Projects (Current)
Rosy Martin retrospective.
Working with the photographer, writer and therapist Rosy Martin and Professor Marsha Meskimmon to produce a retrospective of Martin’s work. It is envisaged that this project would include a publication and a symposium and exhibition.
Isn't it 'About Time'?
The project Isn't it 'About Time'? sets out to reconsider the use of slide-tape as a type of visual arts practice that was used by artists in the UK in the 1980s.
Slide-tape is a series of projected photographic slides with a synchronized audiotape soundtrack. As a technology, it was used by a number of key artists for a brief period before being abandoned in favour of the newer emerging technology - videotape. However, during this brief period artists used the technology to make experimental work that explored the relationship between images and spoken texts or sounds.
The work made in slide-tape technologies was temporary, cheap to make and immediate. Exhibited as much in community and educational settings as in galleries, it was a visual practice used by mainly women and black artists - those from constituencies that, at the time, had little access to large amounts of funding. Due to the temporal nature of the art works and their subject matter, which was often politicized and critical, many of them would seem to have vanished without trace. There are no named archives or holdings of this work (in the UK). As such, an important and little recognized stage in the development of artist’s use of time and screen-based media’s has been ignored.
This project aims to fully research, restate and re-examine this historical ‘moment’ making its importance more widely known – and ensuring that its legacy to contemporary art practice is no longer forgotten.
The project will do this by restaging a number of works from that period in an exhibition, accompanied by a catalogue that shows the results of the research.
After this initial stage, a short programme of socially engaged art projects will run. This will work with underrepresented social groups and aim to produce contemporary work using digital technologies, applying some of the same frameworks and principles left in the legacy of slide-tape work.
Finally, each element of the entire programme will be brought together in a symposium that will address both the legacy and the contemporaneity of slide-tape work.
Overall, the project seeks not just to reconsider these histories but also to show their relevance and currency to broader contemporary arts practices.
Dr Mo White, Principal Investigator.
Lecturer, School of Art and Design
Loughborough University.
Community Slide-tape project.
The AHRC project will also run a ‘community’ strand, replicating the way that much slide-tape work happened in the 1970/80s, and work with groups to produce contemporary versions of slide-tape work to be shown at exhibition
ESRC Project.
Moving in My World:
An Investigation into Young People’s Embodiment and its Impact on Participation in Physical Activity
Research project sponsored by Economic & Social Research Council, UK.
The body increasingly represents a contested cultural site for young people. Given contemporary concerns about physically inactive lifestyles among young people on the one hand, and the myriad of health, fitness, and sport media messages about the body that young people negotiate on the other hand, how do young people of different ethnic backgrounds make sense of their subjective experiences in physical activity settings? What are their visual representations of their understandings? How do such understandings impact their physicality? Dr. Laura Azzarito and her research team located in the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences at Loughborough University are currently investigating such crucial questions. By creating visual diaries using digital photography, young people represent and reflect upon what moving in their world means to them.
Moving in My World is an interdisciplinary research project undertaken with secondary students in inner-city public schools. This research project adopts a participatory visual methodology to explore the complex ways in which young people think about, make sense of, and construct their physicality in their school communities. A key purpose of adopting a visual participatory methodology is to empower young people to creatively express their experiences, thoughts, and identities, and the ways in which their experiences shape their physicality. Moving in My World, moreover, intends to shed light on young people’s subjective experiences of their bodies, and the ways in which such embodiments are expressed in their participation or lack of participation in school physical activity. The research team is conducting visual arts-based participatory research that encourages young people to take an active role in the research process, acknowledging their engagement as potentially transformative of their experiences. To this end, the culmination of this project will entail the organization of exhibits at community schools and museums to show students' visual representations of their identities, their body narratives and their understandings of what physical activity means to them.
Research Team:
Dr. Laura Azzarito, Principal Investigator. Lecturer, School of Sport and Exercise Sciences. Loughborough University.
Dr. Adriana Katzew, Visiting Researcher. Director, Art Education Program. University of Vermont, USA.
Jennifer Sterling, MA, Research Associate. School of Sport and Exercise Sciences. Loughborough University.
Professor Kathy Armour, Project Mentor. School of Sport and Exercise Sciences. Loughborough University.
