The film Little pink bush explores the world of early colour pioneer Elizabeth Burris-Mayer. The film track's down and reunite's her rare published books from the 1930’s and 1940’s, taking a transatlantic trip from the UK to Connecticut USA, where she lived. The film explores the joy of her lost and hidden colour world.
‘Informal Education is an open declaration of the satisfactions of fakery. Stacked against the wall and each other, not randomly but carefully composed, six stretchers covered variously with recycled fabric or oil on canvas form an assembly that taken together add up to a picture of art history learned piecemeal at art school and in the studio. Second hand silk scarves imitate an early black and white Bridget Riley, on another generic, geometric modernism; a mélange of Mondrian, Vaserely and Russian Constructivism, a reference sustained by the adjoining canvas which is a version of Malevich’s Black Square. Informal Education is Taylor’s interpretation both of her inheritance and of her desire as a painter, including at the level of materials - the dishcloths, silk scarves and head-squares - feminism’s challenge to the exclusions of high modernism: the domestic, fashion & popular culture.’
The word making, on a basic thesaurus search conduces up the following nouns: creation; manufacture; production; construction; assembly; building… now let’s add some verbs to the mix…crafting; formatting; composing; fashioning.
And the word research? Investigation; study; examination; enquiry…
Words are useful, and wonderful, & in the context of this years Crossing Borders Research cluster exhibition title, are at the heart of the show. How-ever it is the combination of the words & what the practice of Making Research means that is the aspiration of the enquiry of this exhibition. The intention of Making Research is to inclusively capture the excellence of ongoing practice led or related research work, ongoing at Leeds Arts University, in the contemporary moment.
The work presented by the participating artists reveals that they do not solely make art, often the ‘studio’ is the site of research, often for the passionate study of books, articles, artefacts and historical references. The work in Making…Making Research points to somewhere beyond the visible or audible and allows us to consider what lies beyond the work and initial observations of it, in search of meaning that lies somewhere else…
Abstract:
The aim of my research is to investigate how my practice as a painter is situated within codes of class and gender as they relate to questions of aesthetics in painting. This has involved an interdisciplinary investigation into the significance drawn from the background of my own history in terms of the aesthetic decisions that have previously, and continue to inform my practice as an artist. Life writing at the intersection of class and feminist politics is the framework used to position my understanding of Aspirational Beauty. The concept of Aspirational Beauty is traced and articulated through a process of writing through multi disciplinary perspectives that incorporate and link painting, history, material culture, literature, sociology and fine art practice. The concept of Aspirational Beauty is to understand creative endeavors and practices that are outside of, or marginalized from, established theoretical conventions and definitions. Aspirational Beauty is, I argue, a creative resistance to conforming to socially inscribed ideals of respectability. My research considers Aspirational Beauty as an aesthetic resistance to class shame and a reaction to ascribed and legitimate routes of attaining cultural capital, personified by painting, the most aristocratic of art forms. My research has involved an extensive investigation of painting, by reviewing three decades of international painting survey exhibitions from 1980 to 2010. I have focused on national painting exhibitions in the 1980s to provide a perspective on the changing contexts of painting and subsequently, relations to and considerations of 'Britishness'. The choice of survey exhibitions and related exhibition catalogues as a process of review and analysis provide an extant proper record of painting; that have over time become a legitimized authoritative source of reference. I have considered my practice-as-research, exploring overt transformations of shame in relation to vulnerability and beautification within my practice as a painter. I unravel habitual acts of concealment and aesthetic cover-ups and how this functions as a veneer of respectability.
http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.695398