JAWS: Journal of Arts Writing by Students - Current Issue
Volume 7, Issue 1, 2022
- Editorial
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JAWS’s return
More LessIn this editorial, the editor-in-chief reaches out to JAWS’s readership to shed light on the internal workings of the journal’s team and introduces the articles published in this volume. Having finally overcome many difficulties due to COVID-19’s epidemic backlash, JAWS is continuing to publish relevant and exciting arts writing.
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- Articles
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Using JAWS digest: Playing the game of academic writing in an educational setting: A report
More LessThis article reports on the work developed on the first semester of the 2020–21 academic year in a curricular unit called art and visual culture belonging to the curriculum of the master’s course in design and visual culture at IADE, Faculty of Design, Technology and Communication of Universidade Europeia, Lisbon, Portugal. For the students’ work – to write an academic article – we used JAWS as a template for a hypothetical submission. Each student developed one article as if to submit for publication in this journal. The work was divided into two phases: research and writing. In the first phase, art and humanities methods were explored, concerning reading and organizing textual and visual materials. Gillian Rose’s Visual Methodologies and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne method were explored. Students chose one exhibition held in Lisbon at the time to be the subject of the article. A ‘Warburg panel’ was created, bringing depth in analysis linking contemporary art or visual culture with Romanticism and or Modernism. In the second phase, writing was structured organizing a visual rhetoric deriving from the images already collected. Textual strategies like paraphrasing, quoting and commenting were also explored to finalize an article using a defined article already published by JAWS about an exhibition held in Portugal. The article concludes on the virtue of using academic journals as a learning tool.
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- Interviews
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David Blackmore: An interview
Artist and educator David Blackmore talks about his work, but chiefly how current affairs influence his art practice and the artworld at large. With a studio and an outdoors practice, much of his work is tied to a sense of system and how he fits – or not – in this system, making ‘the border’ a recurrent theme in his imaginary. From the concept of border to the realm of media, we explore in this interview notions of propaganda, art in the digital age, post-truth, life as an artist and other topical insights for those who use critical thinking in their practice.
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Part of the landscape: Interview with Miek Zwamborn
By Nina HanzRevisiting a conversation that took place in 2019, Nina Hanz interviews Miek Zwamborn about her artistic practice. Spanning jewellery making, cooking, writing and gathering information from her shifting habitats, Zwamborn shares her path as a transdisciplinary artist. With a particular focus on her publishing history, the two discuss gentle research approaches that work in harmony with nature and how the collection of objects opens a portal to new knowledges. As the subject of place emerges, discussions around The Knockvologan Studies, Zwamborn and her partner Rutger Emmelkamp’s project space on the island of Mull, arise. Occurring pre-pandemic, the transcription documents missed connections and how life can pull one to unpredictable places.
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- Articles
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Life-seeking approaches in eco-artistic practices: A proposal for a radical cultural change through language
More LessThis article developed in three parts the precursory practice-based research, through a phenomenological framework, to the following yet-to-be-resolved core question: is it possible for the artistic (and ritualistic) object to be imbued with what we consider to be the essence of life? The research arrives at this question by exploring how silence and sound can contribute to the perception of life, highlighting language as a driver for cultural change and advancing the use of a new pronoun assigned to those who bear life.
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Exiled in the present: The last Cyberman walks in Rettendon
More LessThe author introduces, presents and considers a recent experiment that saw him walk to the location of the 1995 Essex Range Rover murders while dressed as a character he has created, ‘the last Cyberman’. The article tracks the lineage of this imagined persona through a concise review of the author’s journey through fine art research study, before displaying the photographs and reflective text resulting from the walk. Upon analysing these, connections are made to the work of Francesca Woodman, Michael Landy and J. G. Ballard, as it becomes evident that this recent performative development in the author’s practice reveals previously tacit truths about his relationship to his home county and the displacement he feels in twenty-first-century life.
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Urban fragments ‘on hold’: Reflections of COVID-19 in the urban Greek environment
More LessThis study focused on how the urban environment of a Greek city, Patras, visually bore witness to the impact that COVID-19 has had within its public spaces. It also focused on how the human involvement is reflected on the city surfaces, and even its absence denotes the new conditions caused by the pandemic. Time appeared to be frozen on the city surfaces and its visual remainders point to a previous era, when a pandemic may have sounded more like a sci-fi scenario, or over the ‘breaks’ of successive lockdowns. In order to record and document the fragmented spatial and temporal actualities, I relied on fine art practices such as photography, photogrammetry and 3D models for the production of an archive of the current historic imperative.
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Photographic realism, camera-less photography and the representation of the feminine: The work of Floris Neusüss
More LessThis article will examine claims that photography can reveal truths about the world with a particular emphasis on camera-less techniques, their claim to realism and their utilization in both late nineteenth-century science and contemporary art photography. I will critique the late twentieth-century work of Floris Neusüss, whose photograms of the unclothed female form were exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2010. It will be argued that the photogram slips the grasp of contemporary gender analysis within visual culture, despite the camera-less process’s associations with a tactful, scientific truth. Understood through their psychoanalytic subtext, Neussus’s images are revealed as compliant with well-worn clichés of female passivity, both in what they represent and in the singularity of their method of production.
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Examining cultural displacement within two graphic novels: A comparative analysis
More LessThis article analyses how two graphic novels convey the feeling of cultural displacement through their intentions, research methods and visual language. The two graphic novels discussed are Shaun Tan’s The Arrival and a student work by Margarita Louka, Foreign. This article will be accompanied by a discussion in the wider discourses surrounding migration, so that the graphic novels can be correctly contextualized. Even though the visual styles in The Arrival and Foreign are different, both use similar strategies such as defamiliarization, variation of atmosphere and a sympathetic main character to convey the feeling of cultural displacement.
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Pat Mills’s Formula: ‘The Godfather of British comics’s’ step-by-step guide to creating girls’ comic stories
More LessMost once-popular UK children’s comics have now ceased publication. This includes Misty. Aimed specifically at girls between the ages of 8 and 14, Misty was a comic that consisted entirely of frightening fiction and articles based on the supernatural and horror. My research into the popularity of Misty in its ‘heyday’ considered the cultural background at the time of publication, how this was reflected in Misty in terms of perceptions of the zeitgeist at the time of Misty’s publication and how this may have influenced the content of the stories contained within it. I also identified and applied critical concepts specifically with reference to the Misty serials ‘Moonchild’ and ‘The Sentinels’, and the one-off story ‘The Treatment’. With these methods in mind, the possible underlying reasons for the popularity of the stories contained in Misty were examined. However, Misty was first and foremost a piece of fiction in comic format. Thus, academic values aside, my research led me to consider the creative process behind its production and I approached Misty’s consultant editor and contributing writer, Pat Mills, ‘the godfather of comics’, who revealed his creative process. This article analyses Mills’s own subjective step-by-step process for creating a comic, which he names The Formula, and its potential to inform contemporary comics in the form of a guide.
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Playworks: A practical reflection on performance art as a means to intersect play and work
More LessThis article is intended to reflect on how performance art can be a channel through which play and work intertwine. The authors Sven Lütticken and Erving Goffman are used to support the idea that work and leisure have become indistinguishable and that life has become a generalized performance. It is theorized that art and play have characteristics that antagonize the sphere of work under capitalism. Three performances by the author are presented: The Machine Must Go On is about competition and acceleration in the work environment; Slow Woman is about the invisible and undervalued domestic work and consequently the disparities between men and women in this matter and Business Game about the power dynamics involving Mexican workers and American companies.
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