was carried out where the resource book and CD were piloted in my school for four weeks by seven classroom
teachers at all class levels. Each teacher was asked to teach two of the featured lesson plans each week for three weeks. In the fourth week, the teachers were asked to teach two more lessons by choosing any image from the CD and applying the approach to it.
Assessment of this research project involved assessing both the children’s learning as well as the teachers reactions. The children were assessed through classroom observations, audio recordings and written responses, and the teachers were asked to respond to the programme through answering a questionnaire.
Findings to date have been largely positive and have shown that when children take time to look they really begin to see.
Maria Broderick
33
MA – Visual Arts Education
TheDramaofArt,aresearchintotheuseofintegrateddramamethodologiesinagallerycontext
SummaryThis thesis aims to analyse and contextualise a project that took place in 2010 in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane while I was Education Curator at the Gallery. The project, The Drama of Art, investigated the use of interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary gallery education. The aim of the research is to probe and question the effectiveness of using drama methodologies to give students further understanding of an artist or exhibition. The project took place over two periods. Initially a pilot programme looked at the exhibition Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty and after the success of the pilot a second project responded to the exhibition Sir John Lavery, Passion and Politics. Secondary School students from 4th to 6th year took part in the programme. The Drama of Art project is rooted in a desire to challenge the more traditional gallery or museum visit. In both The Drama of Art phases students were invited to take part in an interactive tour followed by a drama workshop. The Drama of Art combines a variety of methodologies and approaches, including Art Historical, Visual Culture, Museum
Education, Drama Education, Museum Theatre and Arts Education. The research is rooted in the work of Freire, Dewey, Gardner, Boal and Hein’s model of a constructivist museum. In approaching this research project, some of the questions sought answered, included: does an interdisciplinary approach help to further students understanding of art in a gallery context; what is innovative in this approach; and does this type of cross discipline methodology influence the teacher, visual arts or drama facilitators approach to their own practice as educators. Little has been written on the use of drama methodologies in a visual arts context and I hope that this project will add to this under researched field.
Katy Fitzpatrick
35
MA – Visual Arts Education
The research question I am investigating this year is ‘Does the implementation of a series of looking and responding to art lessons impact on the general oral language development of junior infants in my school?’
The implementation of an intervention, involving looking and responding to the work of six artists in the junior infant classroom, is central to the research study. Strategies for developing oral language, such as pair and group work, have been incorporated into the intervention, as have carefully planned open ended questions and other means for developing language.
Elements of both action research and quasi-experimental research are used as research methodologies in the study. The project evolved from a personal interest in improving my own practice and the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment’s recommendation, in a recent Primary School Curriculum review, that there should be a renewed focus on developing the child’s ability to look at and respond to art in implementing the Visual Arts. Testing of expressive language in two junior infant classes using the (Renfrew Action Picture Test) RAPT took place before and after
the intervention and a control group were tested for comparison. Children’s responses to affective questions asked throughout the study were audio recorded and the process, through which the children went, was visually recorded using photography.
Results from testing suggest that children’s expressive language has been positively developed and enhanced using looking and responding to art as a methodology, over the course of the research study. Further findings are discussed in my dissertation.
The research has been not just worthwhile, in terms of the personal developments I have made as a primary school teacher, but fulfilling and beneficial to the children I have taught. The photo attached, is just a taste of one piece of art created by children in my class during the project, after looking and responding to the work of Damien Hirst.
Martina Jones
37
MA – Visual Arts Education
« First year, post primary student beginning collage work on an observational drawing on the fifth day of the action project.
Charlene Lawlor
WorkingTitle:Re-assessingassessment;oftheJuniorCertificateArt,CraftandDesigncurriculum
In this body of research the author is observing and asking, can post primary art education lend itself to formative assessment and does the current strategy of Junior Certificate assessment facilitate all learners within the art room? A prime focus of this research is based on whether the role of the current Junior Certificate assessment in Art, Craft and Design in the Irish Educational system, is as important in today’s classroom environment as it once was, when first introduced. It is the author’s intention to question the role of this strategy of assessment in Junior Certificate art education in the modern Irish context. This research is being conducted through an action project comparing two groups of first year post primary art students. One group has a continual assessment element inherent in each class over a four week period and the other class does not. With the conclusion of the project both groups will be formally assessed to compare and contrast the interjection assessment had on the first group. An implication of this action project may offer a suggestion that continual assessment at junior cycle is beneficial and it may be argued it could be
more beneficial to all learners in the art classroom of today.
39
MA – Visual Arts Education
My research is based on my experiences as an employee in an organisation that provides care and education to adults with intellectual disabilities. The organisation has been in existence for more than a century, and the ethos of the organisation has progressed in recent years to reflect the general positive paradigm shift in disability care provision from institutional based care services to community integrated services. In recent years there is more of an emphasis on meeting the needs and preferences of each individual who attends the service.
The recent introduction of National Quality Standards for Residential Services for People with Disabilities by HIQA (Health Information and Quality Authority) aims to ensure that all disability services provide the best service possible. Though these standards are for residential services they are impacting on day services and educational services in the field also.
In my research I am using the medium of painting to explore themes related to the field of disability care provision in this era of progress. By investigating issues that relate to institutional life, and the move away from it, I hope to gain an insight into the actual implications of
the positive changes that are underway. It is very difficult to imagine the implications of spending long periods of time in an institutional setting, but it is important to be aware of them to ensure the transition away from this style of care is done with the best interests of the individuals who attend these services as a priority.
Claire Murphy
41
MA – Visual Arts Education
HomeIsland
ExplorationofselfinalocalsettingThrough my research I set out to explore and examine elements or the notion of home. In particular I focused on Kings Island in my home town of Limerick. I was interested here in the relationship between notions of self, the self as an entity, and how this idea of self interacts, becomes defined and intwined with physical space. I choose Kings Island because it is a physical entity, set apart from other land and how this physicality compares to the separateness and singularity of the self. As I work as a visual artist I chose to use an art-based-research methodology, following the working methods and research practices of an artist, exploring my subject through visual art, meaning and answers to questions emerge through this process.
Martin Yelverton
43 « ‘Nettle Coat by Alice Maher’.
MA – Visual Arts Education
ContentandIncentive:AframeworkfortheinclusionofcontemporaryIrishartwithintheleavingcertificatecurriculum
As an art educator with a special interest in art history and visual culture, the aim of my study is to investigate the position of contemporary Irish art within the current leaving certificate programme. Through my own personal teaching experiences and contact with other art teachers it is clear that the topic of contemporary or living Irish art is not being consistently covered with leaving certificate students due to a number of factors. The main focus of my research is to evaluate teacher and student perceptions of the leaving certificate curriculum as it presently stands and to evaluate their attitudes towards the inclusion of contemporary Irish art within the syllabus. A review of available resources and a look at trends and statistics from the exam will be used to highlight the current educational status of contemporary or new Irish art and artists within the leaving certificate course.
A classroom resource on contemporary Irish artists, exploring their process and body of work has been developed as a research tool. This booklet has been disseminated to a number of art teachers
for use and review with their students. Each teacher and student participant completed a detailed survey in response to the booklet. This study hopes to find out what kind of impact, if any, engaging curriculum material on this topic can have on the different types of learner within contemporary Irish classrooms. An evaluation of curriculum policy regarding art history and appreciation and an outline of the influence of the current leaving certificate exam structure will be used to frame my findings. I will identify the current barriers to the inclusion of contemporary Irish art material within the leaving certificate course of study, and suggest possible strategies to assist and promote curriculum reform so as to facilitate this.
I am specifically interested in highlighting how second level students experience artworks and artists in the classroom, and how their experience, engagement and understanding of art in general, can be enhanced through the inclusion of contemporary Irish art content.
Aoife Keogh
45
MA – Visual Arts Education
« ‘Paper Ball’, Aoife Doyle, Textiles Department, Access Day Workshop 2010.
PolicyandPracticeoftheAccessProgrammeoftheNationalCollegeofArtandDesign–AnExaminationofCurrentPractice
The NCAD’s Access Programme is a college wide initiative that is located within the Faculty of Education. This research study takes place within this context and as an insider researcher I will use the findings of the research to help inform and direct future developments around increasing opportunities for access in an art and design context.
The purpose of this study was to examine current access provision. The College Access Programme commenced in 2005 and now encompasses a range of programmes and projects that engage with over thirty primary and secondary schools in Dublin.
A recent study carried out by the Economic and Social Research Institute ‘recognises that working class students are not only disadvantaged in social and economic terms, but they also lack the social access to information about higher education available to their more affluent peers’ (Smyth & Banks, 2010). Schools and their engagement with higher education institutes therefore play an important role in providing access to information that can inform choice.
A primary objective of this action research case study was to analyse the perceptions of secondary school art teachers, participating art and design students from the NCAD and pupils from secondary schools that have had a practical engagement with the NCAD Access Programme.
In triangulating data gathered through interview and questionnaires I sought to evaluate the impact of these programmes in the context of the NCAD access policy and national access policy as well as identify potential barriers to participation in higher education art and design.
Smyth E. and Banks J. “There Was Never Really any Question of Anything Else”: Young People’s Agency, Institutional Habitus and the Transition to Higher Education, Paper delivered at the European Network on Transitions in Youth Conference, Dublin, 9th–11th September 2010.
Finola McTernan
47
MA – Visual Arts Education
ThePrimarySchoolasaSpaceforLearning
Opportunities to enhance children’s experiences exist where the worlds of education and design meet – the potential for the sum of these parts to become more than the whole presents a range of exciting prospects and synergies. The environment where children spend much of their learning lives is school: school as a classroom, as a building, as a playground, as a large place, as a small space, as a community. Learning is not confined to one space; there are possibilities around every corner. Internationally there is a move towards creating a more flexible school design model that enables a holistic and multi-sensory approach to education and promotes active engagement with learning environments and the ‘in-between’ spaces in schools.
With little research done in the Irish context, the aim of my project was to investigate a series of existing school spaces and how they are regarded in the context of learning environments for children. My research looks at the area of school design and what might be considered innovative and stimulating learning environments. It explores learning spaces within the primary
school, the visual environment including the use of display and permanent artwork, and collaboration between architect and end user during the design process.
My field work included case studies of six primary schools as a way to explore contrasting building types and how they are used and considered as a series of learning spaces. Interviews with principals, teachers and architects gave an insight into perspectives regarding spatial and visual environments in schools as well as considering the relationship between the disciplines of design and education. Children’s perspectives were explored by administering questionnaires with senior pupils in the case study schools and a visual representation of the school environment was recorded through photography.
Analysis of the data aims to highlight trends in school design and identify current practices with regard to the visual environment. Recommendations will be made for the future creation of innovative learning spaces as a developing process between school designers and school community.
Anna O’Herlihy
49
MA – Visual Arts Education
Fiona King
The thesis sets out to evaluate and reflect on an action research intervention that facilitated the student art teacher with a pedagogical framework to explore ways in which to embed an issue based approach into the Post Primary Art, Craft and Design curriculum. The research encompassed gathering qualitative data that presented a reflective analysis of the student art teacher’s experience of the methodological approach facilitated during the intervention in order to explore socio-political, cultural and environmental themes through a visual art lens and the translation of this process into a classroom context. A quantitative attitudinal study presented the student art teachers opinions as to whether or not the subject of Art Craft and Design should accommodate an issue-based approach.
The writing of Hoffmann Davis (2008), Eisner (2002), Danver, Steers and Swift (2006), underpinned and contextualised the pedagogical approach. This presented me with a theoretical framework that identifies the significant and distinctive features of arts-based learning that inculcate an experience for the learner that is both qualitative and concrete. A case study recorded the chronological narrative of how the student art teacher utilises the material, the image and
the art-making process to record the tensions and synergies that exist for an artist/educator in engaging and exploring issue based content. In doing so the fundamental question emerged; can an issue-based approach to art education be effectively implemented in a way that will ensure that the core aesthetic and skill based engagement of art is not undermined or subverted by its inclusion? This question was interrogated through a semi-structured interview that documented the student art teacher experience and perceived impact of embedding an issue based approach within their teaching practice.
To contextualise my role as artist/researcher I have located some of the research within the context of my own practice as a photographer to produce a series of analogue and digital images that explore the concept of place to map identity.
51
Masters of Fine Art
I work with the medium of painted installation to engage with the relationship between art and architecture. Using this technique I explore the subjects of urban design, contemporary architecture, modernism and ornamentation. The work responds specifically to the location’s contextual, formal and material qualities whilst also incorporating motifs and themes arising from my research.
I am interested in the ways in which we construct environments for ourselves: the way we enclose space, organise it, order it, and subsequently navigate our way through it. Through gaining an understanding of constructed spaces and the utopian drive to create an idealised urban context, I aim to make work that references a purity of vision, but that also acknowledges the flaws and failures in these plans deriving from the individual’s need for freedom and non-conformity.
My large-scale site-specific installations use the physical structure of the gallery/site as a supporting ground to the painted elements in an inclusive approach that brings the institution, and architecture in a wider sense, directly into the work. It is important that the building provides not only part of the subject matter of
the work but that it becomes an integral physical component to the final formal resolution.
Miranda Blennerhassett
53
Masters of Fine Art
Roderick Bradshaw
Intheabsenceofdreams
“Give me two hours a day of activity and I’ll take the other twenty two in dreams” Luis Buñuel
My work for some years now has dealt with the experience of being me, I am particularly interested in shifting realities and my own psychology and as such I have tried to document my changing psychological state, illustrate my psychological experiences and with this work deal with a psychological experience I don’t have. I can’t say that I don’t dream but I don’t remember dreaming and haven’t for some years.
Theworkisintwoparts:Dreamscape PrintsIt seems to me that dreaming is a state of un-reality wrought with possibility and from what I remember can be both real and indistinct. It is in-distinction and possibility that I am attempting to deal with in this work.
All images are loaded with the prior experiences of the viewer. We may all be looking at the same image yet read it differently. Being of indistinct form and without narrative, like the dream state, these images offer the opportunity to be all possible events associated with a particular colour set, contingent on
the viewers experience. As such, they are as dependent on the viewer for their meaning as on the maker.
Wake-up VideoIs an imagined utopian dream, meditative and relaxing with a hint of humour and a kicking finale.
55
Aisling ConroyMasters of Fine Art
“ To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by Mind at Large-”Aldous Huxley
Working with notions of the infinite and with transcendental spaces, during my post graduate studies I have been drawing ideas from optical illusionary processes, colour theory, sound technology meditation and Yogi Art. My research and work combines these aspects of sound, colour and three-dimensional form in an attempt to explore the realms of time and space through human experience and perception.
Mobile: +353 87 932 4613
57 « ‘Seeing is Believing’ 2011.
AStitchinTime
Eager Maher’s practice is conceived through an interest in an autonomous reality. Processes of interpretation and the functions of hermetic symbols are used to serve the imagination as harbingers to the world he creates. The curious vignettes are exquisitely compact and delicate, pencil work is persuaded and guided in an absurd mercurial twist. The viewer is invited to coerce and pursue these optic inflections, questioning a propensity to grasp and draw associations between impressions of the disarranged and the deranged.
Formal historic drawing styles are deliberately adopted and transformed. The spindly craftsmanship becomes organic, out of control, smothering around and through their environments, pushing the luxurious into a flurry of pathological deliquescence. Leaving a residue of resonances and suggestions, with a quick drama of possibility and impossibility. Saturated with a charged opulence theses pieces propose a world where gravity is ignored and distance collapses, time becomes suspended, accosted to a space of personal logic. The drawings are generally small in scale, closer inspection reveals intensely
dense areas of detail, a constructed seamlessness where the tacit knowledge of subject and skill are conceptually equal. Colonial imagery, religious symbols, Victorian dandies and iconic suggestions of imperial legacies are used as symbols of power and time. These psychological and poetic motifs are altered, disrupting hierarchies and forming a conscious waking dream.
Masters of Fine Art
David Eager Maher
59
Masters of Fine Art
Kathy Herbert
My research involved an investigation of my core ideas and processes, as well as an exploration of methods of engaging an audience. My practice is positioned in an Art and Ecology framework and addresses our attitudes and perceptions of how we live on Earth and explores the notion of art as an instrument for change in the context of the ecological debate. I am interested in how art can articulate this human / Earth relationship and my methodology comprises walking around specific places, of conversations with people, collecting facts, opinions, stories, gathering natural and found objects, taking photographs. It is all subject for the imagination and forms and informs my practice.
My reading included texts that examine systems thinking – everything related and interrelated. This brought great clarity to my thinking. I could see the BEING (existence rather than physical) an artist as a process from which artwork emerges. I understood that the process is as important as the emergent artworks, and that the to-ing and fro-ing between making and thinking comprised the reflective practice. Thus the “process” is the main thrust of the work, through constant iteration and reiteration. This learning enabled me to
construct a framework for my thinking. Understanding my work as non-linear presented me with a more holistic view of my subject and opened many areas for future study.
Part of my inquiry involved informal interactions with audience, collecting opinions, engaging in dialogue, inviting comment from people in everyday situations. This process of engagement led me to investigate the potential of identifying audience on the internet and I have been working with special interest sites particularly to do with mapping and walking. This dialogue has initiated imaginative ways of working to facilitate these new interactions and relations.
61
Blathnaid Ni Mhurchu
Masters of Fine Art
63
Masters of Fine Art
My practice aims to create a psychological tension, aiming to unsettle, encompassing the notion of spatial memory and imaginary architecture. A preoccupation and fascination with empty and transitory elements of the interior directs the work and leads to an enquiry into dystopic ideals, failed and incomplete architecture.
The creation of a space within a space suggests notions of mise en abyme and the spatial uncanny. Obscure viewpoints such as gaps and cracks in the architecture hinder and disrupt the space, aiming to instil a physical and psychological impenetrability.
Referencing filmic, literary and social elements of interior architecture to set up metaphorical labyrinthine and disoriented space, parallels can be drawn between the real and fictional, hinting at an unrecognizable familiarity, blurring boundaries between place and placelessness, inside and out.
Dee O’ Shea
65 « ‘Selina’.
FamilyandFriends
My Practice is to explore spirituality, the concept of carrying the cross/burden of every day, heaven and hell; the different ends of the spectrum; beauty and ugliness; war and peace; evil and love; living in fear and living in love and within a fearless environment where fear does not exist; compulsiveness and laid back; anxiety, racing thoughts and peace of mind; health and wealth; poor and rich; SEESAW.
Essay‘The Lovely Mess of the Message’
RecentExhibitionsFor the Rape Crisis Centre ‘Film Base’ November 2010.
Masters of Fine Art
Daryl Slein
67
Masters of Fine Art
Nicole Tilley
In the broadest terms my work investigates the idea of the existential threshold, that is the in-between intangible line that is neither the ‘here’, nor the there.
Characters exist in my imagination in a liminal state, upon the threshold between my mind and their drawn, cut or sewn manifestations. Heroines from bedtime stories, beloved pets and thread bare toys co-exist with many others in a mental compost heap of collective and personal shared experience and imagery. The pen, the pencil, the scalpel and the needle are the midwives that enable their transition from the non-physical into the physical. They are delivered into drawings, silhouettes, rag characters and creature children that interact again in another liminal space. During the act of making they become not quite what they were and not quite what they will be. Somewhere in the middle, upon the threshold, these hybrid identities totter on the brink of being and not being.
I choose symbolically loaded materials, objects and imagery that occupy a liminal or inbetween position. Second hand fabrics sourced from charity shops, children’s clothes and paper are some of the low status textures that find their
space somewhere in the gap between fine art, craft and illustration. The shadow itself is a nonentity that depends on light and object for it’s inception.
I would like the work to operate on both an intellectual and sensual level. The interpretation of the work is of equal importance as the artist’s intention. For me the interaction between viewer and object, the flickering middle space is, perhaps, also where the art happens.
69
Masters of Fine Art
The research for my Masters was based on my personal experience of mental health issues. For my research I visited psychiatric hospitals, clinics and social services. I drew on these experiences and wanted to bring aspects of mental illness to the attention of the viewing public.
In the process of depicting images surrounding mental health, I was expecting to benefit personally from that process. It was a means for me to express myself and my feelings in a public way. I have benefited greatly from this process, which could only have been successful through the medium of sculpture.
Primarily I decided to highlight two aspects of mental illness, paranoia and self -harming. In the case of paranoia, I tried to place the spectator in a situation which would give them an insight into the paranoid mind. For this purpose, I constructed a metal chair with a multiple of mirrors on iron stalks, creating an all-round view of the surroundings when seated. An image of this chair is shown.
The issue of self-harm is not well understood, and I had to tread carefully in creating alternative solutions. I decided to create a series of four wax forearms with wrists prominently in view. These wrists displayed various injuries and alternative
methods for achieving the same outcome. The alternatives were, in turn; zipping, elastic bands, pins and medication. All of these methods would create a sensation of pain similar to physical harm without the serious consequences.
In the future, I will be continuing to explore these issues and I am looking forward to the reactions to my current work for guidance as to how to proceed.
Maureen Buckley
71
Masters of Fine Art
Ella Burke
Working with the attendants from the college, I have been investigating the role of the worker and labour in modern Ireland, and contrasting this with the relationship the building on St John’s Lane, (in its former role as a children’s school,) has had with Nationalism, Larkinism, and Inghinidhe na hEireann. I wanted to use the attendant’s lunchroom to display my work, a small room situated on the first floor of the building, above the main door. However, memory and politics clashed as negotiations to hang a photo of the attendant’s as Jim Larkin failed. Union rules – students and workers spaces must be kept separate. A white flag is raised. Pat and Mark will raise it every morning they start work and lower it in the evening. It is placed in front of the lunchroom window, and as we eat our lunch we look at it, and remember...
I am interested in how man valorizes objects in an ode to great or tragic moments, to permanize the memory of the event. I create situational, ephemeral, and time-based sculptures, that embrace or capture a once-off performance. The work usually expires, and survives through video and photographic documentation. Investigating memory, and its role in developing society and political spaces, my sculptures are
mourned for their brief and human qualities. It is through their absence that their presence becomes most arresting; giving a melancholy that not only mirrors mortality but also gives an empathy to past ideologies and unrealized aspirations.
www.ellaburke.org
73
Masters of Fine Art
Louise Croke
Waysofseeingthedyingprocess
My work questions liminal states of consciousness in relation to Buddhist philosophy, my own experiences and others. Liminal states of consciousness are characterized by ambiguity, openness and indeterminacy.
During these states, one’s sense of identity dissolves to an extent, bringing about disorientation. This period of transition where normal limits of thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed, creates a situation which may lead to new perspectives on the notion of perception and reality.
Animals unintentionally teach us about euthanasia and the human condition.
Death cannot be conceptualized but maybe the apprehension of impending death can. The animals that appear in my work are a metaphor for the fear and confusion that may arise during liminal states of consciousness we are either aware or unaware of.
For all sentient beings the journey near end of life will cause some levels of fear. This may be different for each individual because it represents the unknown and goes against our hard wiring for survival1.
I employ lens-based media to investigate ways to create an implicit connection to our limited understanding of an evaporating reality through video and photographic installations.
1 p221, Pain and Suffering, Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin & Catherine Johnson. Bloomsbury 2005
75 « The Brown Wolf
TheBrownWolf
I have taken a critical view of how animals are perceived and thought about in contemporary society. In the work, I rely upon the wolf as a principal motif and vehicle for understanding processes of marginalistaion. The work communicates a tension between animals and human spaces. In parallel, the pieces also investigate the othering of minorities and groups that are liminal to society. Moreover, the place or site of each work is equally important and reverses romantic notions of humankind’s relationship to nature.
The content of the work is drawn from my personal intellectual interests and readings on history, culture and popular science, and is never about the external world environment I inhabit. Instead it reflects my internal world concerns and values.
The main research has been on how to navigate these complex ideas through paint and how the medium in application erodes sophisticated connections of subject matter but can retain a coherent if non-literal response to my concerns.
Masters of Fine Art
Gabhann Dunne
77
Masters of Fine Art
Myra Jago
My work operates in the juncture between perception and reality, where involuntary, instinctive reaction engages alongside purposeful thought and action.
Mirroring, where the real meets the reflected, illustrates that juncture as both the point of emerging symmetry and the inconclusive join where both entities converge. It is this tentative quality of ambiguity which most aptly describes the tone I am aiming for in my practice.
Palindromes, mirrors, duality, symmetry perform equally as terminology and content throughout the work, operating as conduits in the reproduction and generation of the dual vulnerabilities of reflexive and reflective reaction.
‘All candidate organising principals of nature, in our modern perspective, involve hypothetical new symmetries… Symmetry has become fundamental to our basic laws of physics and that’s not going to change – its going to stay that way forever. We have really uncovered one of nature’s basic life motifs’. Dr Christopher T. Hill
www.myrajago.com
79
Masters of Fine Art
« “Of Concrete, Steel and Glass” inspired by Michel de Certeau’s book “The Practice of Everyday Life”.
The basis of my practice concerns experiencing an urban environment. I have approached this subject using different media and different methodologies. Currently, I am using photography to explore this experience further.
The work consists of images I shoot during walks or drifts. I intend the images to have a ubiquitous quality allowing them to transcend the specifics of any one place or particular idea. I have approached my practice intuitively, allowing the images and ideas to develop in relation to one another, but from a central point of inquiry.
Shane O’Connor
81
Masters of Fine Art
Louise Peat
The point of departure in my art practice research references global communication technology, particularly the network of submarine telecommunication links, transmitting data, exchanging, connecting, interconnecting. Cable companies have been laying connections under the sea and oceans all over the world for over 150 years. Technological development has spurred rapid growth in submarine connections and, in less than 50 years we have gone from making 36 simultaneous transatlantic calls to around 150 million. My inquiry is also informed by and emerges from the nature of ocean as fluid space. This continuously changing fluid space – oceanic space, can be configured as a medium of dynamism as much as a media of dialectic exchange. The work shifts from the myriad of connected cables carrying millions of conversations around the world under its oceans to the circulatory systems of the oceans themselves, where the waves of conversations to-ing and fro-ing across our continents, like nomadic voices, are in rhythm with the incessant ebb and flow of the tidal systems.
My art practice employs multiple approaches simultaneously, and is open to an investigation through painting, sound, drawing and print. I explore
and operate these specific processes in various transmutations with each other to build a hybrid of work to form a play of relationships between the materials and the organic and the technological concepts. My concern with the art practice is how I pursue it, it’s a very intuitive response to images, sound, concepts and materials, a desire on my part to attempt to make connections, or at least to somehow experience these things as expressive forces. I am interested in how the visual language proceeds in its own rules of logic, how painting and sound open up to other possibilities, and how I continuously endeavour to oscillate between these possibilities.
83
A year ago I was more engaged in being in a remote place away from home and struggling with the the feelings and impacts that my new city, neighbourhood and place had on my mind and emotional life. Slowly and seamlessly, by walking a new path over and over again, it became familiar and I started to have memories and thus emotions towards it.
My research process for 2nd year has become more detached from personal experience and engages more with spatial correlations and the emotions attached to them. In genre of interactive video projection and painting, these works are related deliberately to their surrounding and spatial situation.
Architecture is a complex art form. It creates sculpture from outside and space from inside and these are in close relation to each other.
Space creates emotions instantly. Still it is very hard to foresee what kind of emotions it would create and even harder to explain why. That ’why’ lays deep inside in the human being, in our unconcious memory.
Computer screen, interface and skin gains special importance. A boundary between two different worlds. That surface
common to those different entities is the spot where it all happens: affecting and influencing each other, leading to communication and interactivity.
Virtual for me means that something might never happen physically. Or might have happened but the exact time is not important. Real time, shifts and loops…these tools create such a virtual aura similar to imagination. Transforming spaces and questioning phisical/spatial reality also creates virtuality.
Layering reality and questionable reality, layering present, past, future, virtual time and adding interpretation/deeds of the observer as the ultimate layer creates something that is unique and is unrepeatable. An experience.
www.slice-of-sun.tumblr.com
www.sliceofsun.com
MA – Art in the Digital World
Zsofia Berenyi
85
MA – Art in the Digital World
“People don’t see the world before their eyes, until it’s put into narrative form.” Brian De Palma
My research is investigating how we perceive the world around us, with a particular focus on how we link our experience of others to a narrative, in an attempt to make sense of what we are seeing. It is my own understanding from researching the findings of theorists that if we are surrounded by a particular convention, such as “The Hollywood Formula”; (the beginning-middle-ending template) in the likes of films, literature and gaming then we will instinctively apply this method to everyday life and the people around us. I believe that applying this method is an attempt to understand life. If we apply a known working formula to the unknown then it automatically becomes accessible.
Using illustration, animation, model making and new media technology I wanted to explore this human trait that is imposing narrative on everyday life. Narration is how we understand the world. But how far are we willing to push it? Will we gladly watch or are people willing to engage. “The Lost & The Found” is a mixed media piece that is experimenting with my own experiences of people watching, using the narratives I have constructed myself coupled with
real life stories. These are my attempts at understanding the life that happens around us. Perhaps by searching for meaning and familiarity in strangers’ lives we are attempting to make sense of the unpredictability and sometimes daunting aspects of the world.
www.jendarcy.com
Jen Darcy
87
MA – Art in the Digital World
Nora Duggan
Developing from an interest in the various applications of digital technology within the history of photography’s expanded field, my work frequently responds to specific sites. Appropriated as the definitive media of reality and time, photography and film have to a certain extent been weighed down by representational and narrative signifiers.
My current work derives from two seemingly unrelated sites. Marsh’s library, founded in 1701, was the first public library in Ireland. It comprises of books relating to the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Knowledge contained there has since been superseded by more recent discoveries, but what of that which has been lost over time?
During my first week of study at NCAD I became interested in one particular aspect of the campus architecture, namely the Cupola on the roof of the Granary building. Formerly a means of admitting light, it now remains semi-redundant, functioning more as an aesthetic landmark.
Since the emergence of digital technology, much of what was previously written about photography and film could also be regarded as redundant. Digital media is not a direct reaction of light hitting
emulsion. It is not a physical strip of film, or necessarily evidential or referent. It is inexpensive and immediate. Using digital media, while thinking in an analogue frame of mind, my work seeks to revive a certain potential that photography and moving image offered at their inception; that of illusion and make-believe, enabling the suggestion of multiple realities.
89
MA – Art in the Digital World
‘Generation Z will be the combination of product of X & Y. They’ll need a miracle to survive...’
(‘Marketing to Generation X and Y’, Michael Fleischner)
As our society moves at a rapid pace towards space based mediums of communication and away from time based ones, my practice primarily attempts to capture our reactions, or lack thereof, to these changes through photography, video, installation and text.
Distance and time as considerations in our accessibility to communication media are rapidly decreasing to a value of zero, as does the speed at which we take it in. With information of all kinds being accessible in an instant there is little need to retain information for long periods of time, nor spend lengthy amounts of time looking for it. One of the main questions Foucault raises is how modern western society regulates thought and behavior and what role the media and institutions play in shaping our perceptions of reality. Due to the advancements in technology happening at such a fast pace, my practice attempts to identify our relationship with these possibilities and the potential for huge change. The work attempts to forecast the social and cultural processes of ‘Generation Z’.
McLuhan’s suggestion that we are moving towards a society of ‘all at onces’ has been an integral part of this practice. Instant gratification is one of the ideals we as digital natives have become accustomed to. It has become an instinctual part of our reality also. We want the fastest, greatest most intensely perfect version of everything we do, involve ourselves with and aspire to. It is part of our desire to overcome falling behind the world that we watch every day.
“…Inside all human beings are dangerous, instinctual drives. Those feelings we repress. They are dangerous.” Edward Bernays (The Century Of The Self, Happiness Machines)
Eimear Fitzmaurice
91
MA – Art in the Digital World
“Reason, that highest faculty of man, essential for his life, which gives him ... the means of existence and enjoyment: this same faculty poisons his life” Tolstoy
My research to date has centred on epistomological and anthropological concerns in relation to technology. A view of technology, that beyond a certain threshold, is no longer seen in terms of an instrument deployed by a society, but rather, as a substantive entity in it’s own right. To the point where a process of technological enframement can begin to determine the structure of that society. Furthermore, by drawing on theories of rationality and duality, I’ve sought to understand how technology, as this entity, has the ability to deduct questions of meaning and value which define the scope of creative action, to scientific (instrumental) questions of technique and purpose, the value of which tend to be presupposed.
This form of ‘means end’ or instrumental reason, involves the search for the most efficient means to reach a given end. In particular, looking at how individuals can be treated not as ends in themselves but as the instrumental means to a specific end, has informed my practise of late.
www.juleshackett.com
Jules Hackett
93
MA – Art in the Digital World
Andrew Healy
My practice is interested in the boundaries of what is considered ‘real’ in contemporary culture. A constant point of reference is the play of dimensions in modernist collage and the questions raised by its exposure of the physical and virtual worlds of the image. Rather than being limited to a single medium, I work in whatever way is suitable for the project.
By employing appropriated imagery and constructed identities, I seek to make the viewer conscious of the volatile nature of mediated ‘truth’ and the assumptions made by how these ‘truths’ are presented. This translation of information from the virtual to the real realm (or vice versa) interests to me for the meanings gained or lost along the way. Through the use of traditional materials and processes, my work invites the viewer to connect with digital content in an intimate, tactile way in the physical world. Such works resist reproduction, compelling the viewer to be aware of the physicality of the image and themselves.
www.andrewhealy.com
95 « Merry Christmas Farmer Brown.
MA – Art in the Digital World
MerryChristmasFarmerBrown
Inspired greatly by cinema and visual narrative my work has been addressing nature, the mundane, decadence, dream, memory and time. I’ve been expressing these themes using intense visual textures through the ‘mis-use’ of various camera formats, dis-engaging with specific levels of control and leaving elements to chance.
While working with numerous camera technologies, including both digital and analog, I felt the 16mm film format allowed a comfortable level of spontaneity while maintaining a romantic or pleasing aesthetic. This was mainly due to the vintage quality of the equipment and, because of the materiality of the film itself, the hands-on developing process. These elements gave way to unpredictable results that I believe resonated with ideas of time past or a ‘lost time’ and also a sort of decadence with an apparently dying format.
As with cinema I’m concerned with capturing and presenting blocks of recorded reality in order to create fictional ideas or narratives. While practicing both ‘montage cinema’ and ‘rythmic cinema’ I chose to step out from within the frame and enforce narrative through physical
materials that extend into the viewers space. This allows them to further experience the fiction within the realm of the real, beyond the flat screen of the moving image.
www.mgmh.me
Michael Higgins
97
MA – Art in the Digital World
« Studio work in progress: Betwixt and Between, A Silk Purse to a Sow’s Ear.
My current research practice entitled Unframed Territory investigates the genius fabulae of Irish landscape. The genius of story about place, not only relates to place names and myths but is also closely connected to human relationships, local lore and personal memory. Landscape is doubly constructed – it is physically carved out, but it is also interpreted, narrated and perceived. Irish landscape is loaded with narratives and intangible relationships. These are the dialogues I am interested in unpacking through a series of abstract digital interventions in the Unframed Territory series.
Boora-bang, one of the projects in this series investigates the symbiotic relationship between land, man and machine in the industrial boglands of Co. Offaly. The analogue work practices of the Bord Na Mona fitters who work the land and service peat production machinery are remixed in a site-specific digital installation.
Mobile: 087 260 6479
www.unframedterritory.com
Nicole McKenna
99
MA – Art in the Digital World
Roisin McNamee
(sun)(sine)
My research practice culminates in a self reflexive space concentrating on the nature of material play and the transformation of these materials in a place of production. The work takes the form of sculptural propositions, experimental emotive objects in transit and fragmentary imaginings of possible futures.
The materials I use act as metaphors, symbols to comment on the cyclic nature of life and the remedies employed to accompany this. These substances are part of specialised areas in the food and alcohol production industry and come with a set of their own cultural and scientific associations.They also mostly derive from the sea. Agar derives from seaweed (japanese isinglass) and in its gelatinous form is used in microbiology labs universally. Isinglass is the derivative of the fish bladder and is used in the clarification process of beer. Through stretching, moulding and drying this organic substance a certain unpredictable nature can be observed. Often things deteriorate. I use Guinness as a conductor of sound. I am interested in the healing potential of certain frequencies on these deteriorating materials.
The research has been informed by curiosity and questioning the origins of language and ‘stuff’. More often than not this has led me to the area of marine science and ecological issues within this. The sea appeared to be a relevant place to focus, for its mysteriousness, as a popular metaphor for the digital internet age we live in and as the place where humans originated. My investigations end up talking about fragility and vulnerability in a quest to find balance in volatile habitats.
I hope to bring a quiet absurdity and non-sense to an ever evolving personal sculptural language. The objects and sculptures act as a thread of connection between materiality, science and consumerism. I ask the audience to consider the deeper structures that lie behind the appearance of materials that I use (the translucent and the opaque).
101
MA – Art in the Contemporary World
Moving beyond representation into a painting of objects as processes. These processes are in a constant state of ‘becoming’ and ‘perpetually perishing’. Objects/processes are distant and illusive from us. They are assemblages of non-human flows of matter and energy. However they also form our subjectivity. Painting as a speculation or a fiction, away from individual expressivity and apart from the apparatus of representation, is concerned with the ‘primitive physical materiality’ of paint and the virtual ‘becoming and perishing’ therein.
The proposed research project will be to investigate, speculate and fictionalise around the potentialities of painting, separate from the historically static binary categories of representation and abstraction and instead explore painting through the philosophy of Delueze and Guattari seen in the materialist position of Manuel Delanda and the speculations on art by Simon O’Sullivan. I am interested in Quentin Meillassoux’s idea of the ‘arche-fossil’ as a vantage point for which painting, its objects, its processes and its performances, can be re-formulated.
“Arche-fossils or fossil-matter, as Meillassoux calls them, are not entities that exist in the ancestral or time anterior
to the advent of consciousness and life, but are rather material traces of the ancestral in the present. Thus the light I see emitted from certain stars in the night sky is an arche-fossil or fossil-matter as, knowing that light travels at 186,000 miles per second, the scientist is able to discover that this light took millions of years to reach us. Likewise, the radioactive decay of isotopes in an atom can function as an arche-fossil by allowing us to infer a time prior to life here on earth. Under what conditions, Meillassoux wonders, are these statements meaningful? Moreover, how is the correlationist committed to interpreting or understanding these claims.”
Can the idea of the ‘arche-fossil’ help to formulate an approach that tears the meanings of painting from its history, both in representation and abstraction, and facilitate a theory of painting, as an expanded medium, and thus form new subjectivities around its practice?
Can painting exist outside of the linguistic translations and interpretations of its form?
Can a fiction inform a realist position, and can this position re-formulate the practice of painting?
Alan Boardman
103
MA – Art in the Contemporary World
BungalowBliss
My research centres around rural Irish domestic construction during the 1970s through to the early 1990s. The focus of which is on the Bungalow Bliss publication which subsequently gave its name to the building phenomenon in general. The Bungalow Bliss book first appeared in 1971. It was self published by a Jack Fitzsimons, (an architectural technician for Meath County Council) through his Kells Art Studio. It contained, at first, twenty house designs and became a best seller, was re-published a number of times (with more designs added), through the 70s, 80s and early 90s up to the embryonic stages of the recent building boom. It is now out of print.
The first section of this project will take the form of relaying the educational and labour market changes in Ireland in the late 60s / early 70s, by drawing on research from an essay written earlier this year on The Politics of Measurement of Primary School Achievement. This description of the educative and cultural ground will help illustrate the idealogical changes attached to a workforce moving from an agricultural to a labour market paradigm (or why might one want a “modern” stand alone bungalow, miles from a town centre).
The second section will view the book and its designs, in relation to its reception by the Architectural establishment. My intention is to view the architecture of the Bungalow Bliss designs as a rural, non-canonical Irish Modernism, which became vernacular. Economics, practicality, (utopianism?), taste / connoisseurship, siting, politics and precedent will play some part in this analysis of the establishment’s response to the designs. The visual / architectural language as relaying what the designs meant then, and what they embody now will also be addressed.
The intention is to take this narrative and abstract, map and analyse it from a post-modern perspective of legitimation and transcontextual social theory.
My background in engineering and fine art informs the approach to this thesis, and the intention is to re-present this work in a visual art context.
www.adrianduncan.eu
Adrian Duncan
105
MA – Art in the Contemporary World
Recent developments in Performance art and Re-Performance art in Ireland have been very innovative and exciting meriting study and analysis. In particular I find the work of two Irish artists Amanda Coogan and Aideen Barry intriguing and fascinating and they have agreed to assist me in my research and analysis of their work. Both Coogan and Barry’s art practice entails ritual, durational performance and the notion of the uncanny.
I want to study the motive force that inspires and impels the performer. The whole area of Performance Art is very challenging and is not accessible as there is much controversy. I hope to gain insights that may help to resolve some of the many dilemmas around this genre. One especially engrossing feature of performance is durational and repetition performances while reminiscent of pathological behaviour, obsessive compulsive disorder, this is deliberate and freely chosen by the artist. It is an artistic approach to their art practices and rather than being abhorrent it can be captivating and compelling.
For my thesis I will research and look at the history of the earlier performance artists Joseph Beuys and Marina Abramovic whose pioneering art practices have
had a major impact on performance artists today. My enquiry will also entail investigation into the concepts and writings of Freud, Deleuze and Jacques Lacan. For Freud ‘Repetition Compulsion’ was a psychological phenomenon and a key component in his understanding of mental life. Jacques Lacan expanded on Freud’s concepts of the compulsion to repeat in numerous ways. He introduced the term ‘repetition automatism’ and in order to understand this ‘we must locate the subject of the unconscious’ . Deleuze sees complex repetition as multifaceted which may disguise difference and variability.
Amanda Coogan and Aideen Barry’s performances raise many of these issues making it exciting and stimulating in deciphering their works.
see also:
www.aideenbarry.com
www.amandacoogan.com
Cabrini Lynch
107
MA – Art in the Contemporary World
This specific ability to abstract surfaces out of space and time and to project them back into space and time is what is known as ‘imagination’.1 Vilém Flusser
My currently investigation centres around the idea of the photograph as a non-truth – rather than the perceived verisimilitude of the image and the physical experience of the built space than its measured reality.
The photograph as material and an object itself re-examines the mediums of photography and sculpture. Between the ocular and the tactile experience, the spatial and the flat, the work endeavours to return these spaces from the visual to the physical and back again.
My practice is multidisciplinary and involves a variety of materials and media including found objects, tools, photography, sculpture and installation. Through the use of both flat and solid objects I endeavour to investigate the tension between what we see and what we experience in spaces and how we translate these encounters. Building, cutting, erasing, folding, and endless framing are all part of the enquiry of stuff and immateriality.
The nostalgic aspect of both disciplines is a fundamental aspect of understanding of the language of both built space and photographic image. Temporality rather than perceived permanence in both architecture and photography and the tension between surface and solid object is what is currently at the root of this infinite search for the answer as to what is imagined and what is tangible.
1 Flusser, v, Towards the Philosophy of Photography, Reaktion Books, 1983. pg 8
Vanya Lambrecht Ward
109
MA – Design History & Material Culture
VictorianLuggage:ALookattheMaterialCultureofBritishTravel
The Victorian Era saw great change for the British traveller; it no longer meant a journey through Europe in a horse-drawn coach but a steam-powered journey to the other side of the globe. The upper and middle classes engaged in greater leisure travel and the modern concept of the tourist developed. Railways and steamships shrank distance across both land and sea while scientific, political and cultural concepts increasingly separated people, places, cultures, etc. through stark categories and classifications. As people travelled farther and more frequently, the luggage that they brought with them also had to change.
My research aims to be a qualitative synchronic examination of how luggage changed or, conversely, did not change, to meet travellers’ needs as shifting economic, political, social and scientific ideas developed over the period. The analysis will rely on three categories of primary sources: objects – existing pieces of luggage; print – contemporary trade cards, newspaper advertisements and photographs; and literature – published and unpublished travel accounts and advice books. The central foci of the work
will be: first, the causes, effects and influences of politics, gender, society and science and technology in the development of tourism and the tourist in this increasingly modern world; second, how tourists engaged with themselves, each other and locals in material terms; and finally, how this influenced what luggage people carried, what was considered essential versus luxury, and how they and others engaged with the articles and expectations of travel and tourism.
Sara Daley
111
MA – Design History & Material Culture
ThecareerofSeamusMahonasadesigner–astudyofdesign’sprofessionalizationandtherelationshipoftheatredesigntotheemergenceofnewexhibitionspacesforthehome.
The third Theatre Royal in Hawkins Street, Dublin, was built in 1935. It was built in the age of the Hollywood musical and conceived as a cine-variety theatre that offered audiences a stage show and a film for the same admission fee. During its 27 year lifetime it was the biggest theatre in the country.
Seamus Mahon started working as an assistant in the Theatre Royal’s art department in the 1940’s when he was in his teens, an apprentice to Fergus O’Ryan (ANCAD) who was then the art department supervisor. By the time he was in his early twenties, Mahon had become the department’s head.
‘The Royal’ as the theatre was commonly known, and Seamus Mahon’s role in it presents an interesting case in the context of design history and material culture. Its popular, mainstream format of entertainment made it more vulnerable to the changes that took place in popular culture after the war than the more avant-garde or artistic theatre such
as the Gate or the Abbey. The cultural change of which this theatre’s demise was a symptom, was one to which Mahon adapted successfully, applying his skills to another area in the advancement of his career. His subsequent work as a designer for the state owned Electricity Supply Board was an astute adaptation of his skills to a more secure employment situation in a key modernising industry in Ireland.
Using a variety of primary sources, including Mahon’s own testimony, archive material, newspapers and magazines, my research will place Seamus Mahon’s achievements in design in the context of design’s development in Ireland in the latter half of the twentieth century.
David Devitt
113
« Image from the November issue of the Ackerman’s Repository of Arts, 1814 ‘Fashion plate for a Walking Dress costume depicting pair of Limerick gloves’.
MA – Design History & Material Culture
‘LimerickGloves’:Fetish,FameandFashionability,1780-1850
‘Limerick gloves’ or ‘chickenskins’ as they were sometimes called, were a style of nineteenth-century glove made from the skins of aborted calves and sold encased in a walnut shell. In the past two decades, dress historians and scholars have paid much attention to the study of costume accessories such as shoes or hats. Considerably less attention however has been prescribed to the study of gloves, despite their ability to exhibit, in pure form, the distinction of social demarcation. The central aim of this thesis is to investigate the historical and cultural biography of ‘Limerick gloves’ in Ireland and England during the late Georgian, early Victorian era. Through a blending of artefact based, literary, and theoretical approaches, I intend to examine the cultural significance of Limerick gloves, both as an object and a language, used in the careful construction of self – presentation.
Throughout this thesis I will explore the sensory aspects inherent in the object’s materiality in an attempt to apprehend the intimate and emotional qualities associated with the gloves. I will also consider the numerous shifting careers
adopted by the object and examine its role as a fetishistic and fashioned item. In placing the object within its broader social and cultural contexts, I will highlight the significance of the glove as an important cultural tool in the performance of social constructions such as class and gender.
The main body of this research will attempt therefore, not only to bring to light the biography of a neglected item of Irish manufacture, but also to emphasize the essential contribution of the glove as a material and invaluable signifier of cultural history.
Liza Foley
115
Thomas Wolfangel is a designer and tailor of couture wear who has worked in the Irish fashion industry since the 1960s. During his career, Wolfangel has produced collections of Couture and Ready-To-Wear while also designing for numerous private clients both in Ireland and abroad.
While he is predominantly known for his well tailored day suits which he has consistently produced in high quality fabrics and finished to an impeccable standard since the beginning of his career, he has also created collections of eveningwear that display an alternative aspect to the structured tailoring he is renowned for. Over the course of his career, Wolfangel has become known as a stalwart of the Irish fashion scene.
My research presents the first comprehensive study of this designers work in acknowledgement of his contribution to Irish fashion over the last 40 years. This research uses an object based approach in analysing Wolfangel’s private collection of garments to record the development and evolution of his designs while also drawing on traditional research methods to present a detailed account of his career within the context of the Irish fashion industry.
MA – Design History & Material Culture
Aifric Iremonger- Mooney
117
MA – Design History & Material Culture
OfficialUniformsoftheFreeStateArmy:Theirdesign,fabricationandthelostnarrativeoftheDublinmilitarytailors
As part of my studies for an MA in Design History and Material Culture, I am currently examining the official uniforms of the Free State Army that were introduced in 1922. I will be looking at the uniform design, fabrication and the lost narrative of the Dublin military tailors, who specialised in making dress and regular uniforms for both the British and Irish armies. While military uniforms and their study are often viewed in the context of military history, the skill involved in their design and execution is neglected in favour of discussions of insignia and uniform as an identifier of rank. I am curious to discover who the pre-eminent Irish military tailors were as well as identifying the inspirations and sources for the design of the formalised Free State army uniforms. Having a professional background as a creative pattern cutter, I am particularly interested in the methods used by the tailors in the production of the uniforms as well as highlighting the role of other professionals in the production of accessories (hats, belts, braiding and frogging) and embroideries. I aim to
explore the material culture of this aspect of the Irish garment industry which is well documented but under researched. There is a wealth of primary source material located in the National Military Archives and the National Museum Collins Barracks which I plan to analyse, and I will be focusing in particular on the reference book of J.B. Johnstone, a Military Tailor of 32, Molesworth Street Dublin (NMI). By placing this analysis in a cultural and historical context, I would hope to draw some conclusions about the role of the army uniform in the self-perception of the nascent Irish Free State.
« ‘Illustration of tailoring construction for Army Officer No. 1 Jacket.MORRIS, F.R., (1965) Cutters’ Practical Guide for Gentlemen’s Garments. London: Tailor & Cutter Ltd, p 115.’
Hannah Mullan
119 « Image courtesy of the National Blood Centre archive.
MA – Design History & Material Culture
Teresa Reilly
TheAssimilationoftheIrishBloodTransfusionServiceintoeverydaylifeinIreland,1948–1979
‘Give blood – You get more than you give’ is the current call to action for the Irish Blood Transfusion Service. This statement alone elicits rich dialogue on themes of charity, altruism and the act of gift giving. Richard Titmuss in his book entitled The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy describes the act of giving blood as ‘one of the most sensitive universal social indicators ... which tells us something about the quality of relationships and of human values prevailing in a society’ (Titmuss, 1970, p.13). In my research, I will analyse the various methods used by the Irish Blood Transfusion Service to promote their services and to attract new donors in its formative years, which resulted in normalising blood donation as an everyday practice.
From a design perspective, I will explore their branded ephemera and objects, alongside the glamorous uniforms of the blood donor assistants which reveal the nuances of taste and fashion in modernising Ireland of the 1940s and onwards. However the pivotal focus of my research will be on one of their smaller
branded objects, the pelican lapel pin, which I believe played an important role in the assimilation of blood donation into Irish life. This understated object of adornment was prevalent at this time and many Irish citizens literally wore their allegiance on their breast. Csikszentmihalyi’s argument that objects give ‘concrete evidence of one’s place in a social network as symbols of valued relationships’ (Lubar & Kingery, 1993, p.23), will be key to a material culture analysis of these pins, drawing on other areas of study such as national identity and the presentation of self. The materialisation of blood as a commodity as well as gift, will further enrich this analysis of one of Ireland’s important services.
121
MA – Design History & Material Culture
« Image: Courtesy of National Museum of Ireland
TheCorcoranCollectionofEighteenth-CenturyIrishDelftwareintheNationalMuseumofIreland
My research will focus on this collection of eighteenth century delftware acquired by the National Museum of Ireland in 2007. Originally assembled by Drs John and Winifred Corcoran, it consists mostly of delftware manufactured in Dublin. Previous research particularly that of Peter Francis, has focussed on the production and attribution of Irish delftware in the context of connoisseurship. This study will examine delftware from a different perspective.
It will investigate the consumption of delftware in eighteenth-century Irish society at a time when ‘all Europe was in the grip of china-fever’. Themes such as novelty and luxury will be explored. Conviviality and hospitality were integral to Irish society in the eighteenth century. The role of delftware in the changing dining culture and in the practice of hospitality during the Georgian period will be considered. The eighteenth century concept of ‘politeness’ and the contribution of ceramics to the practice of ‘politeness’ as well as the notions of fashion, emulation and desire, in the context of delftware, will form part
of this research. Marketing strategies and retail practices employed in the promotion and trading of delftware will be examined. Consumption of delftware will be considered in parallel with consumption of other objects such as silver, glass, pewter and porcelain during the period. Economic nationalism was a feature of consumption in Ireland during the eighteenth century. The relationship between the production and marketing of Irish delftware and patriotism will therefore be considered. Using an object analysis approach the objects in this collection will be examined in order to place them in the social context for which they were first intended.
Máire Walsh
123
MA – Design History & Material Culture
ThemythoftraditionandnationalidentityincontemporaryDublinpubs
This project intends to carry out an analysis on the construction of the myths of “nostalgia” and “national identity” in Irish pubs and the way those myths are introduced and combined in contemporary Dublin premises. Irish pubs have become favourites in many places outside of Ireland due to their welcoming air and traditional decoration. Those traditional elements give an essential air of “nostalgia” to pub interiors that makes them recognisable all over the world. The analysis will be carried out by looking at a selection of contemporary pub designs and comparing them with historical sources and records from the mid-twentieth century. Irish society, religion and politics underwent dramatic changes from the mid-twentieth century onwards and new European and Hollywood influences were introduced into the country. Ireland was becoming more cosmopolitan and the marketing sector more aware of an increasing need of international participation. There are various myths contained within the world of the Irish pub. This project will attempt to explore whether those Irish traditional and national elements were ever a reality in mid- twentieth century Dublin and to
what extent do they convey such “myths” in contemporary pubs. A critical and visual approach following a qualitative method in analysing contemporary photographs and twentieth century pub records will be crucial to the development of this research. Historical sources and literary reviews will also form part of the analysis and both written and visual sources will be compared and related in order to draw a series of coherent conclusions. The theoretical framework of Ronald Barthes and his Mythologies will be the background for the shaping of this project, as will Eric Hobsbawm’s ideas on the invention of tradition.
Miriam Ugarte Abollado
125
PhD Fine Art – Sculpture
This PhD uses my own practice as a departure point from which to explore the role of sound within its multiple spaces of performance and reception. When exploring the possibility of a single reading of sound, the literature would suggest that sound does not belong to one single fixed body or space but rather circulates between bodies and spaces (Blesser and Salter, 2007, Blauert, 1997). This transient and nomadic characteristic proposes that sound does not guarantee a single self-contained reading, but suggests many spaces in between the lived experience, its mapping and reception (Sjogren, 2006). However, the way in which sound is mapped and revisited beyond the site of its original dissemination or performance largely does not reciprocate and encompass these tendencies. This research proposes a framework for triangulating these sonic perspectives; made visible through articulation within the spaces of the living, the dead and the living dead. The objective of this research is to construct a space where the sound works can unfold, a space where sonic experience is revisited, and a space where new projections may seek to be constructed through this unpacking.
Sarah Dunne
127
PhD Fine Art – Media
TheHiddenGesturesofPlayThroughVideoartInstallation
AbstractThe aim of this research is to examine the properties and creative strategies of play, locating the experience of play as a form of critical knowledge. The project involves sensory ethnography and a longitudinal case study of my sons’s play from infancy to age 8 years. In order to examine subjectivity, intersubjectivity and the changing representations of children, their language and play and agency in childhood through the moving image I explore the ‘in-between’ spaces, the everyday and the undervalued places that are often dismissed as part of family life. Through a series of video art installations that examine remote and hidden areas of children’s play, I am drawing attention to the unregulated, unexpected spaces of learning and the unintended forms of tacit knowledge that go unrecognized as forms of discovery and ‘metacommunication’ in everyday situations.
This enquiry attempts to explore the current discourses in play, drawing together the theories of play theorists such as, J. Huizinga, M. Spariosu, H. Gadamer, B. Sutton Smith, G. Bateson
and analyses the work of contemporary video artists, that employ the strategies of play in a contemporary art context, artists such as, Mike Kelley, Guy Ben-Ner, Dan Graham. Phenomenological and psychoanalytical approaches to filmmaking experience are explored by using the camera as a mobile fluid eye, re-positioning the camera, re-framing and using particular editing strategies in order to convey the experience of encountering the processes of bodily knowing in child play and play gestures. The research is focused on finding embodied knowledge gained through movement and the senses, which create specific situations in play that generate new narratives other than the rhetoric of play as development or ‘progress’. The choreography of the installation is designed in order to offer the viewer multiple ways to encounter the space of the work through interaction with it. The observer becomes entangled with the subject and the subject with the observer. The research investigates the role of the artist in facilitating an engagement towards a form of social imagination, which reveals hidden spaces of knowledge, expression and reflection.
Collette Nolan
129
PhD Visual Culture
CatholicIreland:TheCatholicChurchandthestrategicconstructionofanIrishCatholicIdentity,1879-1923
This thesis examines the strategic construction by the Irish Catholic Church during the years 1879-1923 of an Irish identity which was emphatically Roman Catholic, by the co-ordinated harnessing and creative manipulation of popular literature and religious material and visual culture. It looks at how unapproved traditions and oppositional ideologies were repressed or appropriated. Books, articles and short stories were used to repeatedly reinforce the idea of the innate Ultramontane Catholicism of the Irish people, and the country’s long history of loyalty to Rome. In these, Irish Catholic identity was regularly presented as marked by its superior spirituality, and distinguished from what was constructed as the secular materialism of Protestantism and Englishness.
This thesis also examines the Church’s use of material culture in its church building and decoration programme, which both facilitated the controlled gathering together of the faithful, and sent out a strong and unequivocal message of the dominance of Catholicism in Irish society. Church interior spaces,
decoration and imagery were fully exploited as ways of orchestrating behaviour and communicating messages. The problematic contribution of the Irish Arts & Crafts movement to Irish church building and decoration is also investigated, as is the incompatibility of its construction(s) of Irish identity to that of the Irish Catholic Church. A major aspect of the Church’s strategy was its use of imagery, especially a small range, iconographically and stylistically, of imported, industrially produced devotional imagery. The Church cultivated the interaction between Irish Catholics and these images, which mainly represented Christ Crucified, the Sacred Heart, the Virgin and Saint Joseph, using them to promote humility, chastity, sobriety, social conservatism, obedience to authority and loyalty to the Roman Church. They were, however, also appropriated by Irish people to serve their own agendas, including a violent revolution in the cause of political independence.
Ann Wilson
131 « ????????
Staff Research
133
HeadofSculptureandMFACoordinator
RecentExhibitionsConferencesetc2011 Presenter, ‘Study Day’ conference, Glasgow School of Art.
2010 Presenter, ‘Art Writing’ conference, The Goethe Institute, Dublin.
2010 Successfully completed PhD in the Visual Culture Faculty at NCAD.
2010 ‘The Chained Lady, The Microscope, and the Southern Fish’ – Group Exhibition Curated by Tessa Giblin, SOFA Gallery, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
2010 Guest Editor/Curator of the ‘Virtual Fictional’ issue of ‘Printed Project’.
2010 ‘In Two Minds – Past Version’, video performance, The Burren College of Art, Co. Clare, Ireland.
2010 ‘The Television – Repeat’, performance and video installation, ‘Lost and Found’, ‘Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art’, Street Level Gallery, Glasgow.
‘InItsOwnWrite’
Excerpt from the Conclusion to ‘Atherton on Atherton – An Examination of the Self-Reflexive Role of Language in Critically Examining Visual Art Practice Through a Consideration of Kevin Atherton’s Work’ – PhD 2010
Whilst the field of interest of this PhD is that of art writing, nevertheless, with the caveat that recognises that writing is of course itself a practice, its legitimate claim to new knowledge is in the area of fine art practice-based research. The new knowledge produced is evident in what is written about but is also simultaneously embedded in the method chosen to do the writing. This I believe gives rise to an inversion of the normal relationship between visual art practice and theoretical text. In this way the research embraces writing as the means of arriving at a situation where it is the practice of the PhD rather than the practice in the PhD that becomes the focus of the research. This is the over-riding contribution of the PhD, which, with its emphasis on how the writing is done rather than the work that is written about, has implications for the continuing evolution and assessment of practice-based PhDs within the ‘Fourth Level’ Higher Education field.
« ‘The Television – Repeat’, Video Performance/Installation – With David Garcia. ‘Lost and Found’, Street Level Gallery, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2010.
Dr Kevin Atherton
135 « Second level art teachers at an NCAD CPD Puppetry Workshop.
FrameworkfortheContinuingProfessionalDevelopmentofPost-PrimaryArtTeachers
My research is in the area of Continuing Professional Development for Second Level Teachers of Visual Art in the Dublin region.
Having taught art at second level for twenty years I feel that Art teachers need to be supported and given the opportunity to develop both personally and professionally throughout the various stages of their teaching careers. They need to be made aware of innovations in their area of expertise, new methodologies and technologies and changes in curriculum or subject content. I am of the opinion that Art teachers need to be given opportunities in a structured and supportive way to develop skills, knowledge and understanding that relates directly to their practice. Art teachers need to be given the chance to apply what they have learned, evaluate the effect on their practice and develop their practice. My vision is to develop a comprehensive framework for the design, implementation and evaluation of Continuing Professional Development for 2nd Level teachers of Visual Art.
To date a Focus Group of Art teachers has met and discussed the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) needs
of Art teachers and how these needs might be met. Research interviews were conducted with various education partners to ascertain their views on CPD for Art teachers: Directors, Administrators and CPD Coordinators of Education Centres, representatives from the Teaching Council of Ireland, Second Level Support Service and the Professional Development Service for Teachers, Arts Council, National Centre for Technology in Education and the Crafts Council of Ireland amongst others.
Based on the results of the Focus Group and Interviews a Needs Analysis Survey was created and sent to 330 Art teachers in the Dublin region. The data from the survey was analyzed and a CPD programme was developed based on the needs the Art teachers identified. The CPD programmed was implemented in 2009-10 and 2010-11. It is proposed to evaluate the programme using an online evaluation survey at the end of the 2010-11 academic year. The data collected will be analyzed, recommendations will be made and the results will be presented in the form of a doctoral thesis for the Professional Doctorate Programme in Education, in Dublin City University.
Telephone: 01 636 4308
Patsey Bodkin
137 « DISTANCE, Digital Video on DVD, 6.46 mins, looped, Collection of the
Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources.
RecentResearchActivities
Oliver Comerford’s practice is engaged with place, and the changing nature of place, addressing the interface between the local and the global. It has relevance to social and environmental change. It explores the notion of to what in fact ‘place’ is; whether it resides in the particular or the universal, whether it is something secure or more complex and contradictory. It draws on aspects of contemporary life, visual culture, and film. It comments on our contemporary relationship with our environment and challenges perceived ideas of Romanticism.
He presents a distinctive psychological space and has focused on the representation of outposts, remote or distant locations, conifer woodlands and views from the edge of town. He reminds us that the edge is a psychological state as much as a geographical or economic one.
In March- May 2010, a mid-career retrospective, Oliver Comerford Painting 1994-2010 was presented in the RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin. The exhibition was accompanied by a 144 page publication, with essays by Fintan O’Toole, of the Irish Times, and Declan Long, NCAD, and a Conversation between Oliver Comerford and Patrick T Murphy.
In June 2010, Oliver Comerford represented Ireland with David Godbold at The Sovereign European Art Prize Exhibition, Barbican Centre, London. He was shortlisted for his Painting True Romance V from his solo exhibition True Romance which was held at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery Dublin, November 2009.
In November 2010, Oliver Comerford exhibited painting and video at Tulca Festival of Visual Art Galway. Tulca: Living on the Edge – People, Places and Possibility curated by Michelle Browne.
In January 2011, Oliver Comerford exhibited at Arte Fiera – International exhibition of contemporary art – Bologna, supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.
In 2011 he was awarded a major Arts Council Visual Arts Bursary.
He is currently External Examiner in Fine Art at GMIT, Galway.
Oliver Comerford is a part-time lecturer, Core Studies.
Oliver Comerford
139 « Mind to Mind, Video Still, 2010
Through anecdote, reconstruction and detailed editing my video works consider the world of the paranormal, the tradition of psychical research, the supersensory and ideas about perceptual phenomenon. Since 2005 I have worked closely with prominent parapsychologists and psychical research institutions including the Dermo Optical Laboratory of Madame Yvonne Duplessis, Paris and Parapsychology Foundation, New York. In Summer 2011 I will work at the Rhine Research Center (RRC) and Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Durham, North Carolina to research and develop new work. The RRC is a parapsychology research unit and successor to Duke University’s Parapsychology Laboratory founded by Dr JB Rhine (1895–1980). Dr Rhine is regarded within the field as the Father of Modern Parapsychology and with his interest in telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis the Parapsychology Laboratory established the possibility that psychic ability might be tested by methods acceptable to science. The archives of the RRC span over 70 years of historic and groundbreaking scientific research.
ForthcomingExhibitions:The Edge of Reason, Kino Kino, Sandnes; What’s Next, Tot Zover, Funeral Museum, Amsterdam; Miracles, Deichtorhallen,
Hamburg; F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N, (solo) Open Space, Victoria, BC. SinceJune2010: F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N, (solo) aceart inc, Winnipeg (artist talks: aceart inc; School of Art, University of Manitoba and University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections); Susan MacWilliam, (solo) Conner Contemporary, Washington, DC; Dig Down in Time, Man&Eve, London; Supersense, (solo) Higher Bridges, Enniskillen; 8th International Photo-Triennial, Villa Merkel, Esslingen.
Writing:My Adventures in the Supernormal, Susan MacWilliam, Paranormal Review, Society for Psychical Research; July 2011; to be – to see – to be seen, James Merrigan on MacWilliam’s F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N; Double Take / Take Two, Susan MacWilliam on Jordan Baseman’s Nature’s Great Experiment, Wellcome Trust Identity Project.
Other:Visiting Lecturer, BA Fine Art and History of Art, Goldsmiths, London.
www.susanmacwilliam.com
Susan MacWilliam
141
ShoeArchiveandpotentialResearchProject
‘The Kerr Shoe Collection’, is housed in NCAD under the care of Dr Helen McAllister.
This collection originated from the Kerr family shoe shop business in Mohill Co. Leitrim. The shop was opened in 1956 and ceased business in the mid 90’s yet still retaining its shoes across this 40 year time span.
The time consuming selection, photographing, cataloguing, transporting and housing of over 1,000 pairs of shoes is now near completion manifesting in a permanent archive in NCAD.
It is an ‘active’ archive where examples of the collection are in permanent rotation in small display cases on the Fashion & Textile floor. At present this archive is a resource, yet this has potential to develop into MA research projects that document the Irish Shoe industry in collaboration with Visual Culture. Not only is this an extensive collection, but significantly, the vast majority of the shoes are Irish made. This clearly demonstrates that there was a flourishing industry of shoe and shoe related products that are now essentially extinct in Ireland. The archive is an important record of an indigenous
manufacturing industry, which had shoe designers, a network of marketing and distribution of production and it reflects a vital social record showing fashion trends and norms over this 40 year period.
Dr Helen McAllister
143
My current research concerns if, or how, the occurrence of repetition in an artwork can render the meaning or interpretation of that work unstable or shifting. Briony Fer claims repetition as something that can empty out meaning, as well as something that can create meaning1. It is through this framework that I am researching repetition, as a device of visual referencing in art, and as a part of the vocabulary of the artwork.
Parallel areas of research also include Installation as material; Site as context; and a transcendent relationship to the singular object through the Multiple.
RecentExhibitions2011 Polemically Small, Torrence Art Gallery, Los Angeles;
2010 Toronto Art Fair, represented by Blue Leaf Projects, Canada;
2010 Art London, represented by Blue Leaf Projects, London;
2010 Materials Worlds, exhibition of contemporary sculpture by 8 artists from Ireland and U.K. curated by Riann Coulter at FE McWilliam Gallery, Co. Down; 2010 The Gatekeeper Project, curated by Naomi Sex, Five Lamps Arts Festival, Dublin;
2010 Wildly Different Things, contemporary art from New York and Dublin at The Observatory, Dublin;
2010 Invisible, 27 artists in 8 venues across Dublin city including Irish Museum of Modern Art, Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Project Arts Centre and the National Gallery of Ireland.
CuratorialProjects2010 Invisible, co-curated with Oliver Dowling and John Graham, 27 artists in 8 venues across Dublin city including Irish Museum of Modern Art, Temple Bar Galleries, The Project Arts Centre, The National Gallery of Ireland and others.
Awards&Residencies2008-2011 Artist-in-Residence, Fire Station Artists Studios.
2008-2010 Artist Bursary, Arts Council of Ireland.
1 Briony Fer quoted by Alison Green, “Artistic Agency and the ‘On and On’ of Repetition in Post-60’s Art”, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 29 No.1 (2006), 159. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600502.
Margaret O’Brien
145
UrbanSpaceandModelsofSustainability
Living in urban space is complex and demands a matrix of spatial organization in which to build a sustainable future. This includes urban planning, healthcare, education, transport infrastructure, clean water, sanitation, housing, energy and cultural intervention. We have moved beyond sustainable thinking as an alternative lifestyle to positions of necessity to avoid apocalyptic disaster. It must be acknowledged that we are not starting from a zero neutral position thus any response will be in the form of an intervention to existent urban conditions. Strategies for sustainability that provide flexibility and adaptability to building new urban imaginings for how we produce the social spaces we inhabit can be envisaged as sustainable approaches to art, architecture, spatial organization or how we use the land for agriculture or energy. Building relationships between art and other urban practices is a transversal action and can lead to innovation and new ways of producing and inhabiting urban spaces. This set of transversal relations occupies an aesthetic spatial politics that can be temporal in thinking and practice, small in scale but with global implications. Artists have a
significant contribution to offer in such circumstances. Through intervention we frequently find ourselves intervening into urban spaces whose particular circumstances are indeterminate and urgent. Through what seems like random acts and detours we generate independent investigation and inquiry that is dependant on the contingency and conditions outside of our field. This diagrammatic asks artists to engage beyond systems of representation. From an art perspective this approach can be visualized through a docking-on-to, plugging-into existent urban structures offering a platform for new ideas on how we produce spaces of culture and politics. These are protean, sometimes unknown situations but when they emerge we need to be alert to making them legible and realizing their indeterminate potential.
Mick O’Kelly
147 « Top: Block printing and dyeing ACP Nepal.
Bottom: Screen-print and woven fabric designs by NCAD students.
SustainabilityPractices:DepartmentofFashionandTextiles
Craft workers in Nepal must respond to many challenges in developing sustainable income generation. As one of the poorest and most under developed countries in the world craft-producers must overcome issues such as poor water supply, pollution, energy blackouts, exploitation, access to education as well as market competition from neighboring countries like India and China.
Since 2005 staff in the textiles department have been involved in various projects with craft-workers in Nepal. Annie Dibble carried out extensive research into the production of fiber from the giant nettle “allo” plant that grows in abundance in the foothills of the Himalayas. This research led to a collaborative project with Rachel O’Connell who developed allo fabrics with a weaving mill in Kathmandu.
In 2009 Rachel O’Connell and Andrew Campbell further developed a connection with the Association of Craft Producers of Nepal (ACP) by organizing a study trip to Kathmandu. The aim was to develop an awareness of the cultural, ethical, economic and environmental issues that are so often faced by manufacturers of
goods in developing countries as well as the wealth of skills and possibilities in the area of textiles and other craft disciplines. This trip led to a student design project in 2010. Textile students developed simple woven and printed fabric designs for ACP that met the demands of western fair trade suppliers with consideration for skills, costs, materials and equipment as well the environmental issues associated with the production of textile goods. Students Design solutions have since been put into production and form part of ACP’s new range of printed interior products.
Ongoing connections with ACP and other organisations in Nepal present many possibilities for research, design projects and work placements at post-graduate level. Underpinned by contemporary debates of sustainability of production methods, market destinations, materials used and products made, this is a developing research strand for the college that offers potential researcher’s participation in this interdisciplinary design programme.
Rachel O’Connell
149 « “Hast thou the flower there? Welcome, wanderer” – Oberon, A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
William Shakespeare.
SoloExhibition
The Embassy of Ireland, Botschaft von Irland, Jägerstr. 51, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Tel: +49 30 2207 2112 Fax: +49 30 2207 2299 Email: [email protected]
08 April – 30 June 2011 Monday – Friday 14:30 – 17:00 and by appointment
PhotographsThis exhibition of large, high-quality photographs brings us to leafy worlds. While popular folklore and mythology stretching back to ancient times has woven stories around the tiny creatures that live in these places, to many they inhabit an alien universe. Yet, as the entomologist and biologist know, their world is also ours and these images, of light and dappled shade, of earth and plant life, invite us to explore and delight in it. The resilient delicacy of natural structures and the interconnection of all living things is the stuff of both science and poetry.
DrawingsEve Parnell’s pencil drawings on paper offer another view of the natural world. As the hand of the artist follows the rhythms and forms of the trees, one
organic substance flowing into another, a precision and harmony is achieved. The intense focus of the artist’s gaze is an attempt to “draw out” and entice to paper, the essential energy of the tree on which she has concentrated her attention. The energy of the drawings mirrors the energy of the life depicted.
Eve Parnell
151«« “Rehearsed«Practice”«Description«–«a«still«from«live«performative,«academic«presentation.
Naomi«Sex
“Practice makes Practice? Interrogating contemporary art practices by performative articulation, and through the study and displacement of artistic professionalism.”
Naomi Sex is interested in what it means to be a contemporary, professional visual artist. Within this broad subject area, her doctoral research has focused particularly on the difference between professional and amateur artists, the state of ‘emerging’ in the art world, the activity of artistic ‘opportunity seeking’ and how the selection of artworks for exhibition occurs – essentially how artists think and behave within certain career orientated scenarios. As catchments for this research area, the manifestation of artistic professionalism, and the mechanics, which underlie art making, her study has acknowledged and defined professional practices such as the building of C.V.s, as an ‘apparatus’.
The research has been structured by considering ‘alternative’, ‘informal’ art showing contexts, and by way of a series of interventions situated where the professionalistic apparatus of artmaking appears to be absent from the process. This practice-led activity is propositional
and asks – what are the outcomes when contemporary art ideals, norms and conventions are repositioned within, and in relation to these contexts? Contrasting the informal nature of this activity, the dissemination of the research is key to the enquiry. The research is distilled, enacted and played out through art practice, which takes the form of scripted, performative and academic, formal presentations. This dissemination process references ‘self-conscious’ artistic, literary and theatrical methodologies. It is a reflexive mode of reactivating, animating and situating the research and its findings. These presentations are a form of praxis and dialectic between theoretical, academic text and that of critical, reflexive, articulations of practice-led research. By doing all of this as a part of a PhD, the research project is attempting to make formal, through academic framing and writing, the informal, the intangible, the invisible, the undisclosed, the elusive, the evasive, the un-minuted the kept on ‘the low-down’, the ‘under wraps’ and so on.
153
Una Walker is a Post-Doctoral Fellow based in NIVAL since 2008 as part of the Humanities Serving Irish Society PRTLI4 project aimed at building a national platform for humanities research. Una has been working to enhance the accessibility of the NIVAL collections and to encourage further research related to contemporary art and design from Ireland. She has produced an overview of all of the NIVAL collections and made proposals for developing NIVAL’s digital collections and finding aids. A new cross-searchable NIVAL website, grant aided by the Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport, will be launched in 2011. Working with the NIVAL Administrator, Donna Romano, funding has been raised from the Design History Society, the Heritage Council and NCAD for cataloguing the Kilkenny Design Workshops Archive, which Una has project managed.
Recentresearchoutputs
Publications“Notes and Queries”. Irish Women Artists 1800-2009: Familiar but Unknown, O’Connor, E (Ed), Four Courts Press, 2010; “Ballrooms to barber shops: visual art venues in Northern Ireland in the latter half of the twentieth century”. Artefact, Issue 2,
Winter 2008. pp. 58-71; “Art and Research Exchange and the Artists’ Collective of Northern Ireland”, Footnotes, Bacon J. & Pierce S. (Eds), Interface, 2007.
Conferencepapers“Kilkenny Design Workshops and the ‘plain style’: why Scandinavian design ideologies were imported into 1960s Ireland”, AAH Conference, Warwick, 2011; “Notes and queries: the use of statistical data in bringing women artists in from the margins”, TCD, Dublin, 2010; “Whose past is it anyway”, ISEA Symposium, University of Ulster, Belfast, 2009; “Storytelling, narrative and the digital database”, ELIA, Sofia, 2009.
Conference/SymposiaOrganisationOrganiser of “Art and design, digitisation and intellectual property Symposium”, NCAD, 2009; ISEA Symposium 2009, University of Ulster, member of Organising Committee.
Recentexhibitions(with)in(the)visible, two person exhibition, Golden Thread Gallery Project Space, 2010; Finite and Bounded, installation, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast., 2009; Surveiller, installation, Troubles Exhibition, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, 2009; Drawing a line, Art Museum of the Heilongjiang Daily, Harbin, China, 2008.
Una Walker
155 « ????????
Projects & Events
157 « The TFE research team based in Dublin at the launch on March 3 2011 by
Mairead McGuinness MEP.
TFE Task Furniture in Education is a Marie Curie FP7 (IAPP) Industry-Academia Partnerships and Pathways funded programme. The project emerges from ongoing and previous research undertaken in the Industrial Design Department under the User-First Design initiative at NCAD through its graduate school GradCAM and its international collaborators in the area of school furniture design and research.
The aim of the project is to exploit the opportunity for knowledge transfer and new product development within a consortium of complementary researchers working in the field. The initiative builds upon a strong foundation of experience and expertise of the partners in TFE. The project is conceived and structured to research and develop new and innovative task furniture solutions addressing modern advances in teaching and learning, the integration of technology in the classroom and the postural implications for children and young adults in schools. In fulfilling the aim. It is intended to significantly narrow the gap between the known user-oriented problems and the responses to them by the designers of the furniture currently available. Existing ergonomic research indicates serious long-term health
problems being inflicted on children in our schools and this evidence only serves to highlight the corresponding deficit in design research. TFE will examine in detail the potential for innovative, tested and proven, user-oriented furniture suitable for economic manufacture.
TFE commenced in January 2011 and will run for four years. The project will be coordinated and led by researchers in NCAD in collaboration with academic and industry partners in Ireland, Germany, Portugal and the USA.
TFE Task Furniture in Education
« ‘Gone to the dogs’ Image from Nigel Cheney textile and quilt exhibition, NCAD Gallery 6th – 28th May 2011
NCAD Postgraduate Yearbook 2011
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ate Yearbook 2011Spine 14mm