CSAD Magazine Issue 2

magazine Autumn 2012 Edition 2

A new home Pages 11 - 12

Cardiff School of Art & Design

CSAD MAGAZINE

Contents CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD MAGAZINE

Steve Thompson:

Ian Wilkins

A Man on B and

MFA Fine Art (2011)

Building a new curriculum Steve Thompson believes that to make something function well, you have to leave it be. That might not sound reassuring when it comes to the man responsible for defining the curriculum at the School of Art & Design. However, after speaking to Thompson for even several minutes, it’s clear he knows what is happening.

“We recognised that the design of the new curriculum had to be an emerging thing.” he explains when asked how you go about designing a curriculum. “We put in place a structure and a shape, which through shared responsibilities and many, many conversations at every level, were allowed to evolve from the ground up.”

The stimulus to change the curriculum was twofold. Firstly, the School wanted to create a curriculum and forms of delivery that were well placed within the 21st Century. “The student experience must be forward-looking and based on the dynamics of the art and design disciplines we address” Thompson explains when I ask what this means for the student. “Secondly, we needed to find a way to make the School financially sustainable,” he continues. “This meant changing or evolving many established practices, as well as developing and deploying the very best of our technical skills and academic expertise. We invested in the best of our ideas and rationalised the portfolio. “ The process of curriculum change within CSAD began with a revision of the masters degrees.

“We now have a rather smart way of delivering masters schemes that enables us to have very small nuanced programmes, that are still viable economically because they’re all under the umbrella of a larger programme. After that, we restructured the School,” he explains. “We now have eight subject leaders who are responsible for driving their subject academically. They have responsibility for programmes in their subject areas and for promoting the quality of their discipline. We also have Heads of Undergraduate Studies, Masters Studies and Research Degrees who provide coordination and have responsibility for quality and student satisfaction.

This structure leads to worthwhile interactions and strong academic delivery, as well as safeguards on quality.

One of the tenets of the new undergraduate curriculum is that students should develop not only depth within their own discipline through engagement with critical and creative practices, but that they should also be able to expand their knowledge through engagement with ideas and practices from outside their discipline. This is done through a three strand approach to the delivery of the undergraduate programme. “Our undergraduate students will take three 40 credit modules each year. The first module each year will always be in their subject (the subject module). This will be an in- depth and progressive engagement with the ideas and practices of their subject, whatever it might be, from Fine Art to Graphic Communication. Then, they’ll move into their Field module.”

In the first year, the whole school works on the same project, called The Spirit of Cardiff,” he explains. “They will be responding through making their engagement with ideas on some aspect of Cardiff as a European capital city. The sense for this was inspired by Cardiff & Co and they will be reviewing the results. In their second year, students will have a choice of Field module, from study abroad in India or the United States, to studying how to set up a business or working with one of our professors. In their third year, they will be more fully engaged with their discipline.

Finally, Thompson explains, there is the constellation module. That’s theory, history, ideas, personal planning and a whole lot of other things brought together. This is where students begin to identify their intellectual position and construct their professional standing.

By way of explanation, Thompson recounts how one of the early models for the new undergraduate programmes stemmed from that employed in teaching Natural Science at Cambridge University. Here both discipline and cross-disciplinary engagement produces both synergies and challenges “At the one end, you’ve got astronomy and then at the other end you’ve got zoology. Thirty years ago, the astronomers might never have spoken to the zoologists,” he says. “Now you get the very small niche field of astro-zoology, where people are looking for microbes in space and suchlike.

There may only be 10 or 15 people in the world who are expert at that but that’s what has been created.”

“What characterises our school is the quality of the students and the staff. I like to think of ourselves, even if we don’t have the name, as being a national School of Art and Design. Our primary mission is to create the artists and

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designers of the future,” Thompson explains.

“We want to produce high quality graduates by building the right kind of environment. That seems to me to be the only way to survive in a highly competitive world. Spin doesn’t work anymore. What works is making quality! It worked for Apple and BMW. It’s the same for education.”

To finish, Thompson explains how much he enjoys working at the School of Art & Design.

“I love working here. Whenever I’m doing my job, I imagine myself back as a masters student at the Royal College of Art again and I think to myself ‘Is this what I had in mind?’ and sometimes when I’m signing off compliance forms or dealing with budgets, I think, no,” he says. “But 99% of the time when I see this world forming around us, something in which I have had a hand in creating, I think there’s no better thing in the world than working in higher education.”

Cardiff School of Art & Design 2

CSAD MAGAZINE

Theory and Practice Senior Lecturer in Ceramics

I point out a set of figurines that have QR codes on their faces, that can be scanned by a mobile phone taking the viewer to a website. He tells me they’re the work of Ingrid Murphy, who shares his office. He recounts, with great enthusiasm, the story behind the work.

It doesn’t take long to see the Senior Lecturer in Ceramics (and next year, Ceramics and Maker programmes) love of his work and the work of others around him.

Ian Wilkins is collecting jobs. He occasionally works as a part-time technician at the Howard Gardens Gallery and is a part-time tutor at London Print Studio. “I’ve just acquired a number of different jobs that I’ve managed to keep going along the way and recently I have made a successful application to be an artist in residency at Marlborough College. It’s close to my home town which is quite fitting. That’s a year’s residency starting in late August,” he explains. “I have been working in a school as a teaching assistant work for early years, reception age. I’m a friendly giant! I also work for Cathays Community Centre doing morning cleaning. I love it because you meet different kinds of people.”

“I’m really into religious painting and religious iconography. I also think about printmaking as being an art form that’s not defined by its techniques.” he told me “Many people think printmaking is print on paper and frame.

I would argue that moving image, films, those are printmaking.”

Aside from being incredibly busy juggling all of the hats that he’s collecting - tutor, technician, artist, community worker, cleaner - he’s making a name for himself as one of the founders of The Cardiff Sessions - a collaborative print project which he started with two friends from his undergraduate days at CSAD, Christina Wrege and Michael Iveson. After graduation, Wrege went to the Royal College of Art in London while Iveson became studio manager for artist Richard Woods.

His Masters work, shown in the Howard Gardens Gallery last September, deployed his wide definition of printmaking. “I did a number of cardboard sculptures that were printed using relief s and I built them up in layers so that they became structures. They were formal, expressive and slightly abstracted things, but very much retaining that idea of the graphic form which I really like about printmaking. I think

“What we did was meet here and printed together over a series of days. What we set up is part mail-art and part experimental drawing. We became aware of is the potential of stone lithography and created a transfer paper that can be drawn on and sent through the post. We each do a drawing and then transfer it onto the lithographic stones and print! That was the original basis of the project which led us to

Credit: Fran Smith

explore the idea of collaboration,” Wilkins explains. “Michael was very fortunate to be in touch with a few people in London who were interested in the project. One of them is Bruce McLean, quite an established artist, who said that he would like to participate. That escalated things and we started inviting others to participate. That opened up all sorts of possibilities. It expanded the notion of collaboration as an artist practice in itself.”

It was at this point that the opportunity to take The Cardiff Sessions to New York came about.

“We were invited to show the projects out in New York in a small gallery called Booklyn Artist Alliance which is a gallery that’s interested in book art (hence the name Booklyn, rather than Brooklyn). We made a successful application to the Arts Council Wales to go out, show the work we’ve already done on the project . It also gave us a chance to collaborate with some artists in New York to make a series of prints to add to

the project. The art we produce is not owned by anyone but is a product of collaboration,” he continues. “New York was a part of that and we’re hoping to keep a relationship going with the gallery there and do something again in the future and we’re always looking for international workshops to collaborate with. We’re hoping to do something in the summer with the Sidney Nolan Trust. It’s a similar arrangement where we invite a number of artists, set a theme and making a small edition of limited prints into a book format.”

Collaboration is very important to Wilkins. He tells me that that’s one of the best things about art school, “You establish strong ties with people who you’ll be in contact with for the rest of your life. It’s really special to be doing something like this,” he says. “It gets heated as well: working in a professional manner with friends. You sometimes get on each other’s nerves and have arguments over the nature of what you’re doing

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and how you go about it, but it’s primarily through that friendship that we sustain the project.

Wilkins is excited about all of the opportunities that this year presents him. From his tutorship at the London Print Studio to his rapidly approaching residency at Marlborough College, he’s got a bright year ahead.

“At the moment I’m in a stage of waiting for the residency to start into a new set of works,” says the prolific artist. “I’ve still got all these works but I’m always looking to move on and submit them to a few shows. I’m collecting art in my flat and the spare room is just full of cardboard and colour!”

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“I teach predominantly into the undergraduate programmes. I teach studio practice, all the areas which are the interface between creative practice and materiality. I also head up the material side, the technology side of the undergraduate programme - especially years one and two,” he says.

Although he has now been in post for 10 years, his journey to being Senior Lecturer at Cardiff School of Art and Design wasn’t a quick one.

“This is a very important moment in my midlife crisis! I’ve been in post for 10 years at the end of this academic year. I had come to Cardiff originally to study for the postgraduate programme. In terms of educational development, my first degree was wood, metal, ceramic and glass. I had a sense of wanting to have a sharper focus. I had always had a passion for clay and the potter’s wheel. At 13 years old, I was working with a potter’s wheel; clay has been at the centre of my interest since that point. In terms of education, I did an art foundation in Manchester. It gave me a lot of wider, intriguing material context and understanding,” he explains. “I worked as a resident artist and teacher at a girls’ school, where one of my many accomplishments was teaching Sienna Miller how to make pinch pots I don’t know where it all went wrong for her! I came to Cardiff to study for the two year

hear all sorts of low resonance that you wouldn’t normally hear. It’s about revealing hidden resonance and sounds that are inherent to certain objects and materials.”

postgraduate. While I was still a student, I was teaching in the art college in Newport. When I finished my MA here, I was taken onto staff as a technician, part-time. Then I bought a house in West Wales where I set up a studio. I came onto the staff ten years ago. And here I am.”

Ayscough tells me how he often finds himself asking students what piques their interest in ceramics when he interviews them before they come to CSAD, “I do often think about it myself. What it has meant to me is that it’s a creative expression. I don’t draw particularly - it’s always been about making with the hands and the intimacy of ceramics for me. Captivating,” he explains. “For me, it’s the production as well - using the potter’s wheel as a way of constructing form, making form and holding form. I suppose it’s intimacy, materiality and plasticity that I find so constantly intriguing. I draw on a wider material understanding: gold leaf, wax polishes that furniture makers use. I’m not a purist in my sense of ceramics. I enjoy the diversity and the material ambiguity.”

This year, he has been able to take his interest in the subject further than ever thanks to several grants and awards that he has received. Most notably, he is the recipient of a Creative Wales Award and, in July this year, Welsh Arts International fund a trip to Denmark to study as an artist in residence.

“The Creative Wales Award is very much about mid career artists who have a reputation and a profile as a practitioner but want to make some incisive progression within their wider practice.

Fortunately the Arts Council of Wales is very forward looking in how they fund Welsh artists,” he says of the former. “The majority of that funding, I’ll be using to buy myself out of teaching because I always think that when you’re buying yourself out of teaching, you’re buying other teachers in, which is great. That supports other practitioners and benefits the student experience because they’re hearing more voices in terms of the teaching they’re receiving. Other practitioners are getting to pay their mortgages as well! Hopefully, I become a more valuable member of the Welsh community as well.”

Although the Creative Wales Award doesn’t tie artists to producing a piece of work like other awards do, he is intending to use the time to experiment with some traditional processes and materials that are found in Greek and Roman work, “I think scale is an important thing for me. I’m unlikely to be making enormous things but I’ll look at increasing scale and using different clays, technical innovations. Fundamentally, I’ll be looking at form and the relationship between interior and exterior: colour, tension within surface, throwing form making pieces,” he explains. “It’s a time to step back. You have a certain amount of momentum when you graduate but then you want to develop a sense of profile. It’s good to be seen as the person who makes a certain type of work to an extent.

We have fantastic students – the way they engage with ideas. You can’t help feeling jealous of your students because they do such fantastic things and you think to yourself ‘I want a bit of that action.’”

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“I think through my 10 years working in the programme and a thing that’s meant a lot to me is how we have been able to put together a programme where students have a very personal experience. This is tailored to their needs and objectifies their creative practice enabling a sense of identity through the materiality,” he explains. “I’m really excited about the changes in the School at the moment.

It’s important to hold onto the fundamental qualities of having a distinctive experience and that the individual student - at whatever level of study - really feels they have an experience that’s tailored for them and to their needs, that they’re being pushed and stretched. One thing I should say is that Ceramics scored a 100% in the student satisfaction survey this year, 97% the year before and 100% the year before that so 99% as a three-year average. For me, that’s one of the statistics I value most because it speaks of the quality of the student experience.

As we go into the future, it’s important we maintain that.”

I left our interview looking forward to the next time that I could speak to Duncan Ayscough – if only to take a longer look at the rarities inside his four office walls.

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CSAD MAGAZINE

When a person talks about the mechanical aspects of art work, it can often be quite difficult to decide whether the person is an artist or a scientist. I asked Pigott whether he considered his work music or an experiment,

Q & A:

Debbie Savage When I get the chance, I also help to populate Cardiff Met's online research repository http://repository.uwic.ac.uk/.

What is your favourite piece of art/design/making/architecture?

Ayscough is clearly very proud of the Ceramics department at Cardiff School of Art and Design.

He notes that more people study ceramics here than any other institution in Europe, with over 100 undergraduate and 20 postgraduate students at any one time.

7 Cardiff School of Art & Design

Who are you?

I'm Debbie Savage, the School's Research and Research Degrees Coordinator.

The first thing that springs to mind is a quilt from an exhibition of artefacts made by American pioneers on their way out west. This particular quilt was a record of shop signs, adverts and logos the wagons passed along the way. It was easy to imagine this unknown woman collecting tiny scraps of material to make a winter bedspread, drawing on what she saw around her and in the process making an amazing piece of technical and social history. It was inspiring to think how something so beautiful, unassuming and intricate could be made in what must have been basic conditions.

What’s a typical day at CSAD like for you?

I work with the Director of Research and Head of Research degrees to try and make life easier for staff and PhD students. A typical day usually involves replying to emails, answering staff or student enquiries, pulling together information for a website, report ,or funding bid, perhaps a bit of work organising an event or a meeting for WIRAD (Wales Institute for Research in Art and Design), and a lot of trying to 'encourage' people to meet deadlines. Most typical days involve going into work expecting to do one thing and ending up doing something completely different.

At the moment, the main focus is on the REF so a lot of time is being spent information gathering, tying to understand policies and regulations and coordinating efforts with our WIRAD partners.

Is there a book that has had an impact on your life in some way?

The Starlight Barking by Dodie Smith - the official sequel to 101 Dalmatians. I read it when I was about 8 and it taught me everything I needed to know about beliefs, religion and international politics (which is why it was too radical for Disney and they had to come up with 102 Dalmatians). Plus, it's a book about talking dogs that can fly, enough said.

Five records for a desert island?

None. Not being a fan of warmer climes, I can only think of two reasons why I'd end up on a desert island - either because I'd shunned

Jon Pigott society and decided to live on a desert island, in which case, as a product of society, I'd also shun music, or there'd been some kind of accident, presumably on a boat, where I'd have enough time to grab a few essentials before jumping overboard in the hope I'd be washed ashore on a desert island. As the latter is the more likely scenario, I'd take a saw, some string, a large knife, knife sharpener and two-pronged fork gift set, a cooking pot and a really large box of uberlong matches. I'd then make my own music with the materials available to me and plan, on my rescue, how best to re-launch myself on Britain's Got Talent as the next SuBo with an album of songs from the island.

What’s the best bit of advice you’ve ever been given?

It'll all be ok in the end - It doesn't always work out as expected, but it usually does work out.

Name one of your heroes and tell us why?

Captain Planet - he's our hero, gonna take pollution down to ZERO. Go Planet!

Name one of your villains and tell us why?

The idea that free market capitalism works.

What’s the best thing about working for CSAD? The people, the ideas, the energy. That and the fact I only have a 15 minute work to every morning, but mainly the people, the ideas and the energy.

Before Jon Pigott was a lecturer, researcher and sound artist at Cardiff School of Art & Design, before he was studying for a PhD in Sonic Art at Bath Spa, before he was a sound engineer at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios or in London, before all of those things, he was interested in sound.

“I have an early childhood memory of playing around on an old record player. I had the Wombles theme and the Doctor Who theme on record. I also had a few extra records that I had taken from my brother’s record collection without him knowing. I was maybe four or five and playing around with DJing,” he says. “The other memory I have is then making my own stylus - making a paper cone, sticking a needle through the end of it and then dragging that needle across some vinyl. In retrospect, you can see how the seeds were sewn for later interests.”

Pigott’s early interests have endured: studying music technology, playing in bands, releasing records and generally wanting “to be a rock and roll star like most good, honest teenagers do.”

But his interest is more in the idea of sonic sculpture at the moment with an impressive range of work being exhibited over the past several years.

“My work now is lots of things. It’s sound art.

This is a specific type of art practice which grew from the 1960s onwards, but has roots in early 20th Century Dadaism and the like. I also think quite musically about what my work does – in terms of composition - although perhaps not in traditional musical terms,” he says. “It’s an exploration and an investigation into the nature of sound itself and the nature of how sound is made and some of the technologies that are around sound. There’s a sort of scientific feel to it in a way and I think my work looks and feels like an art practice that straddles science as well.

I’m comfortable with that.”

His website features video documentation of many of the projects that he has undertaken in recent years. One of the most interesting is The Infinite Spring which is an electromagnetic feedback loop using a speaker and a spring. The idea is that when the spring hits the speaker the sound of the spring is fed back into the speaker causing a loop.

“It just goes on and on and on as long as the electricity is there to power it. It’s rather like when you play an electric guitar close to the amplifier and you get a sort of howling feedback or when a microphone squeals at a conference.

There are other themes present as well. It’s a cybernetic idea - an electromechanical system that has a feedback loop. It comes to life with a dynamic of its own and that’s something that was quite prevalent in the thinking and art practice of the 1960s, when cybernetics was a big area of investigation,” he explains before taking the conversation back to the idea of playfulness. “It also comes back to childhood games where you get your oven tray and you wrap two bits of string around it, wrap the string around your fingers, stick your fingers into your ears and as you knock the tray you

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A New Schoo

“It’s both really. Music can be an experiment.

There’s a term, ‘experimental music’ and I think it’s both. I was having a conversation with a colleague of mine about the difference between sound art and music,” he said as we sat in his office, surrounded by amplifiers and instruments and knick knacks that could well be part of his work. “That’s a whole book and we could talk a long time about that. But if I were to put myself somewhere in that discussion then I have to say that I take a John Cage stance - that all sound is music. Even listening to the road outside, with a certain mindset, you can hear that as music. It can be as inspirational as music and cause you to write a piece of music or sit and listen.

That’s why I say some of my work looks like a scientific experiment, but actually I listen to its outcome as music.”

The idea of listening to the sounds of everyday is an idea that carries over into his most recent work with Plymouth University.

“Some environmental sensors were placed in the North Devon region and we worked with the data those senses produced, making kinetic artworks from their patterns. One of the things we were interested in were bats and we made a piece of early cinema technology of a flying bat to indicate when bats were sensed in the environment. We also were interested in a river and used river flowing motion and a fishing line winding to make a piece,” he tells me. “That particular project was an environmental arts project, so it wasn’t just me tinkering away and coming up with an idea, it was a brief. For me the idea of bats as an environmental sensor was an interesting one because they have a special relationship with sound, even though it’s not sound that we can hear. It’s ultrasound.

Immediately, there was a hook for me. You look for hooks into your own fields.”

Speaking to Pigott, you get the idea that at the base of all of his interest in the academic side of sound and beneath all of his achievement and accomplishment, there’s a boy with oven trays tied to his fingers by string, banging them against a wall and enjoying the sound they make.

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CSAD MAGAZINE

Olwen Moseley:

something’s worth doing, sod doing it well.’

I have terrible, terrible after-event self recrimination.”

Preparing for the Design Festival

This is her favourite of four models of design festival that she identified for a seminar paper.

Her conclusions led her to believe that the most sustainable model was to take a pragmatic approach.

“I identified that there are four different types of festival: big trade festivals (Salone del Mobile) which are very commercial; a city or a region holding a conference and inviting big speakers, in like the Cheltenham Design Festival but this isn’t necessarily to do with the place it’s being held; a city or regional administration deciding to hold a festival, but the moment people are employed it has to succeed in order to be sustainable,” she says. “Throwing money at something like that ends in a short lived situation; Then there’s the fourth which is an indigenous design community and a loose affiliation of the doers and the players who want to make something happen. That’s what we’ve got really.”

One of the people at the helm of the Festival is Olwen Moseley, subject leader for Graphic Communication at the School of Art & Design, mother, wife and ex-industry. She has, with her administrative assistant, Angie Dutton, and a voluntary band of people from the sector, been curating the Design Festival from its birth in July 2005.

It is now the eighth year that the Cardiff Design Festival has taken place and over those years it has become a main part of the city’s creative events calendar, highlighting some of the best work coming out of the city as well as curating a month of brilliant events that promote innovation and design in Cardiff.

He shows me some of the work that he has produced using this method, as well as some of the stones that he uses to produce the work.

More than one of the pieces that he has in the studio features a doorway with radiant light surrounding it.

my show opened up more questions about what I’m making. That’s a good thing because it allows me to go on and expand.”

CSAD MAGAZINE It’s his interest in the work of ancient civilisations that really comes through when we speak. He’s been working with the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge recently after getting in touch with several museums. It was the keeper of collections at the Fitzwilliam, Victoria Avery, who was really excited about the opportunity to have Duncan work at the museum for a week, “I suppose the people at the Fitzwilliam might know each other - sometimes literally opposite sides of the corridor; applied arts and antiquities - but they may never have a shared discourse about the artefacts that they have in the collections. It was fantastic to be there and explore these collections from the point of view of a contemporary maker. Essentially they’re using today the same tools, technologies, slips and ways of working as those used on an Athenian, Greek vase. There’s a continuum between artefacts,” he explains. “It was great to talk to people in the Oriental collection about celadon glazes for example. I took a load of samples for them to see how the priceless collections that they have are technologies that people still very much engage with and are part if everyday life for people in a department like this.”

Duncan Ayscough:

Duncan Ayscough’s office is a truly wonderful thing.

He invites me in and immediately I’m taken aback. Between bookcases full of journals - some in languages I don’t recognise - and books, there are racks that hold up pieces of work like a library of ceramics.

That’s before we even mention the wonderful oddities that stand in glass cabinets and on tables: a ceramic hand sits in a cabinet inches above the floor in the corner, a top the huge table in the centre of the room there are five or six huge gramophone horns.

Ian Wilkins, successfully completed the Masters in Fine Art (MFA) from Cardiff School of Art & Design in 2011, specialising in print making. He is standing in front of a beautiful press on the first floor of the Howard Gardens campus. The press is in a room where I’ve never been before - further evidence in support of my suspicion that there’s way more going on at CSAD than anyone is aware of at any one time. An original, made in the 19th century, he tells me, they don’t make presses like this any more.

In fact, Wilkins is happily living with one foot in the past and one in the present, “I’ve just started working as a tutor at the London Print Studio teaching a rare, specialist type of printmaking called lithography. It’s a privilege to be asked to go in there and teach,” he tells me.

“The lithographic method is effectively based on a chunk of limestone. It was invented in the 18th Century, as far as I’m aware. You have these big lithographic stones - chunks of limestone from a Bavarian quarry and apparently there are none left because they’ve quarried all the stone.

There’s something special about the qualities of the stone. If you take a greasy drawing material and draw on the stone, you can etch into it using a nitric acid, which can then be inked and printed. It’s an incredible process.”

What’s in store for 2012?

It’s the peculiar mix of DIY and organisation that gives the Cardiff Design Festival its unique feel.

And yet, each year the programme becomes more full and better too, with events from a wide range of partners. This year will be no exception:

“It was 2005, the 50 years of Cardiff as a capital city and there was a little bit of money available for events. The initial reaction of the design community to the idea of a festival was that I would never get people to talk to each other because they’re all competing for the same work. Instead, I found that there was a real enthusiasm for the idea, for celebrating the work that went on and for uncovering and explaining what design is all about,” she says. “People understand what some parts of design is: they think they know what fashion designers do, or whatever it might be. But the biggest part of industry in Cardiff is graphic communication and not many people understand what that is. They think it’s printing or marketing but it’s not there’s an invisibility about design, it’s more than a medium. So there was a will and a group of people who were very enthusiastic and we had the first festival in July 2005. It snowballed from there and every year the Festival is slightly different depending on who gets involved and which organisations get involved.”

The Design Festival moved from July to October for the first time in 2008 in order to let the students at the School of Art & Design take a more active role and come to more of the events.

“We’re very lucky that I work for Cardiff School of Art & Design in whose interest it is to have something like the Design Festival as part of their offer. If that wasn’t the case and I was a self-employed designer having to work to make my living, It wouldn’t have been able to spend the time to talk to people,” she says. “We do it in our spare time. So does everyone else who participates. Even more importantly, the legal back up is there. The structural backup is there

and if you mess with those kinds of things… that’s your peril!”

A Model Festival The Festival follows an interesting model.

Moseley decided that instead of meticulous planning, she would just set a date for the festival each year and allow anyone who was doing anything interesting and design-based to become a part of the Festival,

“The other thing I suppose - which is a personality trait of mine - is that some people willl plan and plan and worry about it being perfect as it can be, but if I did that nothing would ever happen. I thought ‘Let’s just do it!’ and that was easy because everyone I asked to be involved said yes,” she recalls when we speak at the Graphic Communication department in the Llandaff campus. “I adopted a couple of maxims which have really resonated: ‘If

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“There are some themes emerging and there are the usual suspects who can be relied upon to put on exciting events: thinkARK, the EcoDesign centre, the Design Circle, the IWA, Design Wales.

There was quite a lot of interest in cycling, actually. I’m not entirely sure where it all started from but there’s a theme going on about that at the moment. There are lots of quirky things that happen during the Festival which are quite fun,” Moseley explains, “We’ve had a bike ride around the city for the last couple of years led by students from the Wales School of Architecture.

We’ve been working with Cardiff City Council about their transport policy and getting people out of cars, imagining what the city might be like without traffic. Planning has been gathering momentum and rumbling along but now after the students have gone there’s a push to get the programme sorted.”

Ch s Denn s

Q

Ma Benne

Still, Charlotte Duffy, is taking it all in her stride.

Having graduated from the Contemporary Textile Design BA last year, she moved to Bristol where she began her career as a freelancer.

“I work from home. I design greeting cards mainly and I’m represented by Image Source (image-source.co.uk) which is one of the leading creative licensing agencies. So I

Freelancing is very hard.

You spend a lot of time worrying about where your next rent cheque is coming from, how you’re going to buy your mother a Christmas present and still get all of the work that you’ve promised your clients you would do, done.

Every year, I look forward to the month of October more and more and feel less and less envious of friends who are heading off to the Salone del Mobile, Dutch Design Week or Istanbul Design Festival.

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Q

F ee anc ng he d eam

that great. The other thing is that it’s really tough coming out of uni and deciding to go freelance straight away,” she explains. “We had professional practice lessons and that covered some of the problems but I don’t think you realise when you’re in uni how tough it is to be a freelancer. Even though the course was really good, I don’t think anything really prepares you for what life is like when you leave.”

While she’s meeting deadlines, making greetings cards and having her work produced in one of the world’s best factories, she’s got her mind firmly fixed on the future.

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“My aim within a year or two is to open my own shop. That’s one of the reasons I moved to Bristol. It’s a really good location to do that in because there are lots of creative people and lots of things going on. I’m going to keep going with the commissions and the greetings cards and hopefully I will turn some of my designs into products and open a shop,” she says.

“I’d like to focus on the cards but also to design things to spec. So, if someone comes and says that they would really like something in the shop but that they would prefer it with a different fabric, I would do that. Customised fabric design.

That’s expensive though so I’m not sure how it’s

going to work. There would be another side where I would have products: kitchen products, cushions, home accessories and that kind of thing.”

One thing is sure though, Charlotte Duffy has a very entrepreneurial personality and is obviously very driven to succeed in the textiles world. The future has a lot in store for her, and no-one can deny that!

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CSAD MAGAZINE

Dan Peterson:

War Artist

James G een

BA Illustration 2009-2012

Jude G Peterson’s experience is an almost unique one: he is a modern war artist. While there are plenty of war photographers and war writers, he’s among a small group of people who go to war zones and draw what they see.

“Can I have two?” says Dan Peterson when I ask him about his enduring memories of his experience.

“One is that during my studies for the dissertation, I found a famous type of picture called the thousand yard stare. They say it’s post-traumatic stress. It’s also to do with being in a nowhere place, being switched off but aware at the same time. I felt that I got that with a picture of an Afghan National Army soldier who grabbed me when I was in one of the compounds and wanted me to draw him.”

Over 20 years ago, he started his artistic education at the School of Art & Design although back then he attended the Cardiff School of Printing, part of the School of Art & Design, within South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education that later became UWIC. After that he went into graphic design, eventually setting up his own business. Three years ago, he achieved his goal of getting onto an illustration course when the Illustration BA was set up at the School of Art & Design. He will graduate this year.

“I was in the territorial army (TA) for 14 years.

When I started doing this course, I was getting interested in reportage and editorial illustration illustration done by illustrators on the spot. As I was looking into that, I came across war art. I found out that war artists still exist,” Peterson explains when I ask how it came about that he decided to go to war as an artist.

“I went to interview a war artist called Matthew Cook as part of one of the modules we had to do - to interview a practicing illustrator. I went to London to interview him. We got on well. He had done x number of years in the TA and he gave me lots of clues and hints, but the most important was if you want to go you’ve just got to persevere. So that’s what I did for another 18 months. I got in touch with friends from my past in the TA. I was fortunate that some of them were quite high up in various areas within the army or the

Ministry of Defence. I was going to go with my old regiment, but I was a bit late. Then with my other associate regiment. They were keen but it takes so long!”

The process is certainly more than just making a decision. There has recently been a change in the way that war artists are sent. They used to be independent, but now they’re sent as part of the media - in the same way as journalists, camera men and photographers. That involves undergoing hostile environment training and also a lengthy administrative process, and having gone through that, finding a regiment who will agree to take a war artist into a hostile environment. The call finally came from the Queen’s Dragoon Guards, also known as the Welsh Cavalry, who wanted to take Dan along with them to Afghanistan in November 2011 where he spent a month with them.

But what do they get out of taking an artist with them? Isn’t it a liability - when they have to protect a civilian, albeit a civilian who spent over a decade in the territorial army?

“My dissertation is on war art and perception of it. I don’t think the army fully knows what they want or get from war artists. What they get is a different perspective to what they get from an army photographer. Nowadays there are lots of soldiers taking photographs. It’s not the same as what they get from an artist or an illustrator. It’s illustration that I’ve come from, not fine art.

That’s quite important,” he explains. “No one has ever commissioned a visual record, of this nature, of what they’ve gone through during a particular tour. Queen’s Dragoon Guards is a good one. They’ve got a 320 year history and are one of the oldest regiments in the British army. The regiment keeps a written history but nothing visual like this. The visual history I am preparing will get printed and put into their regimental history to look after. They’ll also get some paintings for their various messes. They also have a museum in Cardiff Castle called The Firing Line which some of the work will go up in as well.”

Peterson is a very interesting person to talk to.

His voice is firm as he talks about Afghanistan as a country and the things that he saw there, “In one place, there’s a famous dock off a canal.

There’s a crane where the Taliban would hang people. There’s some small pictures - I couldn’t do very much when we were on the ground. You don’t stop for too long when you’re on patrol for obvious reasons. Afghanistan is a much nicer place than it was. I only draw what I saw,” he says. “We drove through a notorious town: Gereshk. I was scared when we drove through there. We had stones thrown at us and were spat at. It’s a difficult thing to draw. I will try to draw some of the faces I saw. But the number of people who smiled and waved outweighed the number who spat and threw stones. Then again, a week prior to us driving through there, grenades were thrown into vehicles. I think I described it as ‘going through a recycling dump.’

Every other shop is a chap covered in oil trying to fix an engine but the next shop sells flowers!

In one compound we occupied there was one electric light bulb that was powered by a solar panel. It’s an odd mix. There are motorbikes and there are cars but a car can have a sofa on top and three people are sat on it.”

He shows me his sketchbook - two moleskins: one large, one small, both contain almost flawless drawings of the war in Afghanistan as he saw it. There’s a wide variety of sketches and illustrations. Some are unfinished or abandoned while others are telling portraits and landscapes of the country, as well as a mixture of Afghan

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and British soldiers at work and repose. It’s the life in these pictures that has attracted a fair amount of media attention to his work.

The other memory that endures for Peterson?

“You can’t forget coming under fire when you’re on operations. You sort of go there and half of you is thinking: I don’t want to get involved because I want to come home alive. The other half is almost keen to get involved. You want to know that you’ve been involved. Five minutes after going into combat, we were under fire. I shouldn’t say this… it was exciting, it wasn’t scary.”

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CSAD MAGAZINE

Robert Pepperell Professor of Fine Art

“I guess I started out as an art student interested in what was then new technology (mid 80s) and what potential that new technology might have for creativity. I was interested in things like automated creativity, generated art and music (using computers) and for quite a number of years I ran a multimedia business in London which was a group of other people like me who were into technology doing things like pop videos, art installations and festivals. Basically, we were trying to think of anyway we could to make a living using technology and creativity,” he says.

The space where a person spends their time can tell you a lot about a person. In Robert Pepperell’s office, for example, there is a huge window which draws your gaze to the city scape.

Looking in the direction of Cardiff Bay on a rainy day makes this feel like quite a dramatic scene.

It was when Pepperell realised that doing multimedia projects and organising the every day ins and outs of exhibiting in places like the Millennium Dome had become more to do with administration than creativity that he decided to go back to what he really loved: artistic practice.

“The ideas and the creating side were more interesting for me than the business side. So, around 2000, I thought I would go back into the art school system because that was where creative ideas were at a premium,” he explains.

“I started teaching in Newport and through various different routes, ended up teaching here.”

He has now been working at the School of Art & Design for six years having previously held posts at University of Plymouth and University of Wales Newport. A Professor of Fine Art, Pepperell can now focus on his creative interests.

“One of the things that has interested me for a very long time is how we see. That's something that artists have traditionally been fascinated by and in many ways it seems obvious and straight forward that we just see things in the world,” he continues. “The more you look into that process

C d ff Op n A and think about it the more complex, intricate and amazing it becomes.”

After a break from painting, Pepperell picked up his paintbrush again seven years ago. At this point, he was interested in exploring the nature of perception. It was through this practice and exploration that he began to see both philosophical and artistic connections between vision and perception. He took the chance to become involved in developing research that pushed science, art and philosophy together.

“I think visual perception is such a complicated phenomenon that no single discipline can deal with it on its own,” he tells me. “The problem that I was working on originally was what I call visual indeterminacy. I did a lot of work on that over a number of years and that’s when you see something in the world, an image or photograph, and it looks like something but you can’t quite recognise what it is. Very often you’ll look at it and go through all the possibilities and try and solve the puzzle. That’s quite a common occurrence for most of us and we tend to overlook it.”

The more he researched this area, the more he found that he was not alone in his conclusions.

Many artists had also written about and portrayed this phenomenon in their work.

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“People like Kandinsky had talked about this same issue of seeing the world in a way where it’s not quite recognisable,” he says. “For a long time I made paintings that tried to put you in that frame of mind. More recently, I’ve been interested in how we see or perceive the whole range of our visual field not just the object we are looking at. I’ve been working on trying to find a way to depict that. It’s a technical problem in some ways but a philosophical problem in others and an artistic one in other ways.

Whichever way you look at it, it’s definitely a problem.”

The two strands of Pepperell’s interest (perception and technology) came together just a few years ago when he first saw the work that David Hockney was doing using the iPad. “I saw his show in Copenhagen where he had displayed hundreds of iPhones and iPads in a black room with his paintings on them. I was really impressed by them because in a way he was using the iPad to do a similar thing to me: to capture the visual experience,” he recalls.

“He drew a bunch of flowers or the sun coming through a blind or a street lamp reflected in a puddle - these aren’t highly charged scenes or ones of particular historical significance.

Nevertheless, they are things that we share in our common experience. The way that the iPad

projected them out through the gloom of the dark room with its very bright screen interested me.”

Shortly after that, Pepperell decided to try it for himself. He bought an iPad, the same stylus that Hockney used and also the same app.

“I found Hockney’s words to be true: there isn’t another medium that allows you to transcribe so quickly what you are seeing,” he explains. “If you use paint, you have to wait for things to dry.

If you’re using coloured pencils, you can’t fill in the big areas or do texture so easily. In terms of a tool for trying to describe what you’re actually seeing the iPad is probably the best. I now mainly use it as a means of recording things that are in front of me.”

What is interesting is that in the time that Pepperell has developed as an artist, from art school student to Professor of Fine Art, the technology which he has always been so fascinated by has also developed with him.

“A lot of the time when I first started using technology it was more the promise than the actuality that we were dealing with. There were paint programmes early on but by contemporary standards they were very limited. All you could do is change the brush size and the colour.

People did amazing things with them but they weren’t really intuitive tools in the way that the paint apps on the iPad are,” he explains. “The other thing is that you had a big mouse between you and the image whereas the iPad is a very direct relationship between you and the screen. I think my interest in technology early on was very limited by the technology available. Now technology enhances creativity rather than dragging behind it.”

In closing, Pepperell adds one thing that he has been thinking about recently.

“About Hockney and the iPad, I would say that we shouldn’t overlook the importance of art in our culture as a vehicle for moving human thinking and ideas forward. Painting, the oldest medium, is still the best way to depict what I’m doing,” he explains. “For me one of the exciting things is that the iPad is maintaining the importance of painting as a way of recalling our phenomenal experience (our direct experience of the world). It’s amazing that after all the technological advances, painting is still the best way to do it. That’s incredibly important I think particularly for our students. Arts of all kinds are more than just decorative or luxury. It’s a fundamental way we have of negotiating and engaging with the world.“

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S hoo

Two years ago, the Wales Minister for Education challenged the Universities in Wales ‘to adapt or die.’

This is the second edition of the Cardiff School of Art & Design’s (CSAD) magazine in which we seek to assure Wales and the World that adaption is more than second nature to us, and that dying is not in our vocabulary.

As the founding faculty of what is now Cardiff Metropolitan University, we are a recognized and valued European art school that delivers.

This magazine describes how we are doing it.

The articles cover something of the success of our graduates, the quality of the work of current students, the research of our academics, and news of our current projects. You will also find personal perspectives from members of our administrative and technical teams.

CSAD, for those who don’t know us well, is full of surprises. For example, we are involved with a considerable amount of research and teaching that involves science and technology. We find much common ground with companies such as Samsung and we are working directly with the University Hospital of Wales. Moreover, we have successful partnerships with academics in Cardiff Medical School and in the Universities of Birmingham and Lancaster. Look for us in the Science Pavilion in next year’s National Eisteddfod in Denbigh.

Many don’t know that, through Cardiff Open Art School (COAS), we have been bringing art and design into the workplace, enabling staff development for companies in Cardiff. This is giving people the opportunity to explore drawing or working with clay in ways that help relevant skill development and work satisfaction.

By the same token, COAS has been helping both the novice and the experienced to develop their skills in all kinds of disciplines from printmaking to photography.

Of course, the big news for CSAD is the development of accommodation for all of its courses and research in new premises on the University’s Llandaff campus. It’s a huge confidence boost and we remain grateful to the Cardiff Metropolitan University’s Governors for the trust placed in us by agreeing to the new development. The work began on 31 July and is due to be completed in time for us to move in for the beginning of the 2014/15 academic year.

So, CSAD can’t help but continue to adapt and we are certainly have no intention of lying down to die. We continue to confront, with alacrity, impediments that stem from opinions that are either ill-informed or just plain ignorant, such as those who imply that creativity is not intellectually demanding and therefore cannot be truly academic, and that science, technology, engineering and medicine don’t need the element of design. We can contest this simplistic thinking at every level and some examples of how we are doing this are in this magazine.

Professor Gaynor Kavanagh DPhil MPhil FMA Dean, Cardiff School of Art & Design Cardiff Metropolitan University Summer 2012

Cardiff School of Art & Design

CSAD MAGAZINE

Steve Thompson: Building a new curriculum Steve Thompson believes that to make something function well, you have to leave it be. That might not sound reassuring when it comes to the man responsible for defining the curriculum at the School of Art & Design. However, after speaking to Thompson for even several minutes, it’s clear he knows what is happening.

“We recognised that the design of the new curriculum had to be an emerging thing.” he explains when asked how you go about designing a curriculum. “We put in place a structure and a shape, which through shared responsibilities and many, many conversations at every level, were allowed to evolve from the ground up.”

The stimulus to change the curriculum was twofold. Firstly, the School wanted to create a curriculum and forms of delivery that were well placed within the 21st Century. “The student experience must be forward-looking and based on the dynamics of the art and design disciplines we address” Thompson explains when I ask what this means for the student. “Secondly, we needed to find a way to make the School financially sustainable,” he continues. “This meant changing or evolving many established practices, as well as developing and deploying the very best of our technical skills and academic expertise. We invested in the best of our ideas and rationalised the portfolio. “ The process of curriculum change within CSAD began with a revision of the masters degrees.

“We now have a rather smart way of delivering masters schemes that enables us to have very small nuanced programmes, that are still viable economically because they’re all under the umbrella of a larger programme. After that, we restructured the School,” he explains. “We now have eight subject leaders who are responsible for driving their subject academically. They have responsibility for programmes in their subject areas and for promoting the quality of their discipline. We also have Heads of Undergraduate Studies, Masters Studies and Research Degrees who provide coordination and have responsibility for quality and student satisfaction.

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This structure leads to worthwhile interactions and strong academic delivery, as well as safeguards on quality.

One of the tenets of the new undergraduate curriculum is that students should develop not only depth within their own discipline through engagement with critical and creative practices, but that they should also be able to expand their knowledge through engagement with ideas and practices from outside their discipline. This is done through a three strand approach to the delivery of the undergraduate programme. “Our undergraduate students will take three 40 credit modules each year. The first module each year will always be in their subject (the subject module). This will be an in- depth and progressive engagement with the ideas and practices of their subject, whatever it might be, from Fine Art to Graphic Communication. Then, they’ll move into their Field module.”

In the first year, the whole school works on the same project, called The Spirit of Cardiff,” he explains. “They will be responding through making their engagement with ideas on some aspect of Cardiff as a European capital city. The sense for this was inspired by Cardiff & Co and they will be reviewing the results. In their second year, students will have a choice of Field module, from study abroad in India or the United States, to studying how to set up a business or working with one of our professors. In their third year, they will be more fully engaged with their discipline.

Finally, Thompson explains, there is the constellation module. That’s theory, history, ideas, personal planning and a whole lot of other things brought together. This is where students begin to identify their intellectual position and construct their professional standing.

By way of explanation, Thompson recounts how one of the early models for the new undergraduate programmes stemmed from that employed in teaching Natural Science at Cambridge University. Here both discipline and cross-disciplinary engagement produces both synergies and challenges “At the one end, you’ve got astronomy and then at the other end you’ve got zoology. Thirty years ago, the astronomers might never have spoken to the zoologists,” he says. “Now you get the very small niche field of astro-zoology, where people are looking for microbes in space and suchlike.

There may only be 10 or 15 people in the world who are expert at that but that’s what has been created.”

“What characterises our school is the quality of the students and the staff. I like to think of ourselves, even if we don’t have the name, as being a national School of Art and Design. Our primary mission is to create the artists and

designers of the future,” Thompson explains.

“We want to produce high quality graduates by building the right kind of environment. That seems to me to be the only way to survive in a highly competitive world. Spin doesn’t work anymore. What works is making quality! It worked for Apple and BMW. It’s the same for education.”

To finish, Thompson explains how much he enjoys working at the School of Art & Design.

“I love working here. Whenever I’m doing my job, I imagine myself back as a masters student at the Royal College of Art again and I think to myself ‘Is this what I had in mind?’ and sometimes when I’m signing off compliance forms or dealing with budgets, I think, no,” he says. “But 99% of the time when I see this world forming around us, something in which I have had a hand in creating, I think there’s no better thing in the world than working in higher education.”

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CSAD MAGAZINE

Ian Wilkins MFA Fine Art (2011)

Ian Wilkins, successfully completed the Masters in Fine Art (MFA) from Cardiff School of Art & Design in 2011, specialising in print making. He is standing in front of a beautiful press on the first floor of the Howard Gardens campus. The press is in a room where I’ve never been before - further evidence in support of my suspicion that there’s way more going on at CSAD than anyone is aware of at any one time. An original, made in the 19th century, he tells me, they don’t make presses like this any more.

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In fact, Wilkins is happily living with one foot in the past and one in the present, “I’ve just started working as a tutor at the London Print Studio teaching a rare, specialist type of printmaking called lithography. It’s a privilege to be asked to go in there and teach,” he tells me.

“The lithographic method is effectively based on a chunk of limestone. It was invented in the 18th Century, as far as I’m aware. You have these big lithographic stones - chunks of limestone from a Bavarian quarry and apparently there are none left because they’ve quarried all the stone.

There’s something special about the qualities of the stone. If you take a greasy drawing material and draw on the stone, you can etch into it using a nitric acid, which can then be inked and printed. It’s an incredible process.”

He shows me some of the work that he has produced using this method, as well as some of the stones that he uses to produce the work.

More than one of the pieces that he has in the studio features a doorway with radiant light surrounding it.

my show opened up more questions about what I’m making. That’s a good thing because it allows me to go on and expand.”

Ian Wilkins is collecting jobs. He occasionally works as a part-time technician at the Howard Gardens Gallery and is a part-time tutor at London Print Studio. “I’ve just acquired a number of different jobs that I’ve managed to keep going along the way and recently I have made a successful application to be an artist in residency at Marlborough College. It’s close to my home town which is quite fitting. That’s a year’s residency starting in late August,” he explains. “I have been working in a school as a teaching assistant work for early years, reception age. I’m a friendly giant! I also work for Cathays Community Centre doing morning cleaning. I love it because you meet different kinds of people.”

“I’m really into religious painting and religious iconography. I also think about printmaking as being an art form that’s not defined by its techniques.” he told me “Many people think printmaking is print on paper and frame.

I would argue that moving image, films, those are printmaking.”

Aside from being incredibly busy juggling all of the hats that he’s collecting - tutor, technician, artist, community worker, cleaner - he’s making a name for himself as one of the founders of The Cardiff Sessions - a collaborative print project which he started with two friends from his undergraduate days at CSAD, Christina Wrege and Michael Iveson. After graduation, Wrege went to the Royal College of Art in London while Iveson became studio manager for artist Richard Woods.

His Masters work, shown in the Howard Gardens Gallery last September, deployed his wide definition of printmaking. “I did a number of cardboard sculptures that were printed using relief s and I built them up in layers so that they became structures. They were formal, expressive and slightly abstracted things, but very much retaining that idea of the graphic form which I really like about printmaking. I think

“What we did was meet here and printed together over a series of days. What we set up is part mail-art and part experimental drawing. We became aware of is the potential of stone lithography and created a transfer paper that can be drawn on and sent through the post. We each do a drawing and then transfer it onto the lithographic stones and print! That was the original basis of the project which led us to

Credit: Fran Smith

explore the idea of collaboration,” Wilkins explains. “Michael was very fortunate to be in touch with a few people in London who were interested in the project. One of them is Bruce McLean, quite an established artist, who said that he would like to participate. That escalated things and we started inviting others to participate. That opened up all sorts of possibilities. It expanded the notion of collaboration as an artist practice in itself.”

It was at this point that the opportunity to take The Cardiff Sessions to New York came about.

“We were invited to show the projects out in New York in a small gallery called Booklyn Artist Alliance which is a gallery that’s interested in book art (hence the name Booklyn, rather than Brooklyn). We made a successful application to the Arts Council Wales to go out, show the work we’ve already done on the project . It also gave us a chance to collaborate with some artists in New York to make a series of prints to add to

the project. The art we produce is not owned by anyone but is a product of collaboration,” he continues. “New York was a part of that and we’re hoping to keep a relationship going with the gallery there and do something again in the future and we’re always looking for international workshops to collaborate with. We’re hoping to do something in the summer with the Sidney Nolan Trust. It’s a similar arrangement where we invite a number of artists, set a theme and making a small edition of limited prints into a book format.”

Collaboration is very important to Wilkins. He tells me that that’s one of the best things about art school, “You establish strong ties with people who you’ll be in contact with for the rest of your life. It’s really special to be doing something like this,” he says. “It gets heated as well: working in a professional manner with friends. You sometimes get on each other’s nerves and have arguments over the nature of what you’re doing

and how you go about it, but it’s primarily through that friendship that we sustain the project.

Wilkins is excited about all of the opportunities that this year presents him. From his tutorship at the London Print Studio to his rapidly approaching residency at Marlborough College, he’s got a bright year ahead.

“At the moment I’m in a stage of waiting for the residency to start into a new set of works,” says the prolific artist. “I’ve still got all these works but I’m always looking to move on and submit them to a few shows. I’m collecting art in my flat and the spare room is just full of cardboard and colour!”

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CSAD MAGAZINE

Sean Rees:

A Man on Brand BA(Hons) Graphic Communication 2003-2006

But when Sean Rees tells me about what he does from an echoey studio in London, I get the feeling, he doesn’t feel like he’s doing many days of work. When I ask what Sean does day to day he replies, “In between drinking copious amounts of coffee, playing darts and colouring in, we mostly work on branding and identity projects.”

They say that if you get a job doing something that you love, you’ll never have to work a day in your life.

When I’ve mentioned that adage to people recently, the majority have scoffed, as if satisfaction in a job is something distant or idyllic.

As well as being a writer for the popular graphic blog FormFiftyFive, Rees is a designer at Purpose, a brand communications consultancy that specialises in brand identity. Sean has been at Purpose for just over a year, where most recently he’s been spending his time working on a brand identity refresh for the Design Council, between work with Orange, Epson and WorldSkills. Asked about Purpose, he said, “In my opinion, they are one of the rare studios who strike a balance between great ideas, and beautiful craft. It’s a rare combination of the two.”

When talking to a designer who works on branding, it’s often quite hard to get a feel for their work. If they’re good at what they do, design becomes seamless with their client’s brand. However, fortunately, Rees’ personal portfolio gives a peak into the work that he was producing several years ago.

“My latest work is not online yet I’m afraid, the work on my website is from 2008,” reads an email that he sent me while we are arranging our interview. Still, the work that he was producing in 2008 is incredibly good.

For example, the identity that Rees completed for the British Ceramics Biennial is a vibrant mark of curls and waves which is consistent with the idea of ceramics - almost molten.

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The mark and brand that Sean produced under direction at BB/Saunders in 2008 remains.

“It was the summer of 2005 and I was in my second year of University, I was fortunate enough to be offered a bursary placement at The Brand Union (formally called Enterprise IG),” he says of his route into the industry. “It was a fantastic experience, I got the chance to work on some great projects with international brands, alongside some incredibly talented people. I soaked it all up like a sponge. I must have made some good tea or something because shortly after that, I was offered a role as a Junior Designer, which I accepted and joined right after finishing University.”

Sean worked at The Brand Union for two and a half years, where he worked with clients such as Vodafone and Mercedes McLaren.

“I learnt a great deal,” he says, “but it being my only experience in the industry, I felt ready to take on a fresh challenge, and moved to a small independent studio called BB/Saunders.”

Rees explains that working at BB/Saunders was a great experience for him, “There was a great emphasis on craft, typography and clever design solutions. The team was small, so it was very hands on, you got to experience every stage of the job, I was learning a great deal incredibly quickly.”

However, Sean was made redundant in 2008, “It was right in the middle of the recession, and unfortunately we were hit hard. Eventually the studio closed it’s doors, which was heartbreaking because I had a lot of admiration and respect for them,” he explains.

Then, there was a period where Rees worked freelance - as a way to continue earning while he found another studio job. Sean then accepted a position at The Partners, where he worked for just over two years winning awards along the way - most notably his work for Richard House, which won Gold at Cannes Lions 2011, and received the Chairman’s Award at Cream 2011.

Asked about his experience there Sean says, “It was a great experience. They really do aim high with everything that they do, and their reputation in the industry is testament to that.”

personal style - I’m not an artist, I’m a designer.

As a designer, it’s not about me. It’s about giving the client an appropriate and a distinctive solution. It’s not about me imposing my style or aesthetic onto them,” he replies.

In search of progression and personal development, Sean joined his current studio, Purpose in 2011.

“Ideas should always be born out of the clients brief, and the solution should be in response to that and be wholly original and tailored to their needs. I won’t impose ideas that aren’t appropriate. At the end of the day, I’m providing a service,” he continues. “I’m a hired gun and I’m there to deliver something original and appropriate. I don’t have an approach that I will use for all clients. I think actually it’s almost a bit egotistical to impose your ideas on your client.”

I asked him if he has a personal brand, a style that he puts into his work or an approach that he takes, “I don’t think I have a style, in fact I’d say that I’m absolutely against having any kind of

Sean is clearly very focused on what he’s working on and his separation of design and art interests me. Many designers seem to have to fight very hard against the temptation to express themselves at the cost of their client’s brand. But does an attitude like Rees’ stifle creativity?

Outside of work, Rees, who recently became engaged to fellow designer and Cardiff graduate, Emma Laura Jones, says he is a typical Welsh man from the Rhondda Valley, “I enjoy long walks on the beach and holding hands…” he laughs. “Actually, I’m pretty much a total cliché of a Welsh man. I’m love rugby. I enjoy going the pub. Recently, I’ve been getting into cycling, the alternative in London is the tube, which I hate, it’s always hot, busy and sweaty, starting your day with aggravation and an armpit in your face is not ideal, I find that on a cycling to work, I feel more awake, energised and alert. I’m getting quite addicted to it.”

Rees is certainly full of sensible ideas. As we’re finishing our interview, he says that his philosophy is the same as graphic designer Anthony Burrill, “‘Work hard and be nice to people.’ I think it’s important to be nice.

It’s nice to be important but it’s more important to be nice.”

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Duncan Ayscough:

Theory and Practice Senior Lecturer in Ceramics

I point out a set of figurines that have QR codes on their faces, that can be scanned by a mobile phone taking the viewer to a website. He tells me they’re the work of Ingrid Murphy, who shares his office. He recounts, with great enthusiasm, the story behind the work.

It doesn’t take long to see the Senior Lecturer in Ceramics (and next year, Ceramics and Maker programmes) love of his work and the work of others around him.

Duncan Ayscough’s office is a truly wonderful thing.

He invites me in and immediately I’m taken aback. Between bookcases full of journals - some in languages I don’t recognise - and books, there are racks that hold up pieces of work like a library of ceramics.

That’s before we even mention the wonderful oddities that stand in glass cabinets and on tables: a ceramic hand sits in a cabinet inches above the floor in the corner, a top the huge table in the centre of the room there are five or six huge gramophone horns.

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“I teach predominantly into the undergraduate programmes. I teach studio practice, all the areas which are the interface between creative practice and materiality. I also head up the material side, the technology side of the undergraduate programme - especially years one and two,” he says.

Although he has now been in post for 10 years, his journey to being Senior Lecturer at Cardiff School of Art and Design wasn’t a quick one.

“This is a very important moment in my midlife crisis! I’ve been in post for 10 years at the end of this academic year. I had come to Cardiff originally to study for the postgraduate programme. In terms of educational development, my first degree was wood, metal, ceramic and glass. I had a sense of wanting to have a sharper focus. I had always had a passion for clay and the potter’s wheel. At 13 years old, I was working with a potter’s wheel; clay has been at the centre of my interest since that point. In terms of education, I did an art foundation in Manchester. It gave me a lot of wider, intriguing material context and understanding,” he explains. “I worked as a resident artist and teacher at a girls’ school, where one of my many accomplishments was teaching Sienna Miller how to make pinch pots I don’t know where it all went wrong for her! I came to Cardiff to study for the two year

postgraduate. While I was still a student, I was teaching in the art college in Newport. When I finished my MA here, I was taken onto staff as a technician, part-time. Then I bought a house in West Wales where I set up a studio. I came onto the staff ten years ago. And here I am.”

Ayscough tells me how he often finds himself asking students what piques their interest in ceramics when he interviews them before they come to CSAD, “I do often think about it myself. What it has meant to me is that it’s a creative expression. I don’t draw particularly - it’s always been about making with the hands and the intimacy of ceramics for me. Captivating,” he explains. “For me, it’s the production as well - using the potter’s wheel as a way of constructing form, making form and holding form. I suppose it’s intimacy, materiality and plasticity that I find so constantly intriguing. I draw on a wider material understanding: gold leaf, wax polishes that furniture makers use. I’m not a purist in my sense of ceramics. I enjoy the diversity and the material ambiguity.”

It’s his interest in the work of ancient civilisations that really comes through when we speak. He’s been working with the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge recently after getting in touch with several museums. It was the keeper of collections at the Fitzwilliam, Victoria Avery, who was really excited about the opportunity to have Duncan work at the museum for a week, “I suppose the people at the Fitzwilliam might know each other - sometimes literally opposite sides of the corridor; applied arts and antiquities - but they may never have a shared discourse about the artefacts that they have in the collections. It was fantastic to be there and explore these collections from the point of view of a contemporary maker. Essentially they’re using today the same tools, technologies, slips and ways of working as those used on an Athenian, Greek vase. There’s a continuum between artefacts,” he explains. “It was great to talk to people in the Oriental collection about celadon glazes for example. I took a load of samples for them to see how the priceless collections that they have are technologies that people still very much engage with and are part if everyday life for people in a department like this.”

Ayscough is clearly very proud of the Ceramics department at Cardiff School of Art and Design.

He notes that more people study ceramics here than any other institution in Europe, with over 100 undergraduate and 20 postgraduate students at any one time.

This year, he has been able to take his interest in the subject further than ever thanks to several grants and awards that he has received. Most notably, he is the recipient of a Creative Wales Award and, in July this year, Welsh Arts International fund a trip to Denmark to study as an artist in residence.

“The Creative Wales Award is very much about mid career artists who have a reputation and a profile as a practitioner but want to make some incisive progression within their wider practice.

Fortunately the Arts Council of Wales is very forward looking in how they fund Welsh artists,” he says of the former. “The majority of that funding, I’ll be using to buy myself out of teaching because I always think that when you’re buying yourself out of teaching, you’re buying other teachers in, which is great. That supports other practitioners and benefits the student experience because they’re hearing more voices in terms of the teaching they’re receiving. Other practitioners are getting to pay their mortgages as well! Hopefully, I become a more valuable member of the Welsh community as well.”

Although the Creative Wales Award doesn’t tie artists to producing a piece of work like other awards do, he is intending to use the time to experiment with some traditional processes and materials that are found in Greek and Roman work, “I think scale is an important thing for me. I’m unlikely to be making enormous things but I’ll look at increasing scale and using different clays, technical innovations. Fundamentally, I’ll be looking at form and the relationship between interior and exterior: colour, tension within surface, throwing form making pieces,” he explains. “It’s a time to step back. You have a certain amount of momentum when you graduate but then you want to develop a sense of profile. It’s good to be seen as the person who makes a certain type of work to an extent.

We have fantastic students – the way they engage with ideas. You can’t help feeling jealous of your students because they do such fantastic things and you think to yourself ‘I want a bit of that action.’”

“I think through my 10 years working in the programme and a thing that’s meant a lot to me is how we have been able to put together a programme where students have a very personal experience. This is tailored to their needs and objectifies their creative practice enabling a sense of identity through the materiality,” he explains. “I’m really excited about the changes in the School at the moment.

It’s important to hold onto the fundamental qualities of having a distinctive experience and that the individual student - at whatever level of study - really feels they have an experience that’s tailored for them and to their needs, that they’re being pushed and stretched. One thing I should say is that Ceramics scored a 100% in the student satisfaction survey this year, 97% the year before and 100% the year before that so 99% as a three-year average. For me, that’s one of the statistics I value most because it speaks of the quality of the student experience.

As we go into the future, it’s important we maintain that.”

I left our interview looking forward to the next time that I could speak to Duncan Ayscough – if only to take a longer look at the rarities inside his four office walls.

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Q & A:

Debbie Savage When I get the chance, I also help to populate Cardiff Met's online research repository http://repository.uwic.ac.uk/.

What is your favourite piece of art/design/making/architecture?

Who are you?

I'm Debbie Savage, the School's Research and Research Degrees Coordinator.

The first thing that springs to mind is a quilt from an exhibition of artefacts made by American pioneers on their way out west. This particular quilt was a record of shop signs, adverts and logos the wagons passed along the way. It was easy to imagine this unknown woman collecting tiny scraps of material to make a winter bedspread, drawing on what she saw around her and in the process making an amazing piece of technical and social history. It was inspiring to think how something so beautiful, unassuming and intricate could be made in what must have been basic conditions.

What’s a typical day at CSAD like for you?

I work with the Director of Research and Head of Research degrees to try and make life easier for staff and PhD students. A typical day usually involves replying to emails, answering staff or student enquiries, pulling together information for a website, report ,or funding bid, perhaps a bit of work organising an event or a meeting for WIRAD (Wales Institute for Research in Art and Design), and a lot of trying to 'encourage' people to meet deadlines. Most typical days involve going into work expecting to do one thing and ending up doing something completely different.

At the moment, the main focus is on the REF so a lot of time is being spent information gathering, tying to understand policies and regulations and coordinating efforts with our WIRAD partners.

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Is there a book that has had an impact on your life in some way?

The Starlight Barking by Dodie Smith - the official sequel to 101 Dalmatians. I read it when I was about 8 and it taught me everything I needed to know about beliefs, religion and international politics (which is why it was too radical for Disney and they had to come up with 102 Dalmatians). Plus, it's a book about talking dogs that can fly, enough said.

Five records for a desert island?

None. Not being a fan of warmer climes, I can only think of two reasons why I'd end up on a desert island - either because I'd shunned

society and decided to live on a desert island, in which case, as a product of society, I'd also shun music, or there'd been some kind of accident, presumably on a boat, where I'd have enough time to grab a few essentials before jumping overboard in the hope I'd be washed ashore on a desert island. As the latter is the more likely scenario, I'd take a saw, some string, a large knife, knife sharpener and two-pronged fork gift set, a cooking pot and a really large box of uberlong matches. I'd then make my own music with the materials available to me and plan, on my rescue, how best to re-launch myself on Britain's Got Talent as the next SuBo with an album of songs from the island.

What’s the best bit of advice you’ve ever been given?

It'll all be ok in the end - It doesn't always work out as expected, but it usually does work out.

Name one of your heroes and tell us why?

Captain Planet - he's our hero, gonna take pollution down to ZERO. Go Planet!

Name one of your villains and tell us why?

The idea that free market capitalism works.

What’s the best thing about working for CSAD? The people, the ideas, the energy. That and the fact I only have a 15 minute work to every morning, but mainly the people, the ideas and the energy.

hear all sorts of low resonance that you wouldn’t normally hear. It’s about revealing hidden resonance and sounds that are inherent to certain objects and materials.”

When a person talks about the mechanical aspects of art work, it can often be quite difficult to decide whether the person is an artist or a scientist. I asked Pigott whether he considered his work music or an experiment,

Jon Pigott Before Jon Pigott was a lecturer, researcher and sound artist at Cardiff School of Art & Design, before he was studying for a PhD in Sonic Art at Bath Spa, before he was a sound engineer at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios or in London, before all of those things, he was interested in sound.

“I have an early childhood memory of playing around on an old record player. I had the Wombles theme and the Doctor Who theme on record. I also had a few extra records that I had taken from my brother’s record collection without him knowing. I was maybe four or five and playing around with DJing,” he says. “The other memory I have is then making my own stylus - making a paper cone, sticking a needle through the end of it and then dragging that needle across some vinyl. In retrospect, you can see how the seeds were sewn for later interests.”

Pigott’s early interests have endured: studying music technology, playing in bands, releasing records and generally wanting “to be a rock and roll star like most good, honest teenagers do.”

But his interest is more in the idea of sonic sculpture at the moment with an impressive range of work being exhibited over the past several years.

“My work now is lots of things. It’s sound art.

This is a specific type of art practice which grew from the 1960s onwards, but has roots in early 20th Century Dadaism and the like. I also think quite musically about what my work does – in terms of composition - although perhaps not in traditional musical terms,” he says. “It’s an exploration and an investigation into the nature of sound itself and the nature of how sound is made and some of the technologies that are around sound. There’s a sort of scientific feel to it in a way and I think my work looks and feels like an art practice that straddles science as well.

I’m comfortable with that.”

His website features video documentation of many of the projects that he has undertaken in recent years. One of the most interesting is The Infinite Spring which is an electromagnetic feedback loop using a speaker and a spring. The idea is that when the spring hits the speaker the sound of the spring is fed back into the speaker causing a loop.

“It just goes on and on and on as long as the electricity is there to power it. It’s rather like when you play an electric guitar close to the amplifier and you get a sort of howling feedback or when a microphone squeals at a conference.

There are other themes present as well. It’s a cybernetic idea - an electromechanical system that has a feedback loop. It comes to life with a dynamic of its own and that’s something that was quite prevalent in the thinking and art practice of the 1960s, when cybernetics was a big area of investigation,” he explains before taking the conversation back to the idea of playfulness. “It also comes back to childhood games where you get your oven tray and you wrap two bits of string around it, wrap the string around your fingers, stick your fingers into your ears and as you knock the tray you

“It’s both really. Music can be an experiment.

There’s a term, ‘experimental music’ and I think it’s both. I was having a conversation with a colleague of mine about the difference between sound art and music,” he said as we sat in his office, surrounded by amplifiers and instruments and knick knacks that could well be part of his work. “That’s a whole book and we could talk a long time about that. But if I were to put myself somewhere in that discussion then I have to say that I take a John Cage stance - that all sound is music. Even listening to the road outside, with a certain mindset, you can hear that as music. It can be as inspirational as music and cause you to write a piece of music or sit and listen.

That’s why I say some of my work looks like a scientific experiment, but actually I listen to its outcome as music.”

The idea of listening to the sounds of everyday is an idea that carries over into his most recent work with Plymouth University.

“Some environmental sensors were placed in the North Devon region and we worked with the data those senses produced, making kinetic artworks from their patterns. One of the things we were interested in were bats and we made a piece of early cinema technology of a flying bat to indicate when bats were sensed in the environment. We also were interested in a river and used river flowing motion and a fishing line winding to make a piece,” he tells me. “That particular project was an environmental arts project, so it wasn’t just me tinkering away and coming up with an idea, it was a brief. For me the idea of bats as an environmental sensor was an interesting one because they have a special relationship with sound, even though it’s not sound that we can hear. It’s ultrasound.

Immediately, there was a hook for me. You look for hooks into your own fields.”

Speaking to Pigott, you get the idea that at the base of all of his interest in the academic side of sound and beneath all of his achievement and accomplishment, there’s a boy with oven trays tied to his fingers by string, banging them against a wall and enjoying the sound they make.

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Gaynor Kavanagh:

A New School Dean of Cardiff School of Art & Design

Beginning life in the oak rooms above the Royal and Morgan Arcades, it is the oldest part of Cardiff Metropolitan University. Since its first site, it has also been housed in The Friary building, near Cardiff’s New Theatre, and in the purpose built Howard Gardens Campus, opened by the Earl of Snowdon on 13 May 1970.

Gaynor Kavanagh Dean of CSAD

In 2015, the Cardiff School of Art and Design will be celebrating its 150th anniversary. At the heart of the city since its opening in 1865, the School which is one of the oldest in the UK has had many homes.

“Each location has marked a step forward and a turning point. No less a turning point is Cardiff Metropolitan University’s decision to consolidate the School on one site, the Llandaff Campus, through an investment of £14m in the provision of a new building and the refurbishment of existing accommodation,” says Dean of Cardiff School of Art and Design, Professor Gaynor Kavanagh. “The planned development means a tremendous amount to the School. Above all else, it represents to us the faith and confidence placed in CSAD by the University’s Governors, who recognise the School as a centre of excellence and high performance in both research and teaching. We are hugely grateful to them for this and for their continued interest and engagement with the School.”

In 2014, the School will move to the new campus designed by award winning architects Austin-Smith:Lord, who also designed the Riverfront Theatre, Newport as well as the Cardiff School of Management - one of the most pleasing and useful spaces in Cardiff.

Consolidating the split site campus allows the School to facilitate a better experience for students as well as staff.

“The development has been designed around the research and teaching requirements of CSAD. As a result, it is sensitive to the ways we work through making and critical thinking,” Kavanagh explains,

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“The design fully recognizes that CSAD represents higher education at its most unconventional, intellectually challenging and creatively dynamic. The design allows for the fact that we are messy, noisy, technologydriven, talkative, hugely hard working, and resource-intensive: not to mention, inventive, pragmatic, constantly developing and generally maverick.”

But the move doesn’t just mark the physical progression of the School of Art & Design’s history. It also indicates a renewed commitment to progression in research, teaching and innovation.

A lead partner in the Wales Institute of Research in Art and Design, the School will deliver a strong submission to the Research Excellence Framework in late 2014 to follow the success of its ranking of 11th in Research Power in art and design in the UK in the REF’s predecessor, the Research Assessment Exercise in 2008. On this last point, Kavanagh says, “The allocation of space in the new accommodation will enable the continuation of our varied and groundbreaking

research work, especially that where we are in partnership with other universities including Lancaster, Birmingham, and Cardiff, in particular Cardiff Medical School. Our commitment to science in the context of our disciplines remains strong and hopefully will be well evident at the Science Pavilion of the next National Eisteddfod.”

The move will come in the third year of delivering the School’s new undergraduate curriculum, designed to enable students to work across the disciplines, whilst increasing their depth of engagement with their own.

“Our students will be able to choose a period studying abroad with partners in India, Zambia, Venice, America or Korea, the Dean says. “They will also be able to choose to undertake a management module or experience a work placement or work with one of our research professors or principals. We will also have a much larger masters and research degree community, with many more students studying for MFA, MDes and Professional Doctorates in Art or Design.”

Moving to a new location also allows the School to take new steps towards providing the energy and momentum for innovation in teaching with a host of exciting plans being made to provide facilities that will mark it as a truly modern faculty. Most notably, a partnership with the Samsung Art and Design Institute in Seoul will allow students to transcend international borders and still cycle home from the campus in the evening.

“We plan to develop video-linked teaching facilities with Samsung Art and Design Institute, enhancing our joint delivery of our MDes, with particular emphasis on product design,” Kavanagh says. “We’re also looking forward to being able to integrate high-end prefabrication facilities into our workshops, linked to the global FabLab network, to meet the proven needs of industry. This will also be deployed to enable local school children with an interest in design and technology to connect with classes as far flung as Boston, Barcelona and Tehran.”

The cross-disciplinary aspect of the new curriculum is very much enabled with the new

shared studios that are being designed. These will be able to accommodate the School’s growing interest in the way that science, art and design relate to one another with debates and engagement.

“We will be able to action our developing plans for part-time degrees, where the emphasis will be on multi-culturalism and engagement with art, design, making and architecture from perspectives other than those that are western, white and frequently male,” Kavanagh continues to confirm the School’s commitment to providing education in art and design to a wide audience.

“Our students love Cardiff, many choosing once graduated to stay to set up businesses and their own practices here. Our staff contribute to the vibrancy of the creative environments of both Cardiff and Wales as a whole. Collectively, we will remain part of the very fabric of what makes this city and this country special,” she says as if to sum up. “We are ready for anything the future throws at us, and we’ll be addressing it from a wonderfully designed and created new base in Llandaff. We can’t wait.”

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Olwen Moseley:

Preparing for the Design Festival One of the people at the helm of the Festival is Olwen Moseley, subject leader for Graphic Communication at the School of Art & Design, mother, wife and ex-industry. She has, with her administrative assistant, Angie Dutton, and a voluntary band of people from the sector, been curating the Design Festival from its birth in July 2005.

It is now the eighth year that the Cardiff Design Festival has taken place and over those years it has become a main part of the city’s creative events calendar, highlighting some of the best work coming out of the city as well as curating a month of brilliant events that promote innovation and design in Cardiff.

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“It was 2005, the 50 years of Cardiff as a capital city and there was a little bit of money available for events. The initial reaction of the design community to the idea of a festival was that I would never get people to talk to each other because they’re all competing for the same work. Instead, I found that there was a real enthusiasm for the idea, for celebrating the work that went on and for uncovering and explaining what design is all about,” she says. “People understand what some parts of design is: they think they know what fashion designers do, or whatever it might be. But the biggest part of industry in Cardiff is graphic communication and not many people understand what that is. They think it’s printing or marketing but it’s not there’s an invisibility about design, it’s more than a medium. So there was a will and a group of people who were very enthusiastic and we had the first festival in July 2005. It snowballed from there and every year the Festival is slightly different depending on who gets involved and which organisations get involved.”

The Design Festival moved from July to October for the first time in 2008 in order to let the students at the School of Art & Design take a more active role and come to more of the events.

“We’re very lucky that I work for Cardiff School of Art & Design in whose interest it is to have something like the Design Festival as part of their offer. If that wasn’t the case and I was a self-employed designer having to work to make my living, It wouldn’t have been able to spend the time to talk to people,” she says. “We do it in our spare time. So does everyone else who participates. Even more importantly, the legal back up is there. The structural backup is there

something’s worth doing, sod doing it well.’

I have terrible, terrible after-event self recrimination.”

This is her favourite of four models of design festival that she identified for a seminar paper.

Her conclusions led her to believe that the most sustainable model was to take a pragmatic approach.

“I identified that there are four different types of festival: big trade festivals (Salone del Mobile) which are very commercial; a city or a region holding a conference and inviting big speakers, in like the Cheltenham Design Festival but this isn’t necessarily to do with the place it’s being held; a city or regional administration deciding to hold a festival, but the moment people are employed it has to succeed in order to be sustainable,” she says. “Throwing money at something like that ends in a short lived situation; Then there’s the fourth which is an indigenous design community and a loose affiliation of the doers and the players who want to make something happen. That’s what we’ve got really.”

What’s in store for 2012?

It’s the peculiar mix of DIY and organisation that gives the Cardiff Design Festival its unique feel.

And yet, each year the programme becomes more full and better too, with events from a wide range of partners. This year will be no exception:

and if you mess with those kinds of things… that’s your peril!”

A Model Festival The Festival follows an interesting model.

Moseley decided that instead of meticulous planning, she would just set a date for the festival each year and allow anyone who was doing anything interesting and design-based to become a part of the Festival,

“The other thing I suppose - which is a personality trait of mine - is that some people willl plan and plan and worry about it being perfect as it can be, but if I did that nothing would ever happen. I thought ‘Let’s just do it!’ and that was easy because everyone I asked to be involved said yes,” she recalls when we speak at the Graphic Communication department in the Llandaff campus. “I adopted a couple of maxims which have really resonated: ‘If

“There are some themes emerging and there are the usual suspects who can be relied upon to put on exciting events: thinkARK, the EcoDesign centre, the Design Circle, the IWA, Design Wales.

There was quite a lot of interest in cycling, actually. I’m not entirely sure where it all started from but there’s a theme going on about that at the moment. There are lots of quirky things that happen during the Festival which are quite fun,” Moseley explains, “We’ve had a bike ride around the city for the last couple of years led by students from the Wales School of Architecture.

We’ve been working with Cardiff City Council about their transport policy and getting people out of cars, imagining what the city might be like without traffic. Planning has been gathering momentum and rumbling along but now after the students have gone there’s a push to get the programme sorted.”

Every year, I look forward to the month of October more and more and feel less and less envious of friends who are heading off to the Salone del Mobile, Dutch Design Week or Istanbul Design Festival.

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Charlotte Duffy:

Freelancing the dream BA (Hons) Contemporary Textile Design

Still, Charlotte Duffy, is taking it all in her stride.

Having graduated from the Contemporary Textile Design BA last year, she moved to Bristol where she began her career as a freelancer.

“I work from home. I design greeting cards mainly and I’m represented by Image Source (image-source.co.uk) which is one of the leading creative licensing agencies. So I design for them and then they sell the designs to major retailers,” she says.

Freelancing is very hard.

You spend a lot of time worrying about where your next rent cheque is coming from, how you’re going to buy your mother a Christmas present and still get all of the work that you’ve promised your clients you would do, done.

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Getting an agent early in her freelance career really helped her - especially when it came to getting her work in front of retailers. Her greetings card designs are very beautiful featuring humming birds and elaborate flowers in vibrant colours - all printed on recycled card in order to make them as environmentally friendly as possible. However, her range of products is already very wide, considering she has been producing the work for just one year.

“I put some of my portfolio on Print & Pattern (an online textile work showcase). They selected my work. The agent who represents me now got in touch because she first saw my work on there. So that was really lucky. It’s the best thing that has happened since leaving uni. I had an interview there and had to produce six greetings card designs. If they were good enough, they would take me on,” she explains of her path into freelancing. “I went away and did them and she was pleased. Since then I’ve been working to different commissions, but also I work on what interests me. Recently, for example, I’ve been doing a travelling themed collection: camper vans, hot air balloons. I decide what I want to do and they take it and sell it for me. It’s really good because I have a lot of freedom with the subjects and media I use.”

This isn’t Duffy’s first taste of success. While still at university, she beat off competition from fellow students for the chance to win a five day work placement at Zeri, a textiles company based in Kuwait. She was chosen from a shortlist of ten students to work on a collection of home ware pieces with Zeri director Laila AlHamad in Kuwait.

“My CV is a lot better! It’s good to have lots of things on there when you haven’t had a design job yet. Also, that opportunity has been the thing that’s been great for me because I’m still in touch with Layla,” she explains of the experience. “I’ve recently done a few more designs for her. I’ve got to see the whole process as it has gone along: the designs that I created at uni have now been made and are on sale in Kuwait. The whole collection has come to life!”

Not only is the work she designed on sale in the marketplaces of Kuwait but it was also produced at one of the most well known textiles workshops in the world.

“My designs were silk and woven in Cambodia and Lao at Carol Cassidy’s factory. It’s not something I expected I would be doing,” she says nonchalantly when I asked her whether she ever expected to see her work produced at Cassidy’s factory. “I didn’t even have a clue that she would be involved. Layla didn’t know it would be woven there either.”

Duffy now works from her home in Bristol where she moved because she felt like a change of scenery having lived in Cardiff for 10 years.

“I live in a house with quite a few people, which is good because I see them when they’re home.

But in the day, I’m on my own a lot which isn’t

that great. The other thing is that it’s really tough coming out of uni and deciding to go freelance straight away,” she explains. “We had professional practice lessons and that covered some of the problems but I don’t think you realise when you’re in uni how tough it is to be a freelancer. Even though the course was really good, I don’t think anything really prepares you for what life is like when you leave.”

While she’s meeting deadlines, making greetings cards and having her work produced in one of the world’s best factories, she’s got her mind firmly fixed on the future.

“My aim within a year or two is to open my own shop. That’s one of the reasons I moved to Bristol. It’s a really good location to do that in because there are lots of creative people and lots of things going on. I’m going to keep going with the commissions and the greetings cards and hopefully I will turn some of my designs into products and open a shop,” she says.

“I’d like to focus on the cards but also to design things to spec. So, if someone comes and says that they would really like something in the shop but that they would prefer it with a different fabric, I would do that. Customised fabric design.

That’s expensive though so I’m not sure how it’s

going to work. There would be another side where I would have products: kitchen products, cushions, home accessories and that kind of thing.”

One thing is sure though, Charlotte Duffy has a very entrepreneurial personality and is obviously very driven to succeed in the textiles world. The future has a lot in store for her, and no-one can deny that!

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Q & A:

Chris Dennis “...big hair is the key to success...”

Who are you?

I’m Chris Dennis, the School Administrator.

I handle a range of administrative duties from the School’s central office at Howard Gardens.

What’s a typical day at CSAD like for you?

I normally start the day answering some emails in the morning with a cup of tea. The rest of the day will normally revolve around handling requests and enquiries from staff and students, managing a range of data through various spreadsheets and databases, and attending school meetings.

Is there a book that has had an impact on your life in some way?

Name one of your heroes and tell us why.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it had a profound impact upon my life but I found the End of Mr Y

by Scarlett Thomas inspiring.

John B. I admire the way he blazes his own unique path in his field of work. And his big hair of course; after all big hair is the key to success.

Five records for a desert island?

Name one of your villains and tell us why.

Roedelius & Lunz House of a Thousand Glances Edward Oberon Paradise Erasure Always B-Complex Little Oranges The Unthanks Gan to the Kye

What’s the best bit of advice you’ve ever been given?

What is your favourite piece of art/design/making/architecture?

One of my favourite works is Caspar David Freidrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.

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Don’t wait until you know who you are before getting started.

I suppose he’s more an antihero than an outand-out villain but I’m going to pick Victor Frankenstein because of all we can learn from the destructive consequences of his single minded obsession. Nothing is that important.

What’s the best thing about working for CSAD? The people I get to work with.

Q & A:

Mal Bennett Credit: Tim Forster

Who are you?

I’m Mal Bennett, a Technician Demonstrator in the School of Art & Design here at Howard Gardens. I specialise in photography.

What’s a typical day at CSAD like for you?

Well, it changes throughout the year. At the start of the academic year in September I work with groups of first year students mainly using film and chemical processes, that’s an extremely busy period dealing with lots of people and questions. It’s also a time to get to know students individually, what direction they might take as artists, what skills they might have and so on. The other end of the academic calendar, June for example, I’ll be photographing work for the school, that’s all digital and a more solitary process, I’ll spend time editing images where I’m alone in a room with a computer.

What do you like most about your job?

Without a doubt its working with students – a lot can happen in the three years that they are here. We have mature students who might have kids and have to juggle their time with a school run or school leavers who are just starting out.

Whatever their background, they have great opportunity to learn more about art and making - that’s often a voyage of self discovery. They become more confident about their abilities and I really enjoy being a part of that.

What is your favourite piece of art/design/making/architecture?

What’s the best bit of advice you’ve ever been given?

There’s a painting by Ford Maddox Brown in the Manchester City Art Gallery called Work. It was painted in the 1850s and it describes the different ways in which people strive to make a living. Also A View of Delft by Vermeer. I was in Amsterdam with some painters who explained the technical details to me, Vermeer mixed sand with some of the paint to give a non reflective texture. It’s an astounding picture, but you have to be in front of it, the reproductions don’t do it justice. The 1959 Chevrolet Corvette takes some beating - in red, obviously. The Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool (68 years to build) is probably the most impressive building I’ve been in. It’s so big it feels like it has its own gravity.

In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they aren’t.

Is there a book that has had an impact on your life in some way?

No, not really… The workshop manual for a 1969 Triumph was pretty handy though.

Five records for a desert island?

The Clash White Man at the Hammersmith Palais Johnny Cash Folsom Prison Blues (live recording) The 2nd movement allegretto of Beethoven’s 7th symphony Abba The day before you came Jun Miyake Lilies of the Valley

Name one of your heroes and tell us why?

Spike Milligan because he changed the way people thought of comedy in the same way Picasso changed the way we look at art. He wrote endless episodes of the Goon show at great cost to his own mental health. Most of the comedy we see on television wouldn’t have been possible without him. He was a man with great humanity who pointed out the absurdity of human behaviour, wrote some silly poems and saved the Elfin Oak of Kensington Gardens.

Name one of your villains and tell us why?

Howard Marks is technically a villain, having been to prison for drug smuggling. He’s keen to point out that he only ever sold marijuana but on such a large scale that the FBI took a dim view of it. I went to a talk he gave at the Pavilion in Porthcawl. He had written a book called Mr Nice which is the name on one of the many passports he had used. He’s a very intelligent guy with a considerable sense of humour.

What’s the best thing about working for CSAD? I’ve worked in a lot of different places but Howard Gardens is by far the best, the staff here are fantastic.

Cardiff School of Art & Design 18

CSAD MAGAZINE

Dan Peterson:

War Artist BA Illustration 2009-2012

Peterson’s experience is an almost unique one: he is a modern war artist. While there are plenty of war photographers and war writers, he’s among a small group of people who go to war zones and draw what they see.

“Can I have two?” says Dan Peterson when I ask him about his enduring memories of his experience.

“One is that during my studies for the dissertation, I found a famous type of picture called the thousand yard stare. They say it’s post-traumatic stress. It’s also to do with being in a nowhere place, being switched off but aware at the same time. I felt that I got that with a picture of an Afghan National Army soldier who grabbed me when I was in one of the compounds and wanted me to draw him.”

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Over 20 years ago, he started his artistic education at the School of Art & Design although back then he attended the Cardiff School of Printing, part of the School of Art & Design, within South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education that later became UWIC. After that he went into graphic design, eventually setting up his own business. Three years ago, he achieved his goal of getting onto an illustration course when the Illustration BA was set up at the School of Art & Design. He will graduate this year.

“I was in the territorial army (TA) for 14 years.

When I started doing this course, I was getting interested in reportage and editorial illustration illustration done by illustrators on the spot. As I was looking into that, I came across war art. I found out that war artists still exist,” Peterson explains when I ask how it came about that he decided to go to war as an artist.

“I went to interview a war artist called Matthew Cook as part of one of the modules we had to do - to interview a practicing illustrator. I went to London to interview him. We got on well. He had done x number of years in the TA and he gave me lots of clues and hints, but the most important was if you want to go you’ve just got to persevere. So that’s what I did for another 18 months. I got in touch with friends from my past in the TA. I was fortunate that some of them were quite high up in various areas within the army or the

Ministry of Defence. I was going to go with my old regiment, but I was a bit late. Then with my other associate regiment. They were keen but it takes so long!”

The process is certainly more than just making a decision. There has recently been a change in the way that war artists are sent. They used to be independent, but now they’re sent as part of the media - in the same way as journalists, camera men and photographers. That involves undergoing hostile environment training and also a lengthy administrative process, and having gone through that, finding a regiment who will agree to take a war artist into a hostile environment. The call finally came from the Queen’s Dragoon Guards, also known as the Welsh Cavalry, who wanted to take Dan along with them to Afghanistan in November 2011 where he spent a month with them.

But what do they get out of taking an artist with them? Isn’t it a liability - when they have to protect a civilian, albeit a civilian who spent over a decade in the territorial army?

“My dissertation is on war art and perception of it. I don’t think the army fully knows what they want or get from war artists. What they get is a different perspective to what they get from an army photographer. Nowadays there are lots of soldiers taking photographs. It’s not the same as what they get from an artist or an illustrator. It’s illustration that I’ve come from, not fine art.

That’s quite important,” he explains. “No one has ever commissioned a visual record, of this nature, of what they’ve gone through during a particular tour. Queen’s Dragoon Guards is a good one. They’ve got a 320 year history and are one of the oldest regiments in the British army. The regiment keeps a written history but nothing visual like this. The visual history I am preparing will get printed and put into their regimental history to look after. They’ll also get some paintings for their various messes. They also have a museum in Cardiff Castle called The Firing Line which some of the work will go up in as well.”

Peterson is a very interesting person to talk to.

His voice is firm as he talks about Afghanistan as a country and the things that he saw there, “In one place, there’s a famous dock off a canal.

There’s a crane where the Taliban would hang people. There’s some small pictures - I couldn’t do very much when we were on the ground. You don’t stop for too long when you’re on patrol for obvious reasons. Afghanistan is a much nicer place than it was. I only draw what I saw,” he says. “We drove through a notorious town: Gereshk. I was scared when we drove through there. We had stones thrown at us and were spat at. It’s a difficult thing to draw. I will try to draw some of the faces I saw. But the number of people who smiled and waved outweighed the number who spat and threw stones. Then again, a week prior to us driving through there, grenades were thrown into vehicles. I think I described it as ‘going through a recycling dump.’

Every other shop is a chap covered in oil trying to fix an engine but the next shop sells flowers!

In one compound we occupied there was one electric light bulb that was powered by a solar panel. It’s an odd mix. There are motorbikes and there are cars but a car can have a sofa on top and three people are sat on it.”

He shows me his sketchbook - two moleskins: one large, one small, both contain almost flawless drawings of the war in Afghanistan as he saw it. There’s a wide variety of sketches and illustrations. Some are unfinished or abandoned while others are telling portraits and landscapes of the country, as well as a mixture of Afghan

and British soldiers at work and repose. It’s the life in these pictures that has attracted a fair amount of media attention to his work.

The other memory that endures for Peterson?

“You can’t forget coming under fire when you’re on operations. You sort of go there and half of you is thinking: I don’t want to get involved because I want to come home alive. The other half is almost keen to get involved. You want to know that you’ve been involved. Five minutes after going into combat, we were under fire. I shouldn’t say this… it was exciting, it wasn’t scary.”

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CSAD MAGAZINE

James Green

When James Green’s mother was pregnant with him, she watched David Lynch’s Elephant Man. Until his birth, she worried that he would be born suffering from the same problem as the real life John Merrick. Twenty-two years later and obviously in very fine form, Green became fascinated by the film:

“That story made the film a bit more special to me. At the time, I was looking at Rembrandt’s self-portraits and thinking that, without knowing anything about his life, you could get a pretty accurate insight into it, just by looking at those self-portraits. You get him physically as well as something about his mental states,” he explains.

“I thought I would make these cardboard masks of the Elephant Man, as if he had made them himself as self-portraits. When I put the collection up on the wall, it was supposed to be his life story. That’s where my current work all started. The masks I have been making are no longer based on the Elephant Man. I am now interested in masks from all over the world.

From what I’ve found, it seems that since the dawn of time, every culture has employed masks in some form or another.”

His interest in masks is not hard to miss. In fact, it overwhelms you as soon as you walk into his room. His walls are plastered from ceiling to floor with elephant face shaped masks in various forms and sizes with beautifully vivid colours and patterns. So overwhelming is his interest in this work that it engulfs not only his space but also the space of his office-mate Ian Wilkins.

“Going right back, the earliest thing I can remember was drawing a face and getting a feeling that I had worked something out. As a kid I carried on playing - I didn’t think it was art.

Doing art was always connected with playing around and I did that all the way through school,” Green says.

After finishing a BA Fine Art at CSAD, he undertook an MA at the Royal College of Art, before moving back to Cardiff to start a PGCE. “Then someone from CSAD called me and said they had some lecturing work. On the back of that, I was offered the chance to do a PhD. It was a lot of luck and hard work,” he laughs.

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On the only wall of the office that is neither Wilkins’ nor already covered in Green’s masks, there are new pieces of art work that, although resembling the masks, are something completely different, “This painting stuff is new, so it’s too early to tell exactly where it is going. If I make something, it needs at least six months for me to work out what it is I have done. I’ve always got a vague idea, but it’s often intuitive. If I knew what I was doing while I was doing it, there wouldn’t be any point and I would get bored. I think that’s how I can work in this sort of detail,” he tells me. “It’s confusing but it leaves things more open for experimentation. Maybe two or three years down the line I’ll look back at these paintings and think: ‘Quaint!’

I can’t ignore the symmetry in his work. All of the work in Green’s room appears well measured out but the recent pieces he has been doing appear to be both measured and calculated immaculately, “The masks are created freehand and come out as symmetrical as I can get them. They’re not measured out by a ruler but they are symmetrical. There’s a lot going on and if you look closely it sort of loses the symmetry,” he

says. “Even the shape of the board is just done freehand. If you start measuring things, it will take away something about your own way of looking. You’re depending on something else when you use a ruler. I’ve just been seeing things by hand.”

This leads on very nicely onto the subject of Green’s research. Despite feeling a little unsure about his precise research question, he’s very clear about researching the subject of visual perception. This is the study of the way that we see the world and the disparity between how artists since the Renaissance have painted things (linear painting) and the ways in which photographers have been forced to take flat pictures (one lens, one viewpoint).

“The way that most people see the Western World is by what’s known as linear perspective.

They think a picture drawn using linear perspective is a realistic picture, but this way of depicting the world doesn’t take into account that we are in the world. When we see something, we can move around and bring objects closer to us,” he explains of the mindbending, but interesting, concept. “Linear perspective also works with the assumption that we only see with one ‘eye’, causing a doubling

up effect. This hasn’t been accounted for in paintings from the Renaissance up until the early 1900s when people like Picasso and the cubist movement and scientists like Einstein were working out theories of relativity confronted our ideas of representation. Space isn’t one constant unchanging thing, however that is what you see in a picture painted with linear perspective.

That’s something that David Hockney might bring up - there’s no sense of movement with it.

These are some of the ideas I’m working with.”

That’s why the paintings he showed me didn’t look so symmetrical on close inspection. “The straight lines aren’t done by ruler. Even the shape of the board is just done freehand. If you start measuring things, it will take away something about your own way of looking.

You’re depending on something else when you use a ruler. I’ve just been seeing things by hand.”

“I was talking to Gaynor before and she asked me ‘How do you think the world would look to us if photography wasn’t invented?’ and I hadn’t ever really thought about it but perhaps it would look completely different. I don’t know if buildings would have built in the same way everything’s been done with straight lines because of Pythagoras. Things like photography have bolstered that way of working,” he tells me in explanation.

Speaking to James is interesting because unlike many people, he is working backwards. Most people start out with an idea about why something is the way that it is and find arguments to support that thesis. Green’s approach is for find out what people are saying and then work on the patterns between them.

Very fitting for a man who is so interested in perception.

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CSAD MAGAZINE

Jude Gill Jude is now studying towards an MA in Ceramics, but that’s not always what she wanted to do. When she left school, Gill began a Foundation Diploma in Art and Design, but a chronic illness which was diagnosed when she was young got progressively worse and forced her to drop out of the course. It was several years afterwards that she returned to study, but this time it was Applied Psychology rather than art which piqued her interest. Unfortunately, her illness returned and she had to move back home to Merseyside. This time however, she met her husband and returned to Cardiff in 2005.

One thing I love about ceramicists is their personality. I am yet to meet someone who works with clay that I don’t find fascinating. The interesting thing is that regardless of what else makes up the person, I have not come across one ceramicist who is not enjoying experimenting with their medium. Jude Gill is certainly no exception.

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“I got well enough to do an evening class with Cardiff Open Art School and I did printing with Chris Lloyd. I absolutely loved that. After that, I started Foundation again and completed it in two years. Again, I absolutely loved that and I looked around for a BA course to do afterwards.

I wanted to make stuff and I looked around at the courses and part of it was that I had settled in here.” she explains. “I like Howard Gardens and the campus and all the disability support I got was fantastic. If I had gone somewhere else, it would have taken me so much time to get used to the place and it felt like I had only just found my feet. I didn’t want to rip that up again.

I looked at what was on offer in CSAD and it seemed to me of all the degree shows I had been to, the ceramics degree shows consistently impressed me.”

She went on to complete a BA in Ceramics at CSAD before beginning her studies towards the Masters this year. One of her graduated works was chosen for the Wales Assembly award and was hung in the First Minister’s Office for a year.

When Gill says that her work is fiddly, she makes an understatement. The intricacy of her undergraduate work is astounding. Her works Hives, in particular, are quite remarkable.

“They’re part of a larger collection inspired by natural objects and combustible materials. I realised paper would burn in the kiln but if I coated it in porcelain I would be left with a really thin porcelain shell. That’s how I built the hives.

This is what I spent the last year of the BA doing and it’s not that far away from what I’m doing now: utilising found materials. Some of them were hand-built and took about three days other needed to be individually coated and joined. It was all very time consuming and fiddly,” she explains before showing me another of her pieces. “This one is a bracket fungus which a friend found in the woods for me. It was huge and full of maggots - pretty horrible. While I was on the BA, I hadn’t figured out how to keep the pieces whole but this is a direct cast of the mushroom. It’s a cast of the negative space. I like the idea that the clay fills the detail. You can’t get that effect any other way. Basically, I’m describing the space around things.”

It’s clear from our conversation that one of the things that interests Gill most is the space involved in her work. Between every connection in the Hives and in every mould which she has taken from nature, there is a wonderful space.

“I suppose my work becomes a kind of fossil because it recalls what was there and you get a lasting record. Filling things, coating things, wrapping and enclosing them. The idea of wonder and curiosity that makes you want to

look into stuff is the most important thing for me. This all led to what I’m doing now,” she explains. “Now, I’m developing it technically. I’ve discovered that if I use different chemicals in the clay, the organic matter leaves coloured crystals.

It’s the same thing except that the alchemy of it leaves these amazing results.”

Alchemy seems a strange word to describe her practice. I ask her about it and if she agrees with my idea that ceramicists are very playful and enjoy experimenting with their practice.

“It’s totally alchemy. Vegetables + clay + fire = alchemy,” she laughs. “Completely! A lot of people aren’t and they have a degree of control.

But a lot of it is science based and you have to know what you’re doing. It’s alright putting something in the kiln and getting something out that is amazing, but if you’ve got no idea how it has happened, then there’s no point. You have to be able to repeat it at least to some degree there will always be discrepancies on how long you put it in the kiln, how you fire it, where the mushroom grew and what minerals it had in it.”

“It’s very playful and I think most people say that you don’t spend hours and hours making something and then get precious about throwing it in a kiln afterwards,” she continues.

“Opening the door of the kiln is

“It’s totally alchemy.

Vegetables + clay + fire = alchemy”

like Christmas morning: you’ve got some idea but so often you get blown away by what has happened.”

I think she’s onto something there. The analogy of opening presents on Christmas morning fits my experience of talking with ceramicists perfectly: you’ve got some idea but so often you get blown away by how interesting they really are.

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Robert Pepperell Professor of Fine Art

“I guess I started out as an art student interested in what was then new technology (mid 80s) and what potential that new technology might have for creativity. I was interested in things like automated creativity, generated art and music (using computers) and for quite a number of years I ran a multimedia business in London which was a group of other people like me who were into technology doing things like pop videos, art installations and festivals. Basically, we were trying to think of anyway we could to make a living using technology and creativity,” he says.

The space where a person spends their time can tell you a lot about a person. In Robert Pepperell’s office, for example, there is a huge window which draws your gaze to the city scape.

Looking in the direction of Cardiff Bay on a rainy day makes this feel like quite a dramatic scene.

It was when Pepperell realised that doing multimedia projects and organising the every day ins and outs of exhibiting in places like the Millennium Dome had become more to do with administration than creativity that he decided to go back to what he really loved: artistic practice.

“The ideas and the creating side were more interesting for me than the business side. So, around 2000, I thought I would go back into the art school system because that was where creative ideas were at a premium,” he explains.

“I started teaching in Newport and through various different routes, ended up teaching here.”

He has now been working at the School of Art & Design for six years having previously held posts at University of Plymouth and University of Wales Newport. A Professor of Fine Art, Pepperell can now focus on his creative interests.

“One of the things that has interested me for a very long time is how we see. That's something that artists have traditionally been fascinated by and in many ways it seems obvious and straight forward that we just see things in the world,” he continues. “The more you look into that process

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and think about it the more complex, intricate and amazing it becomes.”

After a break from painting, Pepperell picked up his paintbrush again seven years ago. At this point, he was interested in exploring the nature of perception. It was through this practice and exploration that he began to see both philosophical and artistic connections between vision and perception. He took the chance to become involved in developing research that pushed science, art and philosophy together.

“I think visual perception is such a complicated phenomenon that no single discipline can deal with it on its own,” he tells me. “The problem that I was working on originally was what I call visual indeterminacy. I did a lot of work on that over a number of years and that’s when you see something in the world, an image or photograph, and it looks like something but you can’t quite recognise what it is. Very often you’ll look at it and go through all the possibilities and try and solve the puzzle. That’s quite a common occurrence for most of us and we tend to overlook it.”

The more he researched this area, the more he found that he was not alone in his conclusions.

Many artists had also written about and portrayed this phenomenon in their work.

“People like Kandinsky had talked about this same issue of seeing the world in a way where it’s not quite recognisable,” he says. “For a long time I made paintings that tried to put you in that frame of mind. More recently, I’ve been interested in how we see or perceive the whole range of our visual field not just the object we are looking at. I’ve been working on trying to find a way to depict that. It’s a technical problem in some ways but a philosophical problem in others and an artistic one in other ways.

Whichever way you look at it, it’s definitely a problem.”

The two strands of Pepperell’s interest (perception and technology) came together just a few years ago when he first saw the work that David Hockney was doing using the iPad. “I saw his show in Copenhagen where he had displayed hundreds of iPhones and iPads in a black room with his paintings on them. I was really impressed by them because in a way he was using the iPad to do a similar thing to me: to capture the visual experience,” he recalls.

“He drew a bunch of flowers or the sun coming through a blind or a street lamp reflected in a puddle - these aren’t highly charged scenes or ones of particular historical significance.

Nevertheless, they are things that we share in our common experience. The way that the iPad

projected them out through the gloom of the dark room with its very bright screen interested me.”

Shortly after that, Pepperell decided to try it for himself. He bought an iPad, the same stylus that Hockney used and also the same app.

“I found Hockney’s words to be true: there isn’t another medium that allows you to transcribe so quickly what you are seeing,” he explains. “If you use paint, you have to wait for things to dry.

If you’re using coloured pencils, you can’t fill in the big areas or do texture so easily. In terms of a tool for trying to describe what you’re actually seeing the iPad is probably the best. I now mainly use it as a means of recording things that are in front of me.”

What is interesting is that in the time that Pepperell has developed as an artist, from art school student to Professor of Fine Art, the technology which he has always been so fascinated by has also developed with him.

“A lot of the time when I first started using technology it was more the promise than the actuality that we were dealing with. There were paint programmes early on but by contemporary standards they were very limited. All you could do is change the brush size and the colour.

People did amazing things with them but they weren’t really intuitive tools in the way that the paint apps on the iPad are,” he explains. “The other thing is that you had a big mouse between you and the image whereas the iPad is a very direct relationship between you and the screen. I think my interest in technology early on was very limited by the technology available. Now technology enhances creativity rather than dragging behind it.”

In closing, Pepperell adds one thing that he has been thinking about recently.

“About Hockney and the iPad, I would say that we shouldn’t overlook the importance of art in our culture as a vehicle for moving human thinking and ideas forward. Painting, the oldest medium, is still the best way to depict what I’m doing,” he explains. “For me one of the exciting things is that the iPad is maintaining the importance of painting as a way of recalling our phenomenal experience (our direct experience of the world). It’s amazing that after all the technological advances, painting is still the best way to do it. That’s incredibly important I think particularly for our students. Arts of all kinds are more than just decorative or luxury. It’s a fundamental way we have of negotiating and engaging with the world.“

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CSAD MAGAZINE

Dr Cathy Treadaway

Richard Morris

in brief Research

CSAD is host to a wide variety of exciting research & enterprise activities. The School strives to build links and share its expertise, creativity and innovation with academic, industry and community partners.

The R&E Newsletter provides a quarterly snapshot of work by the School’s staff and students.

27 Cardiff School of Art & Design

New Appointments It is all change at CSAD with two new Research and Enterprise appointments and a third in Learning & Teaching. Richard Morris has been appointed as the new Director of Enterprise and Dr Cathy Treadaway has been appointed as Research Leader to cover operational matters whilst the Director of Research is on research leave. Olivia Kotsifa as been appointed as the new Field Manager and will be responsible for coordinating levels 4 and 5 Field activities and modules.

Research Seminar Series Lecture CSAD’s Research Seminar series came to an end this term with presentations by Dr Jeff Jones, Ingrid Murphy and Dr Cathy Treadaway. Jeff and Ingrid provided an overview of ceramics research with Jeff looking back over the past century to explore the relationship between ceramics and sculpture, and Ingrid looked forward to examine how ceramicists can harness new technologies and techniques into their practice. Cathy spoke about her work researching creative practice.

WIRAD Emerging researcher Symposium The second WIRAD Symposium for Emerging Art & Design Researchers took place at the Wales Millennium Centre, at the end of March.

Organised by CSAD, the symposium provided an opportunity for WIRAD’s emerging researchers to present and discuss their early research work, access expertise from other parts of WIRAD, find out about the research of others, discuss synergies and differences with peers and learn about the process of research. A number of CSAD staff and Research Students presented at the event, including Jan Bennett, Chris De Selincourt, Sally Grant, Theo Humphries, Jon Pigott and Craig Thomas. Selected papers have been published online at www.wirad.ac.uk.

Drawing Jac Dr Jac Saorsa will be presenting at a number of conferences over the next few months. The first, Intensities and Lines of Flight: Deleuze and Guattari and the Arts, took place King’s University College and The University of Western Ontario, Canada where Jac delivered her paper Drawing Out Deleuze. In September, Jac will present a paper entitled Osmosis: Drawing and Bio-Medical Science at the Drawing Research Network Annual Conference, Loughborough University and will deliver the keynote lecture at the Practice Makes Perfect: Theorising Method In Visual Research Symposium at Swansea Metropolitan University. Finally, Jac will also present ARTOLOGY: Interventions and intersections between philosophy, art practice, and biomedical science at Dundee University in November.

Professor Clive Cazeaux

Theo Humphries, Crapestry

Duncan Ayscough long neck pot

Duncan in Denmark Ceramic lecturer Duncan Ayscough has recently spent time in Denmark undertaking a residency funded by Wales Arts International. The Guldagergaard artist-in-residence programme is designed to encourage artists, designers and craftspeople to work together and develop their creative practice, professional experience and networks, as well as exchange knowledge and share their research. Through his work, it is Duncan’s aspiration that his work embodies the narrative of its making; to communicate the values of its material and the process of making.

It is this fluid discourse between process, concept and material, which lies at the heart of his practice.

CSAD Symposiums Plans are underway for a symposium on drawing in September at the Wales Millennium Centre.

The aim of the event is to draw together staff and research students with an interest in the subject to discuss the role of drawing in teaching and research in CSAD. The day will also include an opportunity to draw a Welsh National Opera rehearsal at the Wales Millennium Centre. Also in the planning stages is a research seminar on health and medicine with Cardiff University’s School of Medicine. Working with Professor Judith Hall, a ‘show and tell’ style event is being discussed for the autumn term.

Professor Clive Cazeaux Congratulations to Clive Cazeaux who has been made a Professor of Aesthetics. Professor Cazeaux joined CSAD as a senior lecturer in 1996 and has been the School’s Head of Research Degrees since 2007. His current work on metaphor and visual thinking develops metaphor as a research method for visual arts research, as Clive explains “Metaphor, the description of one thing as something else, is not just the drawing together of previously perceived similarities but, as Cazeaux (2007), Lakoff and Johnson (1999), and Ricoeur (1978) argue, an embodied principle of conceptual realignment which generates insight. I draw on the philosophical theories of Kant and MerleauPonty to present metaphor as a research method. As a way of thinking and talking about art and design practice, I show how metaphor (a) creates new frames of reference, (b) generates friction between these new frames and established terminologies (where this is a good thing), and (c) calls attention to the embodied nature of human being and the capacity which art and design have to enrich and enliven our embodied condition.”

Emerging Researchers CSAD’s emerging researchers have been a busy this year presenting at conferences, writing articles and working on research projects. In addition to the WIRAD events mentioned elsewhere in the newsletter, the following activities have taken place over the past term:  Cath Davies’ article No Mere Mortal?

Re-materialising Michael Jackson in death, has been published in Celebrity Studies, Vol 3:2, (Routledge).  As well as presenting and leading a research seminar on Intuition at the Transtechnology Research Group at Plymouth University in April, Theo Humphries has exhibited work at The Stitch and Craft Show, Kensington Olympia and Stitching for Pleasure at Birmingham NEC in March, at Niche (Bristol) in June, and Biblos 3 (Bristol) in August. He was also featured as one of the Hottest 5 Cross-stitchers in the UK in June’s Cross Stitcher Magazine.  Sally Grant has received a second award from the Society of Antiquaries for her work on the 70s and a Women's Forum Award from Rosemary Butler AM. She will present her research at the Design and Emotion Conference at Central Saint Martins' in September and the Creative Cutting Conference at Huddersfield in February 2013.

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Philippa Lawrence, 'Nothing is Something', Seared sheepskin and monofilament

 Alexandros Kontogeorgakopoulos was invited to take part in April’s MotionComposer Workshop and Symposium at the Bauhaus University, Germany and has been participating as an External Research Team Member in the EU-funded project ERASITECHNIS: Processing, Analysis, Synthesis and Context-Based Retrieval for Multimedia Music-Related Data Bases of Traditional Music and Dancing Recordings.

His co-authored paper, The FireFader and Derivatives: Simple, Open-Source, and Reconfigurable Haptics for Musicians (Berdahl and Kontogeorgakopoulos), won one of two Best Paper Awards at the Sound and Music Computing Conference SMC2012, Copenhagen in July and his second paper coauthored with Edgar Berdahl, Engraving-Hammering-Casting: Exploring The Sonic-Ergotic Medium For Live Musical Performance, will be presented at the International Computer Music Conference ICMC2012, Ljubljana in September.  Since the spring Jon Pigott has made research presentations at Oxford Brookes and Bath Spa universities, and at the WIRAD Emerging Research Symposium in Cardiff.

In June, he also exhibited two pieces as part of the Appledore Arts Festival in collaboration with artist Antony Lyons. These were kinetic sculptures that responded to live environmental data streams using sensor technology developed by the Plymouth university iDAT group. Jon and Antony's work used data derived from bat activity and levels of river turbidity (muddiness) to effect sound, movement and light.

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During July, Jon completed a two week CPD course at UWE learning how to apply 3D CAD software skills to 3D printing and laser cutting. His ongoing research into electromechanical sonic art continues with a current focus on systems aesthetics and the emergence of sound art during the 1960s.  Philippa Lawrence’s first conference paper Bound; the use of cloth as interface; exploring boundaries and concepts in relation to site and place presented at Activating Cloth to Enhance the Way We Live, University of Huddersfield in January 2012 is due to be published in the journal Textiles; the journal of cloth and culture (Berg) later in 2012. Her research in material manipulation to express the human condition has led to new work, which is being exhibited in Bite-Size: Miniature Textiles from Japan & the UK. The touring show, supported by the Daiwa Anglo Foundation, will visit venues in London and Japan in 2012. In July 2012, Pip also visited The Design Centre at University College, Falmouth to explore the use of its Digital Jacquard Loom with a view to making new work. Finally, Pip has been awarded a residency at the Nirox Foundation, Cradle of Mankind, South Africa, in 2013 to ‘make sense of place’ through Earth and Sky studies.

 CARIAD Workshops At the end of April the CARIAD research group hosted the first of a series of national research workshops part in the AHRC funded project, Connected Communities: Permission to play. The event was organised by Dr. Cathy Treadaway and included presentations and activities led by Dr. Wendy Keay-Bright and Darrell Cobner.

Academics attended from a number of UK universities including University of Strathclyde, Glasgow University, Liverpool University and University of Glamorgan.

In June, the CARIAD team ran a design lab with Rhondda Cynon Taf Skills for Independence. The aim was to create interactive arts technology applications that encourage expressive communication and "make movement irresistible" amongst adults with profound and multiple learning disabilities. They also ran an event at The National Centre for Product Design & Development Research (PDR) user centric lab with teaching and occupational therapy staff.

This project is exploring the feasibility of utilising floor space as a means of interacting with people. The concept is evolving on the idea of "taking steps" toward independent learning, through cause and effect, flow and awareness of the relationship between ourselves and others.  Steve Gill: Professor in development Professor Steve Gill attended two events this summer. In July he attended a week-long ‘Physical Computing with the Arduino’ course at Middlesex University. Arduino is an electronics prototyping platform based on

Work by Dr Cathy Treadaway: 21/2 Weeks in the life of Dr Treadaway

cheap, flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software that Steve wishes to use as a prototyping tool. This was followed in August by a 5-day multidisciplinary Interaction Beyond the Desktop seminar taking place at Scholoss Dagstuhl, Germany. This invitationonly event brought Steve together with computer scientists, psychologists, cognitive scientists and design experts to consider the emerging field of post-desktop interaction research. It is anticipated that the seminar will lead to the production of a book on interaction beyond the desktop and to help initiate and extend international research and develop collaborations.  Autism Spectrum Disorders Technology Dr Wendy Keay-Bright gave a paper at the first International Conference on Innovative Technologies for Autism Spectrum Disorders - ASD: Tools, Trends and Testimonials.

The conference took place during July in Valencia (Spain) at the Faculty of Medicine.  21/2 weeks in the life of Dr Treadaway…

• Saturday 2nd June: Birmingham Dr Cathy Treadaway was part of the AHRC funded Urban Flows community day held at the Huda Centre, Birmingham. Cathy led a series of ‘walk and draw’ interventions with a group of Somali immigrants. The day culminated in a community event to make a drawing of the locality. The research is investigating walking and drawing as an activity to foster community wellbeing.

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Saturday 9th June: Glasgow Cathy took part in the NVA and Invisible College Occupy workshop which brought together international researchers, artists, performers and writers with the general public to envision the potential of a derelict modernist building: the St Peter’s seminary, Kilmahew near Glasgow.

Monday 11th June: London Cathy gave an invited presentation about collaborative art practice at the Researching Empathy Conference at the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Tuesday 19th June: Liverpool Cathy participated in the AHRC Healthy Play Connected Communities funded workshop at Liverpool University exploring how creativity, literacy and reading groups can contribute to community cohesion.

 Rob Pepperell presents…

Professor Robert Pepperell has been making new links to further his research. Rob was invited to present a talk on Posthumanism at Rethinking Humanism, an international conference held at St. Andrew’s University in June. He was also invited to present his latest research on painting and vision at an international colloquium on art and perception attended by some of the world's leading experts in vision science. The colloquium was hosted by the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Paris. Rob is also contributing to an academic network studying the relationship between literature, memory and neuroscience organised by Roehampton University. The group has recently been awarded an AHRC grant to

further development the network. Finally, Rob has recently been awarded a grant from WIRAD to research the depiction of visual perception in British art. This was a joint submission with Swansea Metropolitan University and the National Museum of Wales, and will culminate in a symposium to be hosted by the museum in 2013.  Seed Funding Dr Gareth Loudon, Professor Robert Pepperell and Dr Cathy Treadaway have all received Cardiff Met Research & Entereprise seed funding. Gareth was awarded funding to support the dissemination of recent work at the eighth Global Conference on Creative Engagements: Thinking with Children at Oxford in June and September’s fifth International Conference on Spatial Cognition in Rome.

Rob will use the award to further a Welsh Government funded project exploring new methods of representing the human visual field. The award will be used to present his research at the Visual Science of Art Conference in Italy and purchase two GoPro HD hero cameras that will be used to conduct field research and record the visual field that would normally be see by two human eyes.

Rob will use this data perform the transformations necessary to create his full field images.

Cathy will host a networking/dissemination event at the Wales Millennium Centre to discuss research collaboration on the subject of creativity and ageing.

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Jan Williams, MFA

Research students  Wendy Keay-Bright: Field Work Dr Wendy Keay-Bright has received funding to develop a digital video resource which will showcase Somantics and ReacTickles Magic in use. The resource, funded by ESRC, is collaboration with colleagues from Birmingham and Southampton Universities who will demonstrate ECHOES and CoSpatial.

Echoes, ReacTickles Magic and Somantics have also been selected for the ESRC Festival of Social Science in November.

In May, Wendy ran a Somantics workshop at the Three Ways School’s Sensory Studio, a versatile space that provides an immersive environment. Wendy commented “sessions ran at regular intervals all day, it was very noisy with all the laughter and excitement, and demonstrated how Somantics can engage children with Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties (PMLD). It was especially rewarding to see the slightest wave and nod create a beautiful sparkle or kaleidoscope pattern so the children in wheelchairs could easily join in.”

Somantics and ReacTickles Magic now have regular sessions set up at the Hollies School in preparation for the SHAPE project, which has evolved from Wendy’s ESRC Festival of Social Sciences event. Sessions using ReacTickles Magic focussed on ‘cause and effect’ and the performances from the children were considered by staff to be exceptional. One boy in particular was reported to be more engaged than anyone had ever seen before.

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Wendy also presented talks for the Bristol Autism Research Group at the invitation of Professor Chris Jarrold and Dr.Carmel Conn, and the Autism Cymru Forum for Primary and Special School Teachers Across Wales.

Somantics was well received and the reduction of unwanted stereotypical behaviours regularly being reported by teachers was noted as making a valuable contribution to research.

Finally, Wendy has also been disseminating her research via the Visual Performance Analysis website, an industry based platform designed to enable practitioners’ to discuss their work. In her post, Wendy describes her research methodology and the use of video to capture raw data.

 WIRAD/AHRC Studentships This year’s AHRC studentships have been awarded to Sarah Younan and Jo Barlow.

Sarah has been awarded a PhD bursary to investigate the impact 3D scanning and print technology has on our perception of ceramic objects and Jo will be spending her time on the MA Ceramics course to investigate the effects the demise of traditional heavy industries in the north of England has had on local communities through her ceramic and digital photographic practice.  WIRAD GRADE Exhibition and Symposium Past and current Art & Design MPhil/PhD students presented their work as part of WIRAD GRADE. Taking place between the 21st and 27th June at the HG gallery, the exhibition included a one day symposium which invited researchers to talk about their work, accompanied by a keynote lecture delivered by Daro Montag, Associate Professor of Art and Environment, University College Falmouth. The exhibition and symposium was organised by WIRAD research students, led by CSAD’s James Green and Nigel Hallet, and included presentations from Craig Thomas, Theo Humpheries, Jan Bennett, James Green and Robin Hawes, Helena Sands, and Sally Grant.  Leah McLaughlin: Video production In April, final year PhD student Leah McLaughlin attended a two day video production course run by JISC Digital Media, a service designed to provide advice, guidance and training to the UK’s Further and

Moira Vincentelli and Ingrid Murphy at Ceramics and Sculpture: Different Disciplines and Shared Concerns

Dr Jac Saorsa, ‘The Diagnosis’ (oil and chalk pastel on canvas)

Enterprise

Higher Education community.

Leah commented: “The course provided practical training in methods of video production, which I can apply to my doctoral project. The sessions focused upon capturing and editing interviews and lectures, in addition to ways of disseminating them and some of the implications of ‘online’ research.” As a result of the course and presenting her research, Leah will be meeting with course co-ordinator Tim O’Riodan to discuss mutual research interests and possible collaborations.  Research Student Activities CSAD Research students will be speaking at a number of conferences over the summer.

Gina Deininger presented at the eighth Global Conference - Creative Engagements: thinking with Children, Oxford in June and fifth International Conference on Spatial Cognition, Rome in September. Tim Taylor presented at AIVC-TightVent Conference 2012, in Denmark, David Holmes spoke at July’s iV2012 - 16th International Conference on Information Visualisation in France and Simon Hatherley at the Zero Energy Mass Custom Housing (ZEMCH) International Conference 2012, Glasgow. Finally, Robin Hawes will be presenting at The Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society Annual Conference: Neurophenomenology, Bristol in September.

 Employability case study publication Olwen Moseley has had several case studies about the Cardiff Design Festival and the effectiveness of life briefs included in a publication that Dr. Colleen Connor, Dean of Learning & Teaching, has compiled for the HEA detailing some of the work being undertaken in university programmes across Wales.  Ceramics and Sculpture Conference Dr Jeff Jones organised a conference in July in conjunction with Andrew Renton, Head of Applied Art, National Museum Wales and Laura Gray, CSAD research student.

Ceramics and Sculpture: Different Disciplines and Shared Concerns attracted speakers and delegates from across the UK and beyond and the papers will be published in the forthcoming edition of Interpreting Ceramics.  Digital tourism Dr Gareth Loudon recently ran a feasibility study as an Enterprise project with the Maritime Heritage Trust Wales looking at the development of digital tourism applications showcasing the maritime heritage in Wales.  User-centred design course Dr Gareth Loudon has been running a commercial Skillset Academy Plus course on user centred and experience design. The course, which is either free or part-funded for participants, explains the process and benefits of user-centred design, exploring methodologies for understanding the explicit and implicit needs of target customers by looking at how people actually use and interact with products and services in their

everyday lives, how this understanding can be translated into new product/service concepts, and how the validity of new product/service ideas can be tested with customers.  Strategic Insight Placements success The School has been awarded three new SIPs Dr Jac Saorsa has received a SIPs grant for the Drawing VIN project which involves her collaboration with Dr Amanda Tristram, Senior Lecturer in Gynaecological Oncology, Cardiff University, and Honorary Consultant in Gynaecological Oncology, Cardiff and Vale University Health Board. The project has developed into a wider initiative that involves the relation between art practice and medical science with reference to all four gynaecological cancers and breast cancer together called the 'women’s cancers'.  Paul Granjon has been awarded a Reverse SIP to work with Quadratura Limited, a London based organisation which specialises in software solutions involving machine vision and hearing. Paul, whose work investigates the relationship between humans and machines through the creation of home-made robots and other devices, will use the opportunity to research, experiment and develop the early stages of a cognitiveperceptive system for an animal-inspired mobile robot. The overall project aims to build an intelligent machine which will be used to re-enact a classic performance art piece by German artist J. Beuys.

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Hoffi and the Design Festival at Arts & Business Awards

 Professor Steve Gill will use his SIP to spend time visiting Smaltitech, an organisation that develops small tangible computer objects for learning, to discuss possible collaborations, research and development opportunities.

SIPs have also been completed by Duncan Ayscough, who has just undertaken one with the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and Debbie Savage, who worked with Artist Resource Cardiff.  Going global again Olwen Moseley, the Festival Director, has been invited to take part in International Design Week that is being held in Helsinki this September as a part of Helsinki’s year as the World Design Capital. This opportunity to promote the Festival and CSAD to the global design community arose from an event at last year’s festival where the head of the Dutch Design Week and a representative from Eindhoven Council spoke about the business benefits to a city of hosting design festivals, fostering a thriving design sector, and the long standing international links that the Festival has developed.  Arts & Business Award for Cardiff Design Festival’s sponsors The Cardiff Design Festival organisers were delighted that Hoffi have won the Arts & Business Cymru Award for their long term support of the Festival which was presented at the annual dinner at the Wales Millennium Centre in June. The Award was in recognition for all their design input, website 33 Cardiff School of Art & Design

Cardiff Open Art School

management, training and advice that Hoffi has provided for the Festival for the last six years. The judges were particularly impressed by the reciprocal nature of the partnership and how the relationship had lead to, for example, the launch of spin out projects such as the social enterprise ThinkARK, and PlayARK which organises games festival and pervasive street games.  Cardiff Open Art School Bookings are now coming in for the COAS Summer School. Some new courses have been introduced this summer including Cyanotype Printmaking and Relief Printmaking with Foam Board which are to be run by Bill Chambers and Sarah Edmonds will be running updated versions of her Letter Press Printmaking, Creative Collage and Handmade Books. Also included in the programme are five day Exploring Drawing and Painting in Oil and Acrylic courses.

The Autumn term evening class in Digital Photography - Introduction: DSLR is also proving very popular. Morgen Hall’s Learn to Use the Potter’s Wheel course is proving popular, with students from last term considering joining us as full time BA students. Laura Lillie will again be running her successful Solarprint Etching course and some weekend workshops are also being added to the programme.

 Cardiff Design Festival Several interesting themes have emerged for this year’s Festival which is held from 28 September until 13 October at venues across the city. Various event organisers, for example, are holding cycling themed events including a cycle ride around the city’s most interesting examples of architecture, a car free day in central Penarth, and a design company will show its new cycling fashions and bags. An innovative mobile cinema project is also being organised showing short films along the theme of street life, looking at ways in which pedestrians, children, cars and bikes can share roads more safely. A call for submissions is now open for short films, which will be projected in and on interesting and unusual venues across the city. They will also be shown in Barranquilla in Colombia at the same time, the first time the Cardiff Design Festival has had a presence in South America. Another new addition being planned for this year’s Festival is a photography exhibition highlighting the work of Ely and Caerau Communities First Innovative time banking project where local people pay for training through using their new skills supporting community projects.

Professor André Stitt Richard Cox, Stepwells of India

School  Quilting for Africa CSAD staff and students will be creating a sponsored quilt to be raffled at an event at the Pierhead Building, Cardiff Bay in October 2012. Using the themes of either mothers or Africa, students, supporters and friends are invited to contribute a square for the quilt, which will be sewn together by Maggie Cullinane. The quilt furthers CSAD’s relationship with the Mothers for Africa charity which was set up by the combined Cardiff University and NHS departments of anaesthesia in 2005, to train medical staff in sub-Sahara Africa to care for mothers during pregnancy and childbirth.  CSAD Magazine CSAD launched a new online magazine.

The monthly publication will include interviews with staff, students and graduates from the school, and the latest news on the School’s current research and enterprise activities. Each quarter, the online publication will be combined into a printed journal. http://cardiff-school-of-art-anddesign.org/magazine/  André making an impact This summer, Professor André Stitt will be presenting recent live transmission drawings made on walks in West Wales and Northern Ireland at a one day event combining radical performance practices at Live Notation, Arnolfini gallery, Bristol in July. His painting Smelter will also feature in the Welsh Artist of The Year exhibition at St David’s Hall, Cardiff, during July and August and his painting Weeds & Aliens has been selected for inclusion in the new annual Wales

International Painting Prize. Two of André’s paintings have been selected for inclusion in the annual National Eisteddfod of Wales contemporary art exhibition that takes place in August in the Vale of Glamorgan, and he has been shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize 2012 at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool for his work The Little Summer of St. Michael. The prize exhibition will run form 15 September until 6 January 2013.  Stepwells in North Western India Gallery Director Richard Cox gave an illustrated talk in the HG lecture earlier this year on his work. Richard has been a regular visitor to India since the early 1990s and has been touring an exhibition of digital photographs of Stepwells since 2008. Built in the desert regions of North West India, especially the Thar Desert in Rajasthan since 825AD, these wells, often large and imposing, are complex architectural constructions varying in design and size, built to conserve water.  Rob judges Welsh Refugee Council’s children’s poster competition Professor Robert Pepperell was delighted to be asked to judge the Welsh Refugee Council’s poster competition with the prizes being given out in late June at a presentation ceremony at the National Museum Wales.

The competition aims to help young people in Wales understand and relate to some of the issues facing many refugees whose lives and families have been torn apart by conflict and or persecution. The winning posters will be used for WRC’s promotional purposes.

 Printlinks Bill Chambers organised the Printlinks exhibition showing work by printmakers from Swansea Print Workshop and Cardiff Print Workshop at Oriel Canfas, Cardiff earlier this summer. The exhibition celebrated the close ties between the two cities, demonstrating a shared passion for printmaking as an important and significant art form in today’s eclectic art world. Showcased are some of the best works to come out of the two workshops from some of Wales’ leading exponents of the art form.  Interview for Rolf Harris series Professor Robert Pepperell and research student James Green were recently interviewed by an independent production team for a documentary on the artist Evan Walters. The programme is part of the Rolf Harris on Art series, and is due to be broadcast on the BBC later this year.  Paul @ ARS Electronica Paul Granjon will be attending this year’s Ars Electronica taking place in Linz, Austria.

The festival questions focuses on the nexus of art, technology and society and features a programme of symposia, exhibitions, performances, interventions and concerts.

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Sue Hunt and Annie Giles-Hobbs

Student & Alumni news  Printmaking at the Senedd Annie Giles-Hobbs and Sue Hunt have shown work in consecutive exhibitions at the Senedd over the summer. Earlier this year Annie Giles Hobbs exhibited her prints, which use layers of handmade papers that function not merely as surfaces but are constituted and shaped for her predetermined images.

This was followed by a second exhibition of Sue’s work in July which was sponsored by Jenny Rathbone AM. Sue’s work has always had a strong abstract identity in terms of composition and a rigour in her interest in drawing.  Open Books Sue Hunt also took part in Open Books: Sixteen Artists and the Chinese Open Book in the Council Chamber at The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, which ran until the end of September.

 BA Fine Art - second year exhibition Second year BA Fine Art students took over three Cardiff venues for a weekend in early May to showcase their work. Showing at The Capitol Centre, Milkwood Gallery and The Crofts pub, the exhibitions showcased painting, sculpture and printmaking, live music and poetry.  BA Illustration winner at Shape Open Awards New Illustration graduate Lauren Nicholas, was selected as one of the winners of this year’s Shape Open Awards. Shape Open is an annual exhibition featuring disabled and non-disabled artists responding to the OED definition of disability. Lauren Nicholas won with her short film An Ageing Thing, a stop motion animation telling the story of her grandfather. Nicholas said “[I] never thought I’d win the first prize. I am going to use the prize money to help funding my next art project, which will take place in Greece later this year.”  Fine Art graduate publishes ‘The Monster Machine’ 2005 CSAD Fine Art graduate Nicola Robinson has just had her first children’s picture book published by Pavilion Children’s books. Written and illustrated by Nicola, The Monster Machine is available in bookshops now. www.monstermachine.co.uk.

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 Sky orchestra at the Olympics In July 2011 Londoners awoke to the sound of music emanating from the skies, as The Sky Orchestra heralded a year to go to the 2012 Games. Created by Luke Jerram (Fine Art 1997), The Sky Orchestra is an ongoing research project and bringing together performance and music to create airbourne visual audio installations. The work has previously flown over Bristol, Stratford-upon Thames and Birmingham, as well as cities in Canada, Switzerland and Australia. For the London flights a bespoke Android app allowed users to track the flights and participate from afar. Luke is now Artist and Research Fellow at University of Southampton.  Ant Ballet Product Design graduate Ollie Palmer has developed technology that he hopes will allow him to stage an ant ballet by using synthetic pheromones to ‘direct’ the ants in a choreographed dance. The work, which is part of a six year research project, was on display at the FutureEverybody exhibition, part of Manchester’s FutureEverything festival in May 2012, and the first live Ant Ballet performance is due to take place at Pestival, Sao Paolo in Cardiff Open Art School

Cardiff Open Art School Autumn 2012 We’re delighted to announce our Autumn 2012 programme and it would be great if you could join us.

Learn to Use the Potter’s Wheel Saturday & Sunday, 15 - 16 September 11.00am - 4.00pm £100.00

Life Drawing Comes Alive Tuesdays, starting 25 September 7.00 pm - 9.00pm

£125.00

The Art of Screen Printing Mondays starting 24 September 6.30pm - 8.30pm

£150.00

Life Drawing Wednesdays, starting 26 September 4.30pm - 6.30pm

£125.00

£120.00

Learn to Use the Potter’s Wheel Wednesdays, starting 26 September 6.30pm - 8.30pm

£150.00

Exploring Drawing Wednesdays, starting 25 September 7.00pm - 9.00pm

£120.00

Developing your Portfolio Thursdays, starting 26 September 4.30pm - 6.30pm

£165.00

Intermediate/Advanced Painting on Mondays, starting 24 September 7.00pm - 9.00pm Oil and Acrylic

Introduction to DLSR Photography Mondays starting 24 September 7.00pm - 9.00pm £130.00 Solarplate Printmaking Mondays, starting 24 September 6.30-8.30pm (4 sessions only) £85.00 Relief Printmaking Tuesdays, starting 25 September 6.30pm - 8.30pm

£125.00

Surface Decoration and Hand Building Thursdays, starting 27 September 6.30pm - 8.30pm £150.00

Techniques in Ceramics Introduction to DLSR Photography Thursdays starting 27 September 7.00pm - 9.00pm £130.00 Introduction to Painting in Oil and Acrylic Thursdays, starting 27 September 7.00pm - 9.00pm £120.00 To sign up simply send in a cheque made payable to Cardiff Metropolitan University along with your enrolment form which can be found at http://cardiff-school-ofart-and-design.org/coas/book/ or simply ring 029 2041 6628 and pay and enrol over the phone.

It is possible for you to join any of the courses after the formal start date. COAS runs courses throughout the year. If you are looking for a course or are interested in developing your creative skills in some way, please contact us.

We look forward to hearing from you soon and to welcoming you to Cardiff Open Art School.

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www.cardiffmet.ac.uk/csad www.cardiffmet.ac.uk/studywithus

Cardiff School of Art & Design, Howard Gardens Campus, Cardiff CF24 0SP Tel: +44 (0)29 2041 6154 Fax: +44 (0)29 2041 6944 email: csad@cardiffmet.ac.uk

Cardiff School of Art & Design, Llandaff Campus , Western Avenue, Cardiff CF5 2YB Tel: +44 (0)29 2041 6070 Fax: +44 (0)29 2041 6640 email: csad@cardiffmet.ac.uk

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 Cardiff Diploma in Foundation Studies (Art & Design) (Bridgend)  Foundation Degree in Contemporary Furniture Design (Bridgend)  Foundation Degree in Ceramics (Barry)  Foundation Degree in Textiles (Barry)  Foundation Degree in Graphic Communication (Barry)  HND Architectural Design & Technology (CSAD)  HND Design for Interactive Media (Bridgend)

 Postgraduate Certificate in Professional & Research Skills: Art & Design

 MPhil  PhD  Professional Doctorate: Art Professional Doctorate: Design Professional Doctorate: Ecological Building Practices

 BSc (hons) Architectural Design & Technology  BA (hons) Artist Designer: Maker  BA (hons) Fine Art  BA (hons) Ceramics  BA (hons) Textiles  BA (hons) Graphic Communication  BA (hons) Illustration  BA (hons) Product Design  BSc (hons) Product Design  BA (hons) Photographic Practice (Bridgend College)

Cardiff School of Art & Design

 MA Ceramics  MSc Advanced Product Design

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     

MA (Art & Design) Fine Art MA (Art & Design) Communication MA (Art & Design) Textiles MA (Art & Design) Art & Science MA (Art & Design) Philosophy MA (Art & Design) Ecologies