JAWS: Journal of Arts Writing by Students - Current Issue

Revisiting 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.

The 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.

This 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.

This 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.

This 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.

Most 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.

This 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.