Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 7, Issue 3, 2014

This article concerns the initial stages of an art residency with the Liddle Collection, an archive of World War I interviews, documents and related objects at Leeds University Library’s Special Collections. The Collection, which has been awarded Designation for its international significance, was founded by historian Peter Liddle in the 1970s, and is centred on personal testimonies of wartime experiences. After outlining its history and current situation, the article focuses on my modes of entry into this large body of material. The Collection has a catalogue and cross-referencing subject index. With reference to Spieker, I consider how they shape the archive as I encounter it. Three writing/drawing methods (making notes, drawing diagrams and writing lists) have been used as a means to immerse myself in the Collection, map and process it as an artist. Finally, I consider Christov-Bakargiev’s idea of the ‘distracted archive’ as a model to take forward.

Performances from Brass Art (Lewis, Mojsiewicz, Pettican), captured at the Freud Museum, London, using Kinect laser scanning and Processing, reveal an intimate response to spaces and technologies. ‘A house within a house within a house within a house’ links historical and cultural representations of the double, the unconscious and the uncanny to this artistic practice. The new moving-image and sonic works form part of a larger project to inhabit the writing rooms of influential authors, entitled ‘Shadow Worlds | Writers’ Rooms’.

The research purpose of my article is to use writing to interrogate a sculpture project of my own, using the psychic framework presented in the psychoanalytical theories of Christopher Bollas so as to retrieve actions, methods and process as case studies to support my claim. As a sculptor I will write through the ‘Others’ project to narrate, analyse and interpret my practice as it existed in, with and through the archive. Writing is not the moment of the production of art, but it offers the best opportunity to record my own projects as a sculptor. A photographic record would satisfy methods of observation, description, process and action. However, writing particularly allows me to additionally identify and articulate the theory in sculpture in terms of the work of sculpture itself. My narrative aims to evidence the idea of the psychic dimension of practice within the production of sculpture and, hopefully, contribute to sculptural theory and pedagogy.

The costume industry regularly utilizes vintage clothing for performance in theatre and film. Reflecting on garments previously encountered during a career in this industry, the authors contemplate the lives and purpose of such items and their role within a working costume store. Discussion with professionals from various backgrounds evokes a wide range of questions and differing opinions surrounding the idea of value in this context, producing a subjective reaction with no definitive answer. This article contextualizes these questions through the study of a single item of historical clothing currently used as costume, encouraging the reader to consider how the value of such pieces is perceived. The concept of the costume stock room as an accessible, living archive is explored in relation to the recognized traditional archival structure of a museum store where conservation and preservation have priority.

This article recreates a deteriorating archive, bringing life, opportunity and growth to a collection that is in reality dying. It explores a collection owned by the National Trust at Claydon House in Buckinghamshire. Modern techniques of Infinate Focus Microscopy and Computerized Tomography scanning are used to render 3D digital images which are intended to capture the imagination of contemporary artists and designers resulting in an ever evolving archive for future generations. The research identifies that all textile materials have significance and even the smallest fragments may serve as an inspiration to the next generation of creative designers. Focusing on the preservation, restoration and visualization of small insignificant fragments of delicate cloth, the article captures and reinvents the materials, giving a new meaning for future generations.

With the advent of accessible digital technology in the 1990s, image archive collections that were once the sole preserve of the conservator or researcher with white gloves could now be made available to all. Creating digital surrogates offered promise for increasing public access, however, not without considerable challenges in the making. This article recounts and reflects upon how a local authority aimed to make, potentially, 250,000 glass plate negatives in numerous different local history collections generally accessible by scanning and subject indexing. It considers the challenges of providing metadata that would best meet end-user needs in a touch screen public access system and how and why a hierarchical classification scheme was developed to allow productive browsing of these historic collections of everyday life. The photographic archive case study is then revisited through a twenty-first century lens, discussing latest developments and the potential of open source tools for multidimensional access.

Google Patents is an eight-year-old virtual searchable database containing the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the European Patent Office (EPO) patents, with US patent applications dating back to 1790. This searchable online archive of invention, novelty and innovation is a valuable tool for designers and researchers. As a point of departure for recent art-based research, Google Patents online database is mined by me as a creative practitioner. As an artist-hacker, the found material used in my research arises from patent searches for fantastical machines and devices developed to assist with swimming, dating from the 1870s to the early twentieth century. The retrieved patent, etched drawings and information evidence an understanding of a new sport at particular moments in time. However, almost all of these patents remained ‘unrealized’, only contained within the drawing and text of the patent itself. These patents are used as the visual and conceptual basis for The Swimming Machine Archive (2014), a growing body of collages featuring fictional devices for moving through water.

The foundation for this text is my 10xCD opus The Sounds of Ideas Forming (2008–2012), an archive of 318 sound files featuring content from art students, children and practitioners such as Yoko Ono, David Bowie, Chris Watson, Douglas Gordon, Lydia Lunch, Brian Eno and George Brecht. The Sound of a Sound Art Archive considers this particular sound archive, examining formats, narrative and the relationship between recording sound and recorded sound. I draw upon first person experiences and examples from curating, pedagogy and sound art to arrive at a series of frameworks for a sound art archive, one that is finite, educational and able to interject into everyday contexts.

The pamphlets of local amateur historian Ken Cooper were unearthed at a car boot sale by artists Bristow & Lloyd and subsequently republished for new audiences at a number of festivals, exhibitions and institutions. The work playfully speculates on historical knowledge, weaving the imaginary persona of Ken and his ability to misinterpret, with information drawn from social and archival sources. By presenting a re-interpretation of local history it was hoped that readers would reflect on how they know what they know and in so doing, encourage discussions around ways in which we remember, forget, construct or share knowledge. Placing the work in the public realm and within heritage contexts raised a number of issues around how such a strategy worked.

Collaborative artists Carson & Miller’s project with the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art utilizes their established practice of play. The project explores the physical and conceptual spaces of this museum’s archive. Carson & Miller’s play encompasses a variety of games; between themselves, as well as games that have drawn in visitors and staff. These games have proven to be a fruitful strategy for piercing the archive; its physical presence, its mass and meaning, its availability to the visitor. This article is informed by Roland Barthes’ punctum and explores how these archive games have opened up opportunities for interaction, handling and touch in its physical, sensual and intellectual senses.

This interdisciplinary article explores from a practitioner’s perspective ways in which developments in Web 2.0 technology, in combination with mobile phones, facilitate and encourage new methods of archiving creative process that result in new experimental forms of writing. It takes the author’s use of Twitter as a case study. The research purpose is to consider the benefits of developments in new technology to creative writing practitioners. An aim will be to reach a new theoretical position on how social media and mobile technology can aid and generate creativity by enabling archiving of the creative process to be an ongoing, live, dynamic experience.

The Archive of Nothingness (AON) addresses the connections between art and graphic design; their present-day functions and manifestations and their simultaneously disparate yet interlinked histories, as well as discussions around the role, influence and ‘authority’ of archives, archivists, exhibitions and curators. Designed to resemble the adjacent pages of an open book and to act as a ‘mirror’ which presents images and ideas in (questionable, uncertain) parallel(s), it is based around a Tumblr weblog site. With the dual function of contributing to a mass of online visual information; participating in an existing world-wide dialogue, while also functioning self-reflexively and critically, it provides a vehicle for data collection which simultaneously acts as an ongoing and potentially infinite piece of ‘living’ research. Encompassing a set of binaries, the site is at once regulated and organic, static and kinetic, planned and spontaneous, concrete and indeterminate – and intentionally open to interpretation.

This index takes account of the activities of a research unit, Art (&) Currency: Institute of Vanishing Principles and Spells (A&C). An assembly around a publishing practice, A&C ‘disputes things’ and operates as a minimal collective, a group of researchers from various disciplines with a focus on maintaining a malleable, strategically transformative body of agents within and beyond the institution. Indicating an Institute of Vanishing … the future of A&C is yet unclear; there are murmurs it has already abandoned its formal meetings. The headquarters have not provided a public statement about the current status of the assembly. Given this uncertain, oblique situation, the plan for designing a record of the procedures in 2013 is now in the process of being realized. This ‘taking stock of’ not only embodies the method of ‘archiving’, but also discretely brings in a dispute around ‘The Allure of the Archive’, a significant theme for all A&C members, see also Figure 1.

In 1949 Bretton Hall College was founded as a Teacher Training College designed for the promotion of art education in the West Riding of Yorkshire. It opened with 56 students and by 1964 the college had expanded significantly resulting in an extensive building programme encompassing nine student hostels, a music block, gymnasium, sanatorium, dining hall, library and Principal’s residence. In 2014, 50 years on, the site is earmarked for development and many of the 1964 buildings are potentially going to be demolished. This research will adopt a psychogeographical approach to the site of the college by transposing the 1964 campus map onto the existing landscape to produce a juxtaposition of narratives that exist in the space and supported by secondary data from the National Arts Education Archive at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (NAEA). This retrieval method – allowing what was once there and what is there now – creates a new archive of experience before the 1964 campus map route disappears forever.

This article reveals how submersion in, and appropriation of, the archive has shaped my teaching practice at Leeds College of Art. Engagement with Tom Hudson’s archive, housed at the National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), inadvertently became a piece of writing about my own teaching practice in the role Hudson had held 50 years previously. Using archival documents amassed throughout Hudson’s teaching career, I investigated both his pedagogy and teaching philosophy, and found myself developing appropriated project briefs within my own curriculum planning. A methodology of intervention emerged from my research, which began with hermeneutical methods employed within the archive. This engagement with Hudson’s collection became a piece of reflective writing about my own teaching practice at Leeds College of Art, at a time of renewed interest in Art Education History. This will be explored using both images and words, to reveal the insights gained from working with an archive and the direct use of its materials in a contemporary context.

This interview took place inside the National Arts Education Archive at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (NAEA) in November 2014. Whilst there is a necessary focus on Hester Reeve’s most recent project YMEDACA – a re-mapping of Yorkshire Sculpture Park through the features of Plato’s ‘Academos’ – the dialogue also moves its way through the archive’s important role in the process and formation of the project. We were keen to hold our discussion inside the archive itself; to allow the space to hold us while we negotiated the terrain of sculptural thinking. This was our first meeting and what follows is a partial transcription of our three-hour discussion. We would like our exchange to honour the 30 year-anniversary of the NAEA.

This article investigates the potential of the disparate and unconventional aspects of what can be considered an archive, as a means by which to respond to a past performance. According to French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, commentary on artworks seeks to link onto the gesture or trace of the event and to provoke further artworks as commentary. It is this affective response to fragments from a past performance that motivates this project. In 2013–2014, I worked with students from two art institutions, one in Poland and one in the United Kingdom, to respond to a performance by British artist Stuart Brisley, which took place in Warsaw in 1975. Photographs from the performance are readily accessible online, but there remains no archival record of the performance at the event’s location. It was, therefore, to investigate this performance by other means that students were asked to work with fragments from the past.