Intimate Ecologies: An exploration of the languages of contemporary exhibitions and making in museums and related cultural spaces in the UK

Intimate Ecologies considers the practice of exhibition-making over the past decade in formal museum and gallery spaces and its relationship to creating a concept of craft in contemporary Britain. Different forms of expression found in traditions of still life painting, film and moving image, poetic text and performance are examined to highlight the complex layers of language at play in exhibitions and within a concept of craft. The thesis presents arguments for understanding the value of embodied material knowledge to aesthetic experience in exhibitions, across a spectrum of human expression. These are supported by reference to exhibition case studies, critical and theoretical works from fields including social anthropology, architecture, art and design history and literary criticism and a range of individual, original works of art. Intimate Ecologies concludes that the museum exhibition, as a creative medium for understanding objects, becomes enriched by close study of material practice, and embodied knowledge that draws on a concept of craft. In turn a concept of craft is refreshed by the makers’ participation in shifting patterns of exhibition-making in cultural spaces that allow the layers of language embedded in complex objects to be experienced from different perspectives. Both art-making and the experience of objects are intimate, and infinitely varied: a vibrant ecology of exhibition-making gives space to this diversity.

Still Life

'Still Life'is a six page feature in Frieze Magazine on Sarah Jones's practice which took the form of a conversation between the New York based fiction writer A.M.Homes and Jones. This was a conversation that had begun when A.M. Homes invited Jones to spend some time at Yaddo Artist's Colony in upstate New York firstly in 2006 and secondly as The Meredith Moody Fellow in 2008. Homes also wrote a short story in response to Jones' photographs for The National Media Museum's Archive publication (2007/8). This text was commissioned by the museum as part of Jones' solo exhibition at the conclusion of her tenure as the museum's Photography Felllow. Jones and Homes were invited by Frieze to formalise their correspondence for publication. The interview in Frieze magazine was edited by Jennifer Higgie from a taped conversation between Jones and Homes, made during a visit by Jones to New York to meet Homes in early 2008. The feature includes several full colour reproductions of Jones' work alongside the conversation.

Negligent Eye

This presentation was both an illustrated lecture and a published paper presented at the IMPACT 9 Conference Printmaking in the Post-Print Age, Hangzhou China 2015. It was an extension of the exhibition catalogue essay for the Bluecoat Gallery Exhibition of the same name. In 2014 I curated an exhibition The Negligent Eye at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool as the result of longstanding interest in scanning and 3D printing and the role of these in changing the field of Print within Fine Art Practice. In the aftermath of curatingshow I have continued to reflect on this material with reference to the writings of Vilém Flusser and Hito Steyerl. The work in the exhibition came from a wide range of artists of all generations most of whom are not explicitly located within Printmaking. Whilst some work did not use any scanning technology at all, a shared fascination with the particular translating device of the systematizing ‘eye’ of a scanning digital video camera, flatbed or medical scanner was expressed by all the work in the show. Through writing this paper I aim to extend my own understanding of questions, which arose from the juxtapositions of work and the production of the accompanying catalogue. The show developed in dialogue with curators Bryan Biggs and Sarah-Jane Parsons of the Bluecoat Gallery who sent a series of questions about scanning to participating artists. In reflecting upon their answers I will extend the discussions begun in the process of this research. A kind of created attention deficit disorder seems to operate on us all today to make and distribute images and information at speed. What value do ways of making which require slow looking or intensive material explorations have in this accelerated system? What model of the world is being constructed by the drive to simulated realities toward ever-greater resolution, so called high definition? How are our perceptions of reality being altered by the world-view presented in the smooth colourful ever morphing simulations that surround us? The limitations of digital technology are often a starting point for artists to reflect on our relationship to real-world fragility. I will be looking at practices where tactility or dimensionality in a form of hard copy engages with these questions using examples from the exhibition. Artists included in the show were: Cory Arcangel, Christiane Baumgartner, Thomas Bewick, Jyll Bradley, Maurice Carlin, Helen Chadwick, Susan Collins, Conroy/Sanderson, Nicky Coutts, Elizabeth Gossling, Beatrice Haines, Juneau Projects, Laura Maloney, Bob Matthews, London Fieldworks (with the participation of Gustav Metzger), Marilène Oliver, Flora Parrott, South Atlantic Souvenirs, Imogen Stidworthy, Jo Stockham, Wolfgang Tillmans, Alessa Tinne, Michael Wegerer, Rachel Whiteread, Jane and Louise Wilson. Scanning, Art, Technology, Copy, Materiality.

Vitamin P3 – Oscar Murillo; Yelena Popova

Slyce has contributed entries for the artists Oscar Murillo and Yelena Popova to this forthcoming publication in the series. As well as a contributing writer to the series, Slyce also nominated artists for inclusion representing new perspectives in painting to the series editors.

Future Print Story

Research trip for 5 academics associated with the RCA to give talks and convene workshops at Tokyo University of the Arts and Kyoto City University of the Arts.

Unlearning

Keynote speaker for a one day symposium in Fine Art and Photography at De Montfort University, Leicester. The symposium looked at research as a rigorous process of investigation leading to new knowledge. It was aimed at visual arts practitioners wanting to account for their practices as forms of research. Two key questions were addressed: 1. How can arts practitioners account for the rigour of the methods they use in practice? 2. To what kinds of knowledge can their practices lead? Coutts' keynote looked at the concept of 'Unlearning' used by Marie Luisa Knott to explore what Hannah Arendt first had to do in order to rethink the atrocities carried out by the Nazis in the 20th Century. To be able to think anew means also to find a means for undoing what has previously been thought. Coutts looked to Arendt amongst other thinkers and artists, and used examples from within her own practice, to reflect on rigour in research and methods for legitimising a range of visual practices.

Printmare Against Nature

Nicky Coutts showed a work in the show "Printmare: Against Nature 1", reproducing a miniature storm scene from a Scottish five pound note and an essay titled "Animal Print Suicide" for the accompanying publication "Printmare Against Nature 2". Curated by Finlay Taylor, ‘Against Nature’ was an exhibition exploring conditions of current understandings of geography (or the geo-graphical), natural histories and landscapes. This exhibition concentrated on work that uses print, and the ways in which subtle innovations in this medium are used to investigate some of the complexities that arise when looking at nature in art. An associated publication has been published by Camberwell Press with essays by David Cross and Nicky Coutts, as well as page images by Bob Matthews, Denis Masi, Finlay Taylor, Kate Scrivener and Dick Jewell. Exhibiting artists included Franz Ackermann, Jasone Miranda Bilbao, Sarah Bodman, Ian Brown, Helen Chadwick, Paul Coldwell, Cornford and Cross, Nicky Coutts, Dunhill & O’Brien, Adam Gillam, Oona Grimes, Judith Goddard, Mark Harris, Katsushika Hokusai, Dan Howard-Birt, Susan Johanknecht, James Keith, Serena Korda, Michael Landy, Jo Love, Mike Marshall, Bob Matthews, Julian Opie, Tim O’Riley, Simon Patterson, David Rayson, Rebecca Salter, Kate Scrivener, Jo Stockham, and Herman de Vries.

Vertigo Rising

Sole-authored publication. Five essays on fear of space, irrational gravities and falling, based on the writings of Flusser, Kafka and the Capek brothers. 'Vertigo Rising' was commissioned as a parallel text to accompany a show of the same name at Five Years, (a London Gallery located in a high rise block).

Photography, desire and resistance in the lives of women, following the 1979 revolution in Iran

In my last four years of PhD by practice at the Royal College of Art, I have conducted extensive research on archival photography including materials held at the Museum der Weltkulturen, Frankfurt am Main; the Institute for Iranian Contemporary Historical Studies (IICHS) , Tehran; and the International Institute of Social History (IISH), Amsterdam. My project started with the fortuitous encounter with a photograph taken by Iranian photographer Hengameh Golestan on the morning of March 8, 1979. The photograph shows women marching in the streets of Teheran in protest against the introduction of the compulsory Islamic dress code. In 1936 Reza Shah had decreed a ban on the headscarf as part oh his westernising project. Over forty years later following the 1979 Revolution, Ruhollah Khomeini reversed this decision by ordering that women should now cover their hair. This ‘found image’ presented me with a glimpse into the occulted history of my own country and the opportunity to advance towards a deeper learning and understanding of the event of March 8, 1979 a significant date in the history of feminism in Iran. In what follows I revisit the history of Iran since the 1979 revolution with a particular inflexion on the role women played in that history. However, as my project develops , I gradually move away from the socio-historical facts to investigate the legacy of the revolution on the representations of women in photography, film and literature as well as the creation of an imaginary space of self representation. To this end my writing moves constantly between the documentary, the analytical and the personal. In parallel I have made photographs and video works which are explorations of the veil as object of fascination and desire as well as symbol of repression.