Book Project, Maxted and Boulter

Project Rationale
Chris Maxted and Glen Boulter are alumni of the BA Fine Art course who have gone on to found a flourishing specialist artists publishers. Chris Maxted trained with Bookworks publishing company for several years and Glen Boulter trained in printmaking at the Royal College. As well as publishing a series of self initiated projects, they are currently producing high quality bespoke catalogues for The Womens Library and Museum of Installation, and have recently secured a grant from Bloomberg to further equip their production studio.
They have offered to give a presentation to students attending the Drawing Systems unit and the opportunity for some students to gain some work experience with the publishers to further develop their skills, and also produce their own publication.

Project Outline
Following a set of lectures on the artists book by Drawing Systems unit staff and practical workshops by Maxted and Boulter, the students produced their own books and from that group three students will be invited to become interns.
Books were exhibited within the University. Interns had the opportunity to develop their book project further using the facilities and expertise at Maxted and Boulter. They also had the opportunity to experience issues of running of a small creative business at close quarters.
Interns and participating students were invited to design and deliver book making workshops to pupils at Calverton Primary School.

Final Year Student Support


Project Outline

Objectives:
*To support the realisation of final year work
*To lighten the financial burden on graduating fine art students
*To encourage postgraduate study

The scheme was conceived specifically to offer a greater level of support for female students in a position of financial difficulty, particularly mature students with family responsibilities. The making of work for the graduation exhibition can cost a great deal to the individual student, for many mothers or carers justifying the expense can prove problematic. The Royal Female School of Art provided the opportunity for the university to cover fabrication costs, equipment hire and catalogue expenses for eligible students. All female BA Fine Art final year students resident in the Greater London area were invited to apply as eligible for the scheme and invited to submit applications.

Beauty Queens

Project Outline
Following an invitation to initiate a student project to accompany an exhibition on the history of Beauty Competitions – “Smiles Swimsuits and Sabotage”, students were invited to submit proposals for work to be exhibited in the Café gallery space of the Women’s Library.
During the project students worked with American artist Jessica Voorsanger and visited the archive of the Women’s Library, also working with curator Gail Cameron. For the students it was a great opportunity to explore ways in which an artist can work with historical collections and respond to political themes with personal relevance. Issues of gender and body image were discussed not only with tutors and fellow students but also with historians at the Women’s Library.
The project took place over four months, from the initial request for proposals to the installation of work and the students were involved at all stages of the process enabling them to see how an exhibition is realised.
All participating students attended the opening of the exhibition which was attended by an audience of over 600.
The catalogue was planned with Jessica Voorsanger and designed with student input using the collection at the Women’s Library by Earwig Press.
The exhibition was in place from June 3rd until August 28th 2004.

Antonia Byatt, Director of the Women' Library
"The collections at The Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University, have their roots in the suffrage campaigns. Dame Millicent Fawcett, the President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, was keen to preserve the story of women’s incredible fight for the vote and so the Library was founded bringing together the papers of organisations and individuals involved as well as an extraordinary collection of campaigning material from banners to badges. Over time the papers of other campaigns concerned with women’s equality have been collected in the Library’s collections from campaigns for equal pay to rights for lone parents. One such collection of material reflected women’s concerns during the 1970s about beauty contests and documented protest material against Miss World.

When an archive containing the story of the Miss Great Britain context became available the Library snapped it up, as it contained information about the other side of the story. Not only does the Miss Great Britain archive document the history of the beauty contest at the British seaside, it also gives us a clue about the lives of ordinary women who took part in the contests, who they were and the attitudes displayed towards them. The exhibition contains evocative material including a swimsuit still stained with fake tan, evoking the whole business of the show and the amount of dressing up and disguise from daily life that went on. Films and photographs of the parade make comment on the nature of both the male and female gaze during the second half of the 20th century. The archive also provides interesting information about perceptions of body shape and beauty and how these changed over the last 50 years.

I was thrilled when Dawn Shorten agreed to initiate a complementary project with Fine Art students at Sir John Cass. The students came in and looked at the archive, at the fantastic photographs selected for the exhibition and some of the documentation around the contest and used them to stimulate their thoughts and their work. I was equally pleased when funding was achieved from the Royal Female School of Art Foundation so that artist Jessica Voorsanger could work with the students and we are lucky that her own piece, an exquisite pastiche of ‘Miss Congeniality’ is included in the exhibition. Together the works in the exhibition question the nature of a contest and our attitudes to beauty from Alison Reddish’s photographs of a cattle show to the mechanical and comic ‘Beauty Contest’ in Edita Marelic’s animation. Jane Todd’s photographs of her childhood beauty dreams reference female desires as Caroline Hallidays’s gathered comments question them and P Farnum Hilliard’s remarkable ticker tape of vital statistics is a powerful reminder of idealised concepts of the female body (and the reality!). Nazmeen Latif’s work makes reference to many other aspects of our collections by using a traditional form of female craft to question values around beauty. It is wonderful having such an immediate contemporary response to historical material and the project brings the exhibition into a present day context.

We are very keen that our archives are not solely used for historical research – they are too rich and vibrant and an invaluable resource across many disciplines. The Library contains a large amount of highly stimulating visual and social material which provide wonderful resource for artists and I hope that this project will be the first of many."

Migration-Zagreb 2005
"From London With Love"

Press Release
The presentation of works by London Metropolitan University students will be held on Saturday, April 30, 2005 at 20.00h. The presentation is part of the ''Contact program'', a collaborative project between Miroslav Kraljevic Gallery, London Metropolitan University and the Department of Animation and New Media at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts.

Seven LMU students: Annelies Bloemendaal, Melissa Bugarella, Matthew Johnstone, Mia Meyer, Oliver Evelyn Rahr, Danial Shaw Town, Keiko Yamazaki, stayed for a week in Zagreb, where they created new projects related to the city, as a new place of meeting, communication and investigation. Before their arrival in Zagreb they communicated by e-mail with the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts students, who took on the role of virtual guides for a city the London students hadn't visited before. The presentation at the Miroslav Kraljevic Gallery is just a station in the whole process and an impetus for new projects and possible long-term collaboration between young artists.

Saturday, April 30, 2005 / 20.00 h
Miroslav Kraljevic Gallery

Migration-Hamburg 2005
Exhibition of students from Hamburg at Unit 2 Gallery


Press Release
Besucher (Visitors) is an exhibition of work by students and recent graduates from Hochshule für bildende Künste, the highly regarded art school in Hamburg. Bringing together painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and video, Besucher presents an impressive array of work by a group of young talented German artists. Whilst the exhibition has no definitive or overriding theme, the works in the show can best be described as explorations into the nature of the imaginary and the real, the everyday and the fantastical.

Alongside her economical but amusing video and sculptural works, Nora Klumpp presents her new digital video work Are you Real in which the faces of countless women are perpetually superimposed creating hybridised portraits of real, desired and imagined perfection. Seok Lee's eerie figurative paintings draw from a variety of visual sources and employ digital trickery to blur lines between fiction and reality, appropriation and manipulation. Lees zombie-like figures flit between the mundane and the paranormal, existing in peculiar pictorial reality of the artist’s own making.

Silke Peters' large scale photographic window installation responds to the specifics of the gallery, to examine both the physical and conceptual relationships between the gallery and its surrounding environment. Boran Sadi's wry but ambitious project What somebody carried comprises of photo-sculptures and a video charting Sadi's self-organised rally in which participants were invited to join him on the road with his collection of artists’ banners-cum-sculptures. Maria Tobiassen's vibrant monochrome drawings depict a world of make-believe, whilst her playful sculptural works eloquently explore the possibility of forming narratives across different art forms.

Besucher is an exchange project organised by London Metropolitan University and Hochshule für bildende Künste Hamburg and selected by Wiebke Siem and Dawn Shorten. Part II of the collaboration Visitors featuring work by students and recent graduates from London Metropolitan University takes place at VOR ORT, Hamburg, 8 April - 1 May 2005.

Unit 2 Gallery
59-63 Whitechapel High Street
London E1 7PF

Migration-Hamburg 2005
Exhibition of London Metropolitan students at Galerie VORT ORT in Hamburg

Press Release
Galerie VOR ORT presents the exhibition ‘Besucher/Visitors’, which showcases the work of five current students and recent graduates from London Metropolitan University. This exhibition forms the second leg of a Partnership project with the Hochschule für bildende Künste, which saw artists from Hamburg selected by Wiebke Siem, exhibiting in London at Unit 2 Gallery. The work by the London-based ‘visitors’ is marked by an emphasis on heterogeneity and encompasses Photography, Drawing, Film, Video-Installation and Interactive Soundwork. Selected by the curator Nicolas de Oliveira, the exhibition displays different attitudes of making and viewing. It emphasises the role of the spectator in the process of reception. The traditional contemplative stance is followed by close engagement and scrutiny and finally by interaction - where the artist simply provides the instrument for the viewer to make the work.

Mary Yacoob’s drawings record incidental and typically overlooked occurrences. Habitual behaviour, chance events, and experiments concerning domestic routines are notated in charts and maps. Scientific methods and visual languages are appropriated and used as structures within which to observe and note, to search for the poetic in the everyday or to suggest narratives.
Large colour Photographs depicting decaying industrial buildings form the nucleus of Michael Vogt’s work. Influenced by the Typologies of Hilla and Bernd Becher, and the early architectural photography of Gursky, Ruff, Struth, Hütte and Höfer, these exhausted remains of the machine age speak of a nostalgia for a recent past, and of the inextricably enmeshed social, political and environmental legacies projected into the present.
Lewis Cuthbert-Ashton’s films examine the progressive breakdown of human relationships under extraordinary conditions. His dialogue infuses everyday conversation with dark humour and menace. The absurd scenarios point to the inevitability of violence and result in tragic consequences.
Joe Watling combines video and sound to highlight our perception of time. The spatial quality of his installations, both physical and acoustic, is intended to cause the moving image to be considered in terms of object and location as opposed to a traditional screen-based representation of another time and space.
Merijn Royaards’s work examines the acoustic properties of urban spaces and its relationship to the human sensory experience. The work presented here consists of a modified drum kit, which replaces areas of impact with touch-microphones, and invites participants to create a sound ambient within the space.

Calverton–Arts Week 2007

Arts Week 2007 is the continuation of Arts week events 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 which have been a great opportunity for BA Fine Art students to contribute towards a community based arts activity and develop their workshop skills and capability. It has also had a very positive impact on school culture. The school and the university seek to continue their collaborative partnership for Arts Week 2007 and aims to maintain the widening of different arts activities available. This will take place from at the end of June 2007.
We plan to continue the successful format where teachers and students work together with the pupils in a workshop environment. The Arts Week 2007 will also be complemented by a series of workshops led by experienced community artists; students will also be able to observe and work with the community artists, which will inform and extend their own professional practice. Calverton's pupils will choose the theme of Arts Week 2007, which will be interpreted by the staff at the school and used by the LMU students in their workshop planning and activity.
BA Fine Art students will be taken through a thorough training and induction process, which will cover important aspects such as health and safety, the practical and creative development of a concept, and will participate in an arts INSET session at the school with the teachers.

Knight’s Move

David Howells and Charlie Woolley are editing, publishing and distributing a quarterly journal of commissioned artists’ writing and writing for visual art. They are working with two students Tim Pratt and Charlotte Young.
The relationship of written language to visual art is often considered as problematic. An artist is often perceived as inarticulate, someone who doesn’t read, and can’t or shouldn’t write. Moreover, academic and critical writing on the visual arts can be seen as inaccessible and is sometimes distanced from its subject. This can be limiting for a wide range of people, and in particular students who study the subject of Fine Art.
The journal aims to provide a public space in which visual artists can use the written word as another form of artistic endeavour. The approach is different from the more formal or traditional format of critical theory, or a literary review.
David and Charlie intend to devote their publication exclusively to “writing for art’, and individual contributors will be brought together as part of an integral visual project. And moreover, a new kind of writing will require a new kind of reading – this publication will not be read as traditional newspaper, book or magazine is read.
This periodical is actively seek out contributors and commissions from the new writing in response to a theme or motif, which informs each issue.
It is important to consider Knight’s Move as a new space of artistic activities. The four walls of a studio space become the four edges of a journal. This journal is an innovative vehicle for art writing and writing on art.
Issue one is out and was conceived around the theme ‘the manifesto’.

As stated by the external examiner, Professor Jill Journeaux, for the BA Fine Art in her Annual Subject Standards Examiner’s report:
“The written work that I have been able to view has proven consistently outstanding over the last three years, and is of great strength, and of national significance. The requirements for the written components offer students a vehicle for finding and using their own unique voice through writing, parallel with the visual. This is enabling new territory to be claimed in the articulation of practice through writing, at undergraduate level and is addressing central questions of, what writing is and can be for artists. This work is valuable and innovative and I applaud it.”

People involved
David Howells has recently completed an MA in visual culture at Middlesex University. Ongoing research interests include the relationship between word and image, cognitive approaches to the creative process and drawing as a language.

Charlie Woolley obtained a BAFA in 2003 and is currently running a short course entitled “Literature For Visual Artists” at London Metropolitan University, he is a practicing artists and writer and has worked for various magazines and in the book retail industry. He joined the David Risley Gallery in October 2006.

The Editorial are among other
Nicola Oxley, Artist, Curator, Lecturer at London Metropolitan University
Nicolas de Oliveira, Writer, Curator, Lecturer at London Metropolitan University
David Risley, David Risley Gallery
Dr. Stephen Bury, Head of Modern English and American Collections at British Library
Jemma Kennedy, Lecturer in creative writing at the Manchester Metropolitan University
Sina Najafi, Editor of the magazine Cabinet
Luca lo Pinto, Nero Magazine
Maria Fusco, Bookworks
Pavel Buchler, Artist, has tough at the Glasgow University
Alec Finlay, Independent Art Publisher
Liam Gillick, Artist and curator of the show Kiosque at the ICA

Christian Zuzunaga and Charlotte Heal designed the first issue. They are currently doing an MA in Typography at the RCA.