Cardiff School of Art & Design Magazine by Cardiff Metropolitan University

magazine Spring 2013 Edition 3

Illustrating the unseen Pages 22 - 23

Image: Anna Bhushan Cardiff School of Art & Design

CSAD MAGAZINE

Contents CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Matters

CSAD Graduate

Sara Moorhouse

SADI Samsung Art and Design Institute

It wasn’t too long ago that the classroom of the future was one that contained a personal computer. Things have come a long way in those twenty years and the classroom of the future is nothing like the classroom of the past. In our present, we’re beginning to look at how the technology available to us can be used to better facilitate the interaction between people, wherever they are.

That’s one of the aims of the partnership between Cardiff School of Art & Design and the Samsung Art and Design Institute (SADI). “SADI is in Seoul, South Korea. Samsung Corporation owns it, ostensibly as a means to train designers but also to experiment with design. We have a very good relationship with them in that we jointly deliver an MDes, which is validated with us,” explains Steve Thompson Deputy Dean and Director of Teaching and Learning at CSAD. “Students can study part of the time here and then go back to South Korea, or our students can start here and then go to South Korea.” Thompson is sitting with Gareth Loudon, who is head of masters studies at the School. They look very relaxed as they tell me about the on-going partnership, “We’ve completed two years so far. We started with four students in the first year of delivery. There are twelve who are finishing now and then 16 who are coming this year. That’s a nice growth,” Loudon continues, “They focus on what’s called experience design, which can cover a range of disciplines: product design, graphic design and now, for the first time, fashion design.” The SADI MDes is one year in length and although they have found that UK students are far less likely to want to leave Cardiff to study abroad, there have been a number of students who have spent time in the other hemisphere. “In fact I had an e-mail from a student yesterday who I didn’t even know was in SADI,” Loudon tells me laughing. “He’s not on the Masters - he just finished the undergrad in Product Design.

He had just gone out there of his own accord. They were happy to accept him.”

Although she began her career as an illustrator, gaining an undergraduate degree from Wolverhampton, she decided that life as an illustrator was not for her,

I was intrigued to find out how a partnership with one of the world’s biggest companies came about - moreover, how it came about between Seoul and Cardiff.

“I could do the colour but I wasn’t too good at drawing, really. I became a teacher for six years. As a teacher, a lot of the projects I developed were about colour: the impressionists, pointillism, Clarice Cliff,” Moorhouse explains. “In 2003, I left teaching and decided to go back to ceramics so that I could do an MA.”

“We’re not quite certain of how it happened. I think the impetus came from Gareth Barham, a Principal Lecturer here, who was roaming around the Far East and China making contacts. He must have visited and it started from there,” Thompson explains. “Professor Richard Park, who heads up the team at SADI and is SADI’s Provost, visited us. We talked about how we might work together and went from the initial discussions to the validation of the MDes within three months.” Both Loudon and Thompson are also keen to emphasise that the School of Art & Design is already engaged very deeply with research into computer embedded design. Obviously, this is something that is very important to Samsung which has a revenue of $148 billion based on its work in the electronics industry. “People almost take Samsung for granted because it’s running so well,” Thompson remarks. “They’ve been in the press recently and it’s not particularly positive, but the mobile phone sector is only a tiny part of what they do! To be involved with a company of this calibre is a reflection on the quality of staff and research that we have here at CSAD.” For Loudon, the important thing is how the degree works out in practice. “The degree is a Cardiff Metropolitan University Master of Design. SADI is a much respected

educational institution that doesn’t have degree awarding powers, but has substantial research and industrial credentials. Each year, students on the MDes do three modules here in CSAD from October through to the end of January,” he explains. “Then from the February until the end of July, they do their remaining modules out in SADI. They’re practice based modules. It’s taught in Korean there and English here so we require the relevant English language qualifications.” On the note of language, both staff and students have found that it is not the barrier that one might think it ought to be. Students are expected to have a good level of English or to take a language course to enable them to complete the modules in Cardiff straightforwardly. “We found the relationship with them very easy and honest,” Thompson adds. “It helps that most of the people who we are dealing with at SADI

have done their design degrees in either Australia or America. The language isn’t a barrier at all.” With the School of Art & Design moving to the new Llandaff campus in 2014, the School is already thinking of the future and how SADI fits into that. “We’re keen to build the visibility of SADI in our new building. We’re going to try to have a constant link between the two studios. The time difference is such, however, that it’s absolutely pole-to-pole: during working hours, they would be looking at a dark studio and so would we,” Thompson explains. “We’re now looking at whether we can inter-develop SADI/Samsung facilities in the new CSAD building. This may mean an enhancement of the proposed Fab Lab, which is a fabrication workshop with links to other labs across the globe.”

Asked about how important the use of technology in the seminar room or class room is, Thompson and Loudon both agree that in the next couple of years the School will be testing a lot of ways to enable better interaction between students. “We’re exploring with SADI ways that we can open up the pool of teaching in both locations without building up a huge carbon footprint through students and staff flying back and forth,” Thompson says excitedly. “The feeling from both sides is that we’re not quite there yet to enable it. We’ll be working with them to bring the presence of one to the other more directly. In an ideal world, I’d like to have some kind of mirrored space, but I think we’re a little bit off it at the moment. That being said, we’re dealing with a company who is at the cutting edge of that stuff.”

Sara Moorhouse is a self-employed ceramicist with a studio in Riverside and an unusual relationship with colour. Her work is currently taking the form of bowls which she throws on the pottery wheel and then paints in bands of bright colours.

It was shortly after Moorhouse became aware of the idea of painting her bands onto bowls that she was throwing, her mother fell ill. This meant that Sara spent a lot of time driving back and forth between Cardiff and Nottinghamshire. “It was spring time and the landscape in Nottinghamshire is quite rolling and gentle. That’s something I always liked because you can

CSAD’s dean flew out to Seoul in November to take the discussions further.

pages 2 - 3 1 Cardiff School of Art & Design

Cardiff School of Art & Design 2

CSAD MAGAZINE

S effan Cumm ns see for miles but you also get a sense of the movement,” she continues to explain of the origin of her work. “The development in the crops was also very noticeable. The oil seed rape and the vivid yellow fields stick in my mind. Watching it completely change its appearance over the weeks with the bright yellow across the area making everything seem vast in scale. These things together seemed like a perfect combination of events: I could change the bowl by the application of different colours.” Moorhouse is keen to point out that usually when colour and ceramics are mentioned or researched together, it is to do with the chemicals needed to achieve a certain shade of red or yellow. However, it was her unique take on colour and ceramics that led her to undertake a PhD in the subject. “Whenever I walk through a landscape or a townscape or wherever, I’m constantly picking up on colour. Now I know that that’s what my life’s work is going to be about, I understand that habit and before I noticed it fully, it must have been subconscious. I pick up on things like a cloud having a little tinge of purple in it. I see colour all the time and it excites me. I want to do something with it: remember the combination of colours, put it into a sketchbook and try to use it. It never fails to excite me and it never stops, changing,” she tells me when I ask what it is specifically that interests her about the topic. “By that I mean that one colour can look different inside and outside. I’m sitting looking at a bench in the garden which I painted blue and there’s the same colour blue on the windowsill inside but it looks completely different. Also, if I were to put that blue next to a red, for example, the blue would look completely different. It’s all to do with the physiology of the eye and I didn’t know

that before my PhD but in the process I began to learn why colour is such an enigma.” In the process of her work, Moorhouse is keen to act on her instinctive use of colour and question the traditional rules of colour theory. “One of the fascinating things I remember being told as a child is that ‘blue and green should never be seen.’ When you think about it, that’s rubbish! A lot of the landscape is blue and green - the sky next to the fields, for example,” she says. “I feel so excited by it because there are endless colour combinations that look great together. There is no end to what I’m doing. The combinations are limitless and that’s fascinating in itself. My life’s work will never really end.”

“The two are slightly different endeavours,” she says. “The large throwing course was because I wanted to make large one off pieces, reflecting the scale of the landscapes that I am interested in. The mould making course is to help me make lots of smaller bowls which could help the business side of what I do and help me get more out to galleries. I also want to develop my colours in relation to seascapes. The coastlines from around South Wales are beautiful.” One thing is for certain, with her life’s work being firmly based and rooted in a wonderfully infectious fascination with colour and the world around her, Sara Moorhouse is unlikely to run out of things to explore and create.

Asked what her future plans are, Moorhouse has a lot in store. She was recently the recipient of an Arts Council Wales grant that she used to go on two courses: large throwing and mould making.

pages 4 - 5 3 Cardiff School of Art & Design

Cardiff School of Art & Design 4

pages 6 7

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Academic

CSAD Current Student

Wendy Keay-Bright

Clara Watkins

Jona han C a kson

Wendy Keay-Bright on helping children with autism

Wendy Keay-Bright is exactly the kind of person who will be remembered in decades’ time. It may seem like a grand claim but she’s akin to a 21st Century Louis Braille and should be praised for her team’s work in helping autistic people to communicate better. Dr Keay-Bright is a reader in inclusive design at the Cardiff School of Art & Design. Working mainly in the area of graphic communication she works with a variety of media. Her thirty year career has taken many forms including work in digital storytelling, film making and, probably most importantly, animation.

“I started my career in animation in Cardiff working on the Superted series. That was a breeding ground for all sorts of creative activity in South Wales. I started in 1981/1982 and spent three years there, becoming interested in film production. I then started working freelance as a producer and during that period of time I revisited my earlier experience of animation: not drawing teddy bears but making things out of bits of paper and anything to avoid doing a lot of work really!” she explains. “I was very excited by technology and the editing process - the idea of making things out of nothing with simple ideas that could be amplified using technology. I began working with children directly at that point with S4C. They had a project called The Storyboard Competition which invited schools to participate in a project whereby their ideas for a story would be made into an animated film by animators.” The Storyboard Competition was Keay-Bright’s first foray into the world of working directly with children to help them to express themselves visually. The project ran for three years and at one point the competition was in partnership with classic children’s television show Blue Peter. But it wasn’t until she began working on a television show for HTV that she began to really realise how empowering visual communication could be for children with disabilities. “We started filming these little flipbooks the children were making as animations. We were quite experimental in our way of getting from a story to a film that could be shown on a TV programme. That's where I cut my teeth on the idea of making a complex process very simple,” she explains. “I began working with children with special needs, including the hearing impaired and various other sorts of disabilities.

That was empowering for them because they could describe their idea using means other than speech.” After years of industry experience and now a mother, Keay-Bright decided to take an academic role and began teaching at CSAD. She says that at this point, the digital revolution was just getting into swing and forced her to embrace the change, “While I was teaching, the digital revolution kicked in and I realised I was teaching students who had a different concept of what film was technically. I had to get to grips with new technology very quickly, so that I could be one step ahead of my students,” she says. “During that period, I became really interested in technology and computer programming. So I started developing interactive scenarios and began to introduce these things to students. I started designing activities for my students where they could use a bit of code to make a circle behave in a particular way. The idea was that anything you could do with coding in this way would be pretty much guaranteed success. That took the terror away and shaped what I do now.” That’s when Reactickles began. Reactickles is a suite of interactive programs that encourage communication in autistic children and give them a positive affirmation when they use the ‘games.’ “Reactickles is a cause and effect digital activity that is responsive to user input. There's a difference between that and perhaps a computing game or a computing task. With those things, there's a motivation towards completing the task,” she explains. “But with Reactickles, it's very much responsive to the physical being or

being human. Before you have the cognitive experience of thinking, 'What should I be doing here?’ we are sensory, feeling people. That's the idea behind Reactickles - it reacts to whatever sensory input we have.” The idea is simple and stripped back. There is a shape on a screen and the user interacts with the shape by simply trying things out. There are a number of different modes including Expand, Find, Orbit and Trail which when ‘played with’ cause the shape on the screen to do a number of visually stimulating responses but there are no instructions which might confuse or annoy an autistic child. That’s a very intentional way of saying to the child, ‘You can’t lose, because there’s no end goal.’ “I started designing these little games at home so that I could learn the coding myself and teach it to my students the next day. I was also making them for my kids. I realised how empowering it was for them to grasp something and then do something with it that gave a response. So instead of thinking of a computer as 'what task I can do', we started thinking of it as graspable and giving people decisions of what to do with

it,” Keay-Bright explains. “As soon as you touch the circle and it responds, you get a positive feeling and you act on it again. That's a feedback loop of you acting on something that mirrors what you are doing - it's a positive affirmation that you exist and that's before you even decide what you're going to do.” She shows me a video on her iPad which documents the history of the project from the very first inception which used a mouse and a computer screen, through to the stage of testing using interactive white boards, incorporating the use of sound and also right up to the present day of using a multi-touch interface on an iPad. As well as developing technologically, her project has now adapted to the demands of developing Reactickles as a product which is available worldwide as well as her second project Somantics - a similar product to Reactickles but relying on the use of sound and motion sensors more heavily than touch. To accommodate the workload, Keay-Bright works with a core team who she is full of praise for: Joel Gethin Lewis, Pete Hellicar, Marek Bereza who have an incredibly impressive CV between

pages 8 - 9 7 Cardiff School of Art & Design

For Clara Watkins, a product designer studying for a PhD at Cardiff School of Art & Design, that's not really a consideration that she takes. "I studied product design and did the BSc here at CSAD. I worked really hard and in my third year I took on a project which involved a research centre in Malawi," she says with telling patience, despite my confusing the time of our interview and turning up late. "I was redesigning packaging for Malaria treatment. This led me into the area of cultural relevance in design and how things have to be altered to suit different environments. I found it really interesting and my lecturer suggested I should follow through and take that to a higher level of education. I did that and got involved with the charity Mothers of Africa." Watkins has just returned from Zambia where she was working with Mothers of Africa to assess the problems that design might solve in daily life in the country. "It was my first trip, so it was a bit of a scopeout. I was working with a team from Mothers of Africa who are doing a massive project at the moment," she explains of her trip. "They had a team of six who went out. Two of those six are engineers from Cardiff University and they were setting up the electricity for a local school where they don't have any. While they were doing that, I spent a long time with clinical anaesthetists teaching in a school there. I also had a lot of meetings with different medical personnel and had a lot of tours of hospitals. The idea was to see their needs and identify projects that we could do."

The most remarkable thing? Some of these children used to struggle to communicate at all. Now they’re having a whale of a time. Maybe the claim about Keay-Bright being a 21st Century Braille doesn’t sound so outlandish after all.

Mothers of Africa is a charity started in 2005 by Professor Judith Hall, Head of Anaesthetics & Cardiff School of Art & Design 8

CSAD MAGAZINE

Intensive Care at Cardiff University which aims to make motherhood in African countries safer, through addressing some of the risks associated with childbirth.

place they have never been that they want to devote several years of their life, at least, to improving the design of its systems and products?

“They are working to improve the standards of care for the mothers, especially by working with the midwives," Watkins elaborates. "There is a lot of work going on in Zambia at the moment on improving the standard of education for mothers which through trickle down will allow for a better standard of education for the children. They're looking at how to promote health and the understanding of contraceptives."

"Actually, my last trip was my first to Africa. My sister lives in Africa and I felt that I was interested in coming at design from an environment different to our own," she explains. "So it's not specifically Zambia, but more about going outside of a western culture into a very different one. I could have gone to Asia, but that didn't really interest me. I wanted to go somewhere with bigger needs."

That's where Clara comes into the picture. Already well involved with culturally relevant design from her undergraduate work on Malaria packaging, she is now planning on continuing her work in this area through her PhD. "I'm in the early stages," she tells. "But I will focus on how the design process can be used and evolved to cover different cultures and associated political issues, as well as different environments."

Her first trip was an eye opener for her. She was amazed by how much she takes for granted in her day to day life.

What is interesting about Watkins' interest in Africa is that she doesn't have the personal links to any particular country that you usually find when speaking to humanitarians in Africa: she didn't grow up there, she hadn't been there before. In fact, her only personal link to Africa is that her sister lives on the continent. So what is it that makes a person interested enough in a

"It's amazing what we take for granted. After even a week, you come back and think, 'Wow, I forgot how nice my flat is,'" she says. "We don't really think about it in terms of how different it is for Western people. Over there, people don't always have electricity and water, many don't have the basics. You just can't get an understanding of that without being there."

kindness. "But it really is great and I'm very happy to have helped. The students were very keen and couldn't have been more grateful for spending their time to go out there."

It's as she submits a proposal for a PhD that she will remember the warm welcome that she received in Zambia this summer.

"Ideally, I'll be in culturally relevant design. I want to do something that matters and I think it's important to focus on that. I love design and I love how important it can be," she says. "Your mobile phone is not just a mobile phone. You've got a cultural relationship with that product.

"That sounds nice, doesn't it?" she laughs as she catches herself on a clichéed view of African

It is probably a little premature to ask where Watkins will be in five years time, but she isn't afraid to answer,

pages 10 - 11 9 Cardiff School of Art & Design

But at the same time, we forget that there are other countries and when you go to hospitals in Africa, they've often been donated the same stuff as we use, but it's not always relevant. That's a big issue that needs to be addressed. They need stuff that they can actually use and that is suitable for their surroundings." With someone as caring and talented as Clara Watkins designing the medical products that are used to help mothers in Africa, the risks are, even if slowly at first, sure to decrease.

Cardiff School of Art & Design 10

pages 12 13

CSAD MAGAZINE

Meet our Technician Demonstrator and Administration Team

Nigel Williams

Matt Leighfield

Who are you?

Who are you? A typical day at CSAD: Days are not typical at CSAD. At the start of the academic year I am mostly involved with first year BA Fine Art and Designer:Maker students, showing them the process of safe use and techniques of the machinery. The rest of the taught year is split up among all three years, contributing ideas and help with the students toward their coursework.

I am a Technician Demonstrator at CSAD. My specialist area is machine wood working and joinery. I studied at Cardiff Met and have over 27 years experience, 20 of which have been working in CSAD. I am primarily based in the woodworking studio and hold demonstrations and workshops for all wood working equipment, and other demos such as wood turning, wood construction, carving, adhesives, wood finishes and many other processes.

Design could be quite selfish. When your trade is in making things easier or more comfortable to use and you see problems so readily, you could quite easily decide to make life easier for yourself only and redesign products and systems that you use daily.

My favourite piece of architecture? It’s a Sussex barn built in the decades either side of the turn of the 18th Century. What gives me the greatest pleasure is the interior oak frame. It’s an outstanding example of what some would call vernacular architecture and I would say is a living tribute to our ancestors’ mastery of their environment. They may not have had a lot of books in them but they could do marvellous things with hand tools and green oak. A film that has had an impact on my life. This is easy, Forrest Gump, starring Tom Hanks. It’s a movie about a very simple person, and it made me realise that you don’t need to be ‘somebody’ to do something. No matter who you are, you can make a difference as long as you do it right. You don’t need to be ‘known’ to be a catalyst for positive change! Ever since I found out that I was going to be a dad, this movie and what I learned from it has been on my mind. This Robert Zemeckis masterpiece has become a major part of my whole being, and lets me look back through my life fondly, at special times and everlasting friendships. Five records for a desert island. Eric Clapton - Tears in heaven Lionel Richie - Oh No Jon Secada - Just another day Ed Sheeran - Lego House Pink Floyd - Great Gig in the Sky

What’s the best bit of advice I’ve ever been given? After losing a few very special friends within the last five or six years from illness, and to the war in Afghanistan, all in their forties or younger, you get to thinking, “Where am I in this queue of departing people?” So after chatting to a very close psychiatrist friend of mine, free of charge may I add, he came out with these pearls of wisdom. He said “Nigel, live everyday like it’s your last, because one day you’ll be right”. My all time heroine? Elsie May Edwards, my Nan. What can I say about this woman? I could write a book. She was amazing, intelligent, sprightly and so funny. I was forever laughing when she was around, she made me smile so much during my adolescent years, and later on in my life, I think this is why I became a stand up comic for about five years during the early nineties. She was bursting with Second World War anecdotes, which I would intently listen to, hardly wanting to take a breath for fear of missing some awe inspiring piece of information or fact that would double me over with laughter. She knew that this was a bad time for everybody, but refused to let it get the better of her. My all time villain? The wicked witch from The Wizard Of Oz. The poignant quote being, “I’m melting, I’m melting, what a world!” What’s the best thing about working for CSAD? Nurturing the students work from the very beginning is still such a refreshing challenge for me. The host of wild, wonderful and whacky ideas, and thought processes that are discussed and constructed are what makes CSAD such an exciting place to work.

What is your favourite piece of art/design/making/architecture? The opening credits to It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World by Saul Bass. Or the scene at the end of the Woody Allen film Love and Death where he dances with Death to the music of Prokofiev. Or Prince’s career between 1980 and 1987. Is there a book/film/album/artwork that has had an impact on your life in some way? Billy Liar, the book and the film. The pathos of Billy’s thwarted ambition had a powerful affect on me as a youth, feeling, as I did at the time, that the good life was out there somewhere for Billy (as for me), that meant London. Unlike Billy however, I didn’t miss the last train, and I spent 7 amazing and awful years there.

Carla Rapoport

Five records for a desert island? Joanna Newsom - Ys Elliott Smith - Either/Or Sufjan Stevens - Illinoise Joni Mitchell - Hejira Bjork - Vespertine What’s the best bit of advice you’ve ever been given? Don’t get tipsy till the cheese course. What’s the best thing about working for CSAD? The fresh insight from working with students constantly rejuvenates my working life, keeping it interesting and exciting in a way which no other job has come close.

pages 14 - 15 13 Cardiff School of Art & Design

I have been a technician at CSAD for about 10 years, starting as a part-time visiting tutor, then leaving to teach Graphic Design in Further Education, before returning in 2006 when I applied for a full-time technician position.

Cardiff School of Art & Design 14

CSAD MAGAZINE

Me on G nsbe g

CEO of Lumen Prize Last autumn saw the announcement in Cardiff of the winner of the international Lumen Prize Exhibition for digitallycreated fine art. Tommy Ingberg of Sweden collected first prize for his piece Torn which depicts a man ‘torn’ between the sky and the ground by balloons and a boulder.

I’m based in BA Graphics but work with staff and students across the School. I am also responsible for the CSAD website, and update the School’s Facebook and Twitter feeds along with other social media. My main area of interest is web technologies, but I’m also developing an interest in motion graphics. What’s a typical day at CSAD like for you? The morning usually starts by checking my emails. If I’m running a workshop, I will prepare the computer room. There are usually amendments and additions to be made to the CSAD website, or news items to be posted on Facebook and Twitter. Throughout the day students will book out and return equipment. If I have any spare time I try and develop my skills at the moment I’m learning After Effects and HTML5. Often, current and ex-students and staff will send me links to interesting course related things on the web, and I’ll add them to the BA Graphics blog, and tweet them.

CSAD Matters

The prize, now in its second year, was started by business and financial journalist Carla Rapoport in an effort to draw the world’s attention to the amazing art being created by all the new technology that has rained down on artists worldwide, from the ubiquitous smartphone to tablets to the latest computer software. The prize, now in its second year, was started by business and financial journalist Carla Rapoport in an effort to draw the world’s attention to the amazing art being created by all the new technology that has rained down on artists worldwide, from the ubiquitous smartphone to tablets to the latest computer software.“I was really taken with all the changes happening to so many industries because of the IT revolution and the impact techhology was having on art being a huge fan of David Hockney’s work. I’ve always had an interest in art as a member of various museums, attending private views and always wanting to spend as much time as possible in front of great art. It’s such a pleasure to be in the presence of genius,” says Rapoport. “I thought it might make sense to set up a competition to provide a bar to which artists who use this genre can reach. I see the Lumen Prize Exhibition as a means of breaking the log jam of acceptability of this genre by the established art world.” Rapoport, the US-born CEO and Founder of the Lumen Prize Exhibition, has long been a fan of art. For her, fine art is unlike any other cultural discipline because of the proximity that it allows the viewer. “It’s such a pleasure to be in the presence of genius. While music is fabulous and the theatre is fantastic, you can’t actually stand as close to genius as you can to visual art. You can’t get

that close to an actor or an orchestra,” she explains. “Attending a visual art exhibition is perhaps the most exciting cultural thing that you can do. I realised that technology was a great enabler for artists but I also recognised that digitally-created fine art had been shoved off into a corner of the art world. I think this was the simple reason that no-one knew how to sell it.” Rapoport admits that the response to the Prize has been overwhelming. Between its launch in May 2012 and now, 1000 people have registered on the Prize’s website. When the contest closed its call for entries last summer, Lumen had received over 500 submissions of work from over 30 countries for its 2012 competition. “The Prize was set up to recognise the very best in art created digitally and then take that art around the world on a global tour. Digital art has the unique ability to be shared and enjoyed via the web or on web-enabled devices, so it can be seen in places where traditional art is already, but also where it can’t be seen,” she says of the art prize which is unlike any other. “From the very start, I wanted the Lumen Prize to engage with a charity, so I took it to Peace Direct which enables and support local peace builders in conflict zones. The charity loved the idea and helped to give us a home so that we could get the project off the ground by providing us with strategy and logistical support. Then, thanks support from the City of Cardiff, we now have a physical home for the Prize.” In a world that has been rendered increasingly borderless through technology and networking, the story of how the Lumen ended up in the capital of Wales instead of a major world city is a funny one.

It was on a train journey between her home in the Brecon Beacons and London, where Rapoport was working at the time, that she, by chance, sat next to Professor Terry Stevens, an expert in City and Regional Development as well as the Digital Economy. “I told him what I was doing and he said he loved the idea and that he would be happy to introduce me to Ken Poole who is in charge of the City Council’s resurgence and regeneration activities,” she recalls. “Within ten weeks we had a deal with the City of Cardiff to partner with us for 3 years. Terry also introduced me to Gaynor Kavanagh, Dean at Cardiff School of Art & Design. I met Gaynor for a coffee and extraordinarily kindly, she accompanied me on my first meeting with Ken Poole about the Prize. That was an amazing leap of faith for her - to come along with someone she had just met.” The judging process of the Lumen Prize is complex but through its complexity, thoroughness is ensured. “We judge the works in two ways. First, an International Selection Committee of academics and art experts review 100 works each. We structure this so each work submitted to the Lumen Prize is seen by at least 5 committee members. The top 50 works - which make up the Lumen Prize Exhibition - are chosen through this review are then submitted to our Jury Panel of 8 top artists, gallery owners and art critics. These panel members review all 50 of the works and select the 20 works on our shortlist and our three top prize winners,” Rapoport explains. “Also, all the submitted works appeared in a Lumen Online Gallery where there was an open vote for the People’s Choice Winner.

Next year, we will invite works into the Lumen Online Gallery for the People’s Choice competition.” The judging panel of eight industry experts includes nationally-known artist Gordon Young; Ivor Davies, President of the Royal Cambrian Academy and Anne Farrer, programme director at Sotheby’s Institute. In keeping with the digital aspect of the Prize, none of the judges met in person to discuss the shortlist. It was all done online. This is just one of the ideas that makes it so special. “Digital art is uniquely enabling. It can be created anywhere in the world without the need for canvas, oils, studio or any of those other things. It can be done with an iPad or a computer or any digital device. The luminosity of our tablets creates a great effect.” Like any advance in a traditional industry, digital art has its critics. Carla Rapoport’s response to those who dispute the value of digital art is to ask whether they believe a print made by a press to be art or why photographers like Andreas Gursky can sell their photographs for millions.

pages 16 - 17 15 Cardiff School of Art & Design

“Where the critics of digital art misunderstand is that they associate it with commercial art because dog food commercials are created digitally,” she rebukes. “The person who creates that imagery is not an artist because they are working commercially. But when that person goes home at night, what they create on their iPad could well be fine art and shown in museums. Because an artist does dog food commercials in the day, does that mean they can’t be an artist?” Very thankful to both the City of Cardiff and Cardiff School of Art & Design, Carla Rapoport is at the head of a very exciting art prize which has the potential to showcase the work of lesser-known artists from around the world and give them a platform for praise. The Lumen Prize Exhibition - a global tour to five cities - was launched at Gallery 27, Cork Street, London on January 22 and ran to Janurary 26 before moving to Riga, Latvia, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and returns to Cardiff in March 2013. The 50 artists chosen for the Lumen Prize Exhibition come from 13 countries and 43 cities around the world, including Pakistan, Israel, Iran, Taiwan, and China. Cardiff School of Art & Design 16

pages 18 19

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Graduate

Fleen Doran

Anna Bhushan

BA Ceramics 2007-10

Having graduated from BA Ceramics at Cardiff School of Art & Design in 2010, Fleen has come a long way since she first started becoming interested in ceramics as a teenager who had unknowingly got a job one of Britain's top craft galleries.

Ceramicists and potters are always interesting to speak to. Their love of clay and kiln is so infectious and their enjoyment of their craft is so evident. Fleen Doran is no exception.

"I worked at a little gallery called the Candover Gallery. I started working there without really knowing that it was a prestigious gallery. It was a great introduction to some brilliant pots and potters," she explains. "After college, I first went to Staffordshire University to do a course in 3D Design Crafts, but having decided that it was clay that I wanted to work with full time I went to Cardiff because it's the place to be for Ceramics! That's when I started making pots and it's functional pots that really interest me: objects you can use everyday in the kitchen and home." In 2010, when she graduated from the course at CSAD, Fleen received funding from the organisation Adopt-A-Potter to go and be an apprentice at Bridge Pottery under the very well respected potter Micki Schloessingk. "I had already planned to work with Micki for the summer. But we decided to apply for funding for a year long apprenticeship. The idea of Adopt-APotter is that the funding goes to the student so that they can focus on their apprenticeship full time,” Fleen explains. Having already completed a work experience at Bridge Pottery the year before she graduated, Fleen was keen to return to learn more from Schloessingk about salt-glazing and wood-firing, the two methods in which she is expert as well as learning how to run a pottery practice as a business.

"That's a more unusual way of firing pots. As well as the kiln being heated by wood, the whole pottery is also heated by wood," Fleen says. "We do lots of chopping! The point of firing with wood is that the firing is as much a part of the creative process as the making. The pieces are made individual through the process."

“I come from a family of artists. Both my parents were artists as well as my grandfather. I grew up drawing and painting and it was always assumed that I would go to art school,” Bhushan explains. “I rebelled and decided to study Comparative Religion at Manchester but it didn't last very long. I missed paint and being creative in that way. So I changed track and started an art foundation in Oxford.”

You would be forgiven for not understanding the nuances of using wood as opposed to gas or electric. Unlike an electric kiln - which can be programmed and left to complete the process, firing with wood requires constant stoking and monitoring. The kiln is responsive to the pattern of stoking, it is affected even by weather conditions and the type and size of wood used on each stoke. “It is very engaging way of firing my pots,” Fleen explains. “We fire for around 30 hours. Towards the top temperature, we put salt in the kiln that forms a vapour which is drawn through the kiln and glazes the pieces. With a standard kiln, you would usually fire the pieces twice and glaze them in between the firing. With this process, the pots are only fired once and instead of using glazes, I use slips (clays with oxides) to get different colours, so it's really a combination of the salt, the wood ash and the slip that makes the glaze unique." Micki Schloessingk is a renown potter because of her skill in salt glazing and wood firing methods. Her work has been exhibited all around the world. Fleen feels very privileged to have been offered the opportunity to learn from her teacher.

Following her time in Oxford, she completed an illustration degree in Brighton. It was when she left University at the end of that course that she got her first taste of travelling and working as a freelancer.

"It was the wood firing and salt glazing that I wanted to learn about and she's an expert in that as well as being a great mentor, tutor and supporter," she continues. "We're a good team now! I'm able to take some of the responsibilities of running the pottery. I run my own evening throwing course, have time for my own potting and make a range of pots for the pottery.” While there is plenty of chance to learn the secrets of salt glazing, Fleen has been learning a lot about the other aspects of running a pottery too.

pages 20 - 21 19 Cardiff School of Art & Design

"As well as learning lots of practical skills in the pottery, I have also gained useful business skills as well. Each day of the week, we have a different focus," she says. "Monday, I work on my pots. Tuesday is maintenance day; preparing clay, the kiln and wood. Wednesday is office day website management, photography, publicity organising courses etc. Thursday is making pots for the pottery and Fridayis working on my pots again!" Having recently returned from travelling around India learning about the firing techniques that they use in making pots there, Fleen is now back at work on her own pots.

Anna Bhushan is a lecturer in illustration at Cardiff School of Art & Design but she's also a meditation teacher, freelance illustrator for some of the world's best publishers and a researcher in Indian philosophy.

After two years of moving about the world and working wherever she could, Bhushan settled down in London for a while to complete an MA in Communication Art and Design at the Royal College of Art (RCA). “Just as I was leaving the RCA, I got in touch with Heart Illustration Agency which was the agency I'd always fantasised about being represented by. I was really fortunate that they took me on and when I left I got straight into freelancing. I was with them for four years,” she recalls. “The week I graduated, I moved to New York and got married. That was a dramatic time in my life. I was doing lots of editorial work and freelance work. I also started to show my work in galleries in New York.”

Fleen will carry on working on those functional items. Her interest in pots that you can use everyday has already taken her far. With an enthusiasm for pottery and glazing as contagious as hers, it would be difficult to see her not going far in the world of pottery. Cardiff School of Art & Design 20

pages 22 23 21 Cardiff School of Art & Design

Resea ch Sem na Se es Having moved back to London, as well as working for publications like the New York Times and The New Yorker Bhushan also added visiting lecturer to her CV. But, after balancing all of those different parts of her portfolio for a while, she decided it was time for a change. “I decided that I'd been a visiting lecturer for quite a while: teaching at Westminster, St. Martins, Winchester, bits at Brighton and Camberwell and various other instituti and Indian philosophy/yoga) intersected on that project. That was quite fantastic for me. Now my PhD research is continuing the intersection of those two areas of interest.” “Anatomical diagrams are based in information illustration now, but if you look at Persian Medieval diagrams (for example), when dissection wasn't allowed, there's a big difference. The role of imagination comes into the picture. One of the challenges that scientists face is to explain concepts that are beyond the everyday understanding. That's where my interest in working as an illustrator with scientists on some of those projects came about,” she explains. “My current research has taken a slightly different direction and I'm still looking at the idea of how images and text can be used to communicate notions that are paradoxically, beyond human imagination, which can be ambiguous, intangible and elusive. Now, I'm looking at this in terms of philosophy, rather than in terms of science specifically.” The PhD, Bhushan hopes, will be an ambitious examination of the use of image and text in authorial illustration for communicating elusive and ambiguous subject matter. This will be based upon a text and image work re-examining the teachings of Buddha and Patañjali.

“Teaching is important. My project is all about communicating complex and intangible ideas through text and image,” she explains. “When you teach you have to learn how to communicate things which are difficult to put into words. Teaching feeds back into the way I think about communication, both verbal and visual.” Bhushan seems very pleased to be a part of the School and delighted to have found a middle road between teaching, research and independent practice. Cardiff School of Art & Design 22

pages 24 25

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Current Student

Florence Walkey

Florence Walkey is a printmaker. She’s currently enrolled part-time on the Master of Fine Art (MFA).

Saman ha A and

“I’ve always been interested in art. My mum is an art teacher. In 2006, I was diagnosed with scoliosis and was ill from school for 2.5 years,” she tells me. “After operations, I did my GCSEs from home and hospital and my mum taught me art.”

Walkey’s dedication to producing monoprints is astounding. Finding it rather hard to wrap my head around such a large number of prints and how that would look on a gallery wall or even in a book, I asked her for her motivation behind choosing that number.

After getting her A-levels and finishing her secondary education, Walkey made the decision to study “an arty or computer course” in Cardiff. She initially enrolled for an Interactive and Motion Design degree course at the University of Glamorgan’s ATRiuM, but decided after her first year that she wanted to do something more firmly rooted in artistic practice.

“My relationship with Scoliosis found a physical release through art. I did 1000 because I had only just joined printmaking and I wanted to perfect a technique. Secondly, all my peers had two years experience more than I so I wanted to do something quite impressive,” she explains. “I got really into the mass numbers and the 10,000 came from that. I want the end product to have aesthetic gratification for people but it’s more to do with mass production really.”

“I came to Cardiff School of Art & Design. So I’ve only been doing printmaking for two years. I managed to get a first class honours! I thought, ‘I can’t stop now because I really love what I’m doing.’ I was persuaded to do the MA here so I took the chance.” After the offer of a place on the MA, Florence found some funding and began her work which draws on her experiences with Scoliosis and the various problems that it causes. “Last year, my degree piece was called A Thousand Pieces of Flesh and Bone which I entered into the Bankside Gallery competition and I won a prize for it, the Frank Brangwyn Memorial Prize and I got £1000,” she explains. “From that piece, in the MA I thought that I would expand and I did 10,000 monoprints, made it into a book and I’m working on a projection piece.”

Walkey’s enthusiasm for teaching people how to do things is something that she thinks she would like to explore further. “I’d really like to go into teaching. It’s strange to think that but even when I was in my degree, I was having tutorials with people and seeing the roles that the MA students had. I learnt off them by mimicking them,” she explains. “I really enjoyed that and I thought that it was something that I’d really love to do. That’s a way of me carrying on my practice as well.” For now, Walkey seems very content to continue learning more about printmaking and documenting that learning process for the world to see via the internet.

Florence cites the work of Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol as influences in her printmaking practice. This makes a lot of sense and really helps you to appreciate what it is that motivates in her work. She tells me that she will soon begin experimenting with other kinds of printmaking. “I plan on making a beginners guide to printmaking this year with a book and filmed lessons which I’m going to put online. That way people can go online and learn in a really simple way,” she tells me. “There are a great deal of printmaking books out, there but the ones that I’ve come across are very text heavy. As someone who is dyslexic, I find that I learn through pictures and things being shown to me. If I were making short films and documenting things step by step, it would make it easier for people like me.”

pages 26 - 27 25 Cardiff School of Art & Design

Cardiff School of Art & Design

Cardiff School of Art & Design 26

pages 28 29

pages 30 31

CSAD has in the order of 1200 registered students studying for degrees at undergraduate, masters and research degree levels. Their ambition to live a life enriched by their skills, knowledge and imagination, are not just unquestionable, they are entirely realisable. For some, this may involve enabling others to engage with art and design, through careers in teaching, curatorship, media, or arts management. For others, this may mean working as artists and designers in their own right, building a freelance career with incredible nerve and steely commitment. Some of our graduates, especially our designers, gain employment in established design businesses, often in small or medium sized companies.

Others take unexpected trajectories, working with the materials and ideas to build practices that can be anything from designing treehouses, to working with charities (often overseas) where their skills are especially relevant. A number will work outside of the creative industries entirely, as a means of earning a living whilst their own special work develops to the point where it will find its niche. Notwithstanding where our graduates end up, few will never stop engaging their passion for art, design or making, in whatever form that takes. It is this that defines them and makes them whole. CSAD has structured its undergraduate programmes to give our students a fighting chance of fulfilling their ambitions. In their second year of study, students can elect to take a module on starting-up a business, undertake a work placement or voluntary work. In their third year, instead of writing a dissertation, students can choose to write a start-up business plan, ready for enactment once they have graduated. These opportunities sit alongside not only personal and professional planning, which is an integral component of their studies throughout their three years, but also many opportunities to hear from successful graduates and leading practitioners. CSAD has ambitious plans to further enable the career aspirations of our graduates. We are planning an annual employability conference for our final year students. Our graduates will be able to elect to go on the CSAD Graduate Boot Camp in the summer following graduation, further preparing them for self-employment as practitioners. We hope to go even further through the inauguration of CSAD Graduate

Launch Pad, which will provide opportunities for eight of our graduates to incubate their creative projects within the School, in a special facility. Other initiatives include the development of commercial outlets within the city for the sale of work and for promoting commissioning, through which are students will learn about such realities as price tolerance and effective marketing. For some time now, significant figures in the sector, in particular Sir James Dyson and Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, have been stating the case for how much the UK and World economies need creative talent and the skills which the CSAD graduates hold in abundance. We couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t agree more. One of the most stunning recommendations for the quality of creative practice in the UK came in the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic games in the summer of 2012. Simply put, the people behind those events were artists, makers and designers, trained in UKâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s art and performance schools. In the UK, we have the largest creative sector in the EU and, relative to GDP, perhaps one of the largest in the world. We got to that position through having an infrastructure to foster this talent. But more than anything, we got to that position because we have people with the guts to say that they want to be artists, designers and makers, who refuse to settle for anything less. Professor Gaynor Kavanagh DPhil MPhil FMA Dean, Cardiff School of Art & Design

Cardiff School of Art & Design 1

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Matters

SADI Samsung Art and Design Institute

2 Cardiff School of Art & Design

He had just gone out there of his own accord. They were happy to accept him.” I was intrigued to find out how a partnership with one of the world’s biggest companies came about - moreover, how it came about between Seoul and Cardiff. “We’re not quite certain of how it happened. I think the impetus came from Gareth Barham, a Principal Lecturer here, who was roaming around the Far East and China making contacts. He must have visited and it started from there,” Thompson explains. “Professor Richard Park, who heads up the team at SADI and is SADI’s Provost, visited us. We talked about how we might work together and went from the initial discussions to the validation of the MDes within three months.” Both Loudon and Thompson are also keen to emphasise that the School of Art & Design is already engaged very deeply with research into computer embedded design. Obviously, this is something that is very important to Samsung which has a revenue of $148 billion based on its work in the electronics industry. “People almost take Samsung for granted because it’s running so well,” Thompson remarks. “They’ve been in the press recently and it’s not particularly positive, but the mobile phone sector is only a tiny part of what they do! To be involved with a company of this calibre is a reflection on the quality of staff and research that we have here at CSAD.” For Loudon, the important thing is how the degree works out in practice. “The degree is a Cardiff Metropolitan University Master of Design. SADI is a much respected

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Graduate

Sara Moorhouse Although she began her career as an illustrator, gaining an undergraduate degree from Wolverhampton, she decided that life as an illustrator was not for her, “I could do the colour but I wasn’t too good at drawing, really. I became a teacher for six years. As a teacher, a lot of the projects I developed were about colour: the impressionists, pointillism, Clarice Cliff,” Moorhouse explains. “In 2003, I left teaching and decided to go back to ceramics so that I could do an MA.”

In first six months of her Masters degree at the School of Art & Design, Moorhouse struggled from a problem that many people face at sometime or another in their life: she was looking for a great idea, when all along, the thing she was looking for stared her in the face. “I was throwing on the wheel and making lots of pots before cutting them up and reassembling them in order to make tall tower structures that looked like they were quite unbalanced and might fall over. That was my concept then,” she says. “My tutor cut to the chase and said they weren’t that great but asked what I had been interested in at degree level. When I told him about the colour, he suggested I go back to the wheel and use colour. I thought ‘Oh’ and had a kind of revelatory moment and then spent the next day painting bands onto a bowl.” It was shortly after Moorhouse became aware of the idea of painting her bands onto bowls that she was throwing, her mother fell ill. This meant that Sara spent a lot of time driving back and forth between Cardiff and Nottinghamshire. “It was spring time and the landscape in Nottinghamshire is quite rolling and gentle. That’s something I always liked because you can

4 Cardiff School of Art & Design

see for miles but you also get a sense of the movement,” she continues to explain of the origin of her work. “The development in the crops was also very noticeable. The oil seed rape and the vivid yellow fields stick in my mind. Watching it completely change its appearance over the weeks with the bright yellow across the area making everything seem vast in scale. These things together seemed like a perfect combination of events: I could change the bowl by the application of different colours.” Moorhouse is keen to point out that usually when colour and ceramics are mentioned or researched together, it is to do with the chemicals needed to achieve a certain shade of red or yellow. However, it was her unique take on colour and ceramics that led her to undertake a PhD in the subject. “Whenever I walk through a landscape or a townscape or wherever, I’m constantly picking up on colour. Now I know that that’s what my life’s work is going to be about, I understand that habit and before I noticed it fully, it must have been subconscious. I pick up on things like a cloud having a little tinge of purple in it. I see colour all the time and it excites me. I want to do something with it: remember the combination of colours, put it into a sketchbook and try to use it. It never fails to excite me and it never stops, changing,” she tells me when I ask what it is specifically that interests her about the topic. “By that I mean that one colour can look different inside and outside. I’m sitting looking at a bench in the garden which I painted blue and there’s the same colour blue on the windowsill inside but it looks completely different. Also, if I were to put that blue next to a red, for example, the blue would look completely different. It’s all to do with the physiology of the eye and I didn’t know

Asked what her future plans are, Moorhouse has a lot in store. She was recently the recipient of an Arts Council Wales grant that she used to go on two courses: large throwing and mould making. Cardiff School of Art & Design 5

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Current Student

Steffan Cummins Graphic Communication (2010-Present)

While watching the Olympics in London, Cummins became interested in the branding of both of the Games and London and decided to use some of his summer vacation to undertake an ambitious project to rebrand the City of London, publishing the results on his personal blog. Cummins based his work on an old competition brief from the Student Awards organised by Design and Art Direction (D&AD), an organisation representing creatives worldwide.

Despite only having just out completed his first year of a Graphic Communication BA programme at Cardiff School of Art and Design this summer, Steffan Cummins has been gaining a lot of attention for a self-initiated branding project that he published on his blog.

“My City of London project got quite a bit of attention online, including from a writer at FastCo.Design (Fast Company Magazine's design blog)," he says. Although nothing came of that exchange, Cummins was also contacted out of the blue by several other people including the director of a London-based branding studio who assumed Cummins was already a graduate working freelance. “He asked what I was up to at the moment,” Cummins laughs. “I got really excited and told him everything I was up to. His response was 'Drop me a line when you graduate.'" Last summer, as well as going to the Olympics and becoming internet famous, Steffan spent three months at See What You Mean, a branding agency in Cardiff run by Richard Webb, who has worked for an impressive roster of clients including BBC Worldwide and Chelsea FC. "Richard also came across my work online and asked whether I'd be interested in going in to speak to them. I went in and walked them through my work," Cummins recalls. "He seemed to be really interested in what I was doing and offered me a placement between June and late September."

6 Cardiff School of Art & Design

Cummins is keen to emphasise that he learnt so much at the agency in just a few months of working on projects. "At See What You Mean, they operate on the idea that the best way to communicate is less in a robotic way and more in a human way," he explains. "Learning what I did there has helped me develop those human skills such as conversation and dialogue and realising the potential of that rather, than just having facts thrown at you." Now the semester has started again he’s busy with his classes but also helping out at the agency from time to time. "I did a workshop with Richard at The School of Communication Arts 2.0 in London showing what they could develop by working in the See What You Mean way," he says. "He asked me to be his assistant. I not only helped out with the workshop but because I'd been there for three months, I could show the students how to think like that. It was quite nice." But that's not the only place where he's been invited to help teach other people about branding. Recently, the college from which he graduated just under two years ago asked him back to give a workshop to AS Level students. “The lecturer told me she hadn't seen the students that motivated in a while!” Cummins says. “It was empowering for me too.” Cummins is young to be attracting so much attention for his work and still has two years remaining on the Graphic Communication BA at the Llandaff Campus of Cardiff School of Art & Design under the enthusiastic leadership of Olwen Moseley.

"I want to develop skills that will work with lots of different types of people all around the world and make sure they can connect with their audience and help them get their ideas across," Steffan explains. "Essentially, I want to be a graphic communicator. I want to help people communicate rather than just 'knocking up branding' and Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll make an impact with the things I work on." As weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re closing our interview, Cummins has a lot to say in praise of the Cardiff School of Art & Design. "Without Olwen, I wouldn't have been able to do a number of the things that I have. When I first started, I was really shy and not confident," he says, completely sincere. "It took me a while to actually make some friends and I was in my own little bubble. I'm kind of like that. When I eventually did make friends, the whole university experience grew. I'm thankful for the School for helping me get skills and become a bit more confident, giving as much as I can and getting going. If I hadn't have come here, I'd probably not have done half the things I have done."

Cardiff School of Art & Design 7

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Academic

Wendy Keay-Bright Wendy Keay-Bright on helping children with autism

8 Cardiff School of Art & Design

them all. Additionally, Somantics and Reactickles are worked on by a much larger team of consultants and contributors. The video that Keay-Bright shows me demonstrates the glee of a boy who uses his head to manipulate the circle on the wall, a boy who enjoys bouncing on a space hopper while shrieking gleefully and causing a cascade of colour on one side of the classroom where Somantics is being projected. The most remarkable thing? Some of these children used to struggle to communicate at all. Now they’re having a whale of a time. Maybe the claim about Keay-Bright being a 21st Century Braille doesn’t sound so outlandish after all.

Cardiff School of Art & Design 9

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Current Student

Clara Watkins Design could be quite selfish. When your trade is in making things easier or more comfortable to use and you see problems so readily, you could quite easily decide to make life easier for yourself only and redesign products and systems that you use daily.

For Clara Watkins, a product designer studying for a PhD at Cardiff School of Art & Design, that's not really a consideration that she takes. “I studied product design and did the BSc here at CSAD. I worked really hard and in my third year I took on a project which involved a research centre in Malawi,” she says with telling patience, despite my confusing the time of our interview and turning up late. “I was redesigning packaging for Malaria treatment. This led me into the area of cultural relevance in design and how things have to be altered to suit different environments. I found it really interesting and my lecturer suggested I should follow through and take that to a higher level of education. I did that and got involved with the charity Mothers of Africa.” Watkins has just returned from Zambia where she was working with Mothers of Africa to assess the problems that design might solve in daily life in the country. “It was my first trip, so it was a bit of a scope-out. I was working with a team from Mothers of Africa who are doing a massive project at the moment,” she explains of her trip. “They had a team of six who went out. Two of those six are engineers from Cardiff University and they were setting up the electricity for a local school where they don't have any. While they were doing that, I spent a long time with clinical anaesthetists teaching in a school there. I also had a lot of meetings with different medical personnel and had a lot of tours of hospitals. The idea was to see their needs and identify projects that we could do.” Mothers of Africa is a charity started in 2005 by Professor Judith Hall, Head of Anaesthetics &

10 Cardiff School of Art & Design

Intensive Care at Cardiff University which aims to make motherhood in African countries safer, through addressing some of the risks associated with childbirth. “They are working to improve the standards of care for the mothers, especially by working with the midwives,” Watkins elaborates. “There is a lot of work going on in Zambia at the moment on improving the standard of education for mothers which through trickle down will allow for a better standard of education for the children. They're looking at how to promote health and the understanding of contraceptives.” That's where Clara comes into the picture. Already well involved with culturally relevant design from her undergraduate work on Malaria packaging, she is now planning on continuing her work in this area through her PhD. “I'm in the early stages,” she tells. “But I will focus on how the design process can be used and evolved to cover different cultures and associated political issues, as well as different environments.” What is interesting about Watkins' interest in Africa is that she doesn't have the personal links to any particular country that you usually find when speaking to humanitarians in Africa: she didn't grow up there, she hadn't been there before. In fact, her only personal link to Africa is that her sister lives on the continent. So what is it that makes a person interested enough in a

place they have never been that they want to devote several years of their life, at least, to improving the design of its systems and products? “Actually, my last trip was my first to Africa. My sister lives in Africa and I felt that I was interested in coming at design from an environment different to our own,” she explains. “So it's not specifically Zambia, but more about going outside of a western culture into a very different one. I could have gone to Asia, but that didn't really interest me. I wanted to go somewhere with bigger needs.” Her first trip was an eye opener for her. She was amazed by how much she takes for granted in her day to day life. “It's amazing what we take for granted. After even a week, you come back and think, ‘Wow, I forgot how nice my flat is,’” she says. “We don't really think about it in terms of how different it is for Western people. Over there, people don't always have electricity and water, many don't have the basics. You just can't get an understanding of that without being there.”

kindness. “But it really is great and I'm very happy to have helped. The students were very keen and couldn't have been more grateful for spending their time to go out there.”

It's as she submits a proposal for a PhD that she will remember the warm welcome that she received in Zambia this summer.

“Ideally, I'll be in culturally relevant design. I want to do something that matters and I think it's important to focus on that. I love design and I love how important it can be,” she says. “Your mobile phone is not just a mobile phone. You've got a cultural relationship with that product.

“That sounds nice, doesn't it?” she laughs as she catches herself on a clichéed view of African

It is probably a little premature to ask where Watkins will be in five years time, but she isn't afraid to answer,

But at the same time, we forget that there are other countries and when you go to hospitals in Africa, they've often been donated the same stuff as we use, but it's not always relevant. That's a big issue that needs to be addressed. They need stuff that they can actually use and that is suitable for their surroundings.” With someone as caring and talented as Clara Watkins designing the medical products that are used to help mothers in Africa, the risks are, even if slowly at first, sure to decrease.

Cardiff School of Art & Design 11

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Academic

Jonathan Clarkson “It's a series of accidents,” he says when I ask him how he got to be where he is today. “I was late coming to education. I did a year at university in Cardiff studying architecture and I was very bad at it; I failed the first year and thought that was it. I worked for a few years and then came back to do Art History and Film Studies for my BA in Kent and then a PhD in Essex, where I was looking at art theory and psychoanalysis.” This interest in psychoanalysis formed the basis for Clarkson's later work.

There is, for most people who have attended a university, a lecturer who has been formative in the way that they think about the world and the way that they conduct their professional lives afterwards. For me, that lecturer was an east German man who, ironically, looked like Karl Marx. For many Cardiff School of Art & Design graduates, I expect, it will be Jonathan Clarkson, senior lecturer in History and Theory of Fine Art. 12 Cardiff School of Art & Design

“I was interested in the role that art plays in the psychoanalytic theory of the mind. It seemed to be interesting and one that no theorist agreed on,” he explains. “All the analysts said that art was something to do with ‘fantasy’, but they all meant something by the word.” A very eloquent man, Clarkson says that his work is not as clear cut as it is for some of his contemporaries, who maybe, for example, Picasso scholars or experts in a particular artistic movement. “One of the things I'm interested in is the relationship between the viewer and the artwork. What demands does the artwork make on the viewer, or what does the viewer expect of the artwork? Moreover, when you look at Renaissance paintings, you often wonder whether one represented character can see another,” he says. “Even though they are both in the painting, one might be a mythical person and the other historical. Or they might be separated by the corner of the building and although you can see them, it's not clear if they can see each other or not.”

By way of example, Clarkson pulls up on his laptop a picture of a vase in the collections of the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff. “This is called the Jenkins Vase. It's a really interesting object that is part Roman and part 18th century. It has a narrative that runs around its middle. It's set before the Trojan war,” he explains while I listen, fascinated. “You've got the Greek figures Helen, Aphrodite, Eros and Paris and on the other side you have the three Muses. One of the things that interests me is that because of the nature of carving a narrative on a circular surface, some things are closer to each other than they could be on a flat surface. Helen and Paris can see one another on a flat surface, but as a curved surface, we're not shown how they meet but the moment just before. One more step and they'll come into view of each other and fall in love. This is a pregnant moment just before history becomes inevitable.” Clarkson is writing an article about the Jenkins Vase at the moment, he says. When it went through its restoration process in the 18th Century, the man who restored it created two separate illustrations of the story that is engraved on the middle of the vase. The first shows the story as a horizontal narrative where Helen and Paris have already met and fallen in love. The second engraving shows an alternative, circular view, in which the two lovers have not yet met. Clarkson’s interest is in the two different effects that this creates. His article discusses the idea that the different perspectives have a huge difference because of the lovers either meeting or not meeting.

Image courtesy of Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales

“This study came out of talking to students in the museum. As an art student, you come across works of art that come from a culture about which you might know next to nothing,” he tells me. “As a group, we decided that the best way to look at the vase was to ask the same questions of it that we would ask of a contemporary art project. Once we did that it revealed the two perspectives that I am writing my article about.” It is interesting that Clarkson's work has recently been influenced by a discussion which he has had with his students. However, he says this happens more often than just this once. “About half of my seminars are in the museum and the type of discussion you get when face to face with the work is quite different from when you have to rely on images,” he explains. “Art students are extremely good at responding to the physical work of art and finding entry points that may not be the ones that you expect coming from a standard art history background.”

Clarkson is perhaps best known for his work on Constable. In 2010, Phaidon Press published his book Constable much to the adoration of reviewers with The Sunday Times and Telegraph listing it in their art books of the year in 2010. “When I look at Constable I ask similar questions as I do of the Jenkins Vase: things about where and when a thing is seen and the demands it makes on a viewer,” he says showing me a picture of Wivenhoe Park painted by Constable. “When you go here, there isn't a single place where Constable could have seen everything he has painted here. He has moved around the park about 50 yards and blended the viewpoints. He wants something like the experience of a trip around the park. There's the daughter of the house in a little donkey cart and the idea is she's going to make a trip round the park.”

“That's the pleasure of doing it. If it didn't do that I wouldn't be interested,” he says as we close our interview. “For me it's the dynamics of the relationship between an artwork and an artist or a viewer that I like.”

Clarkson's love of the story behind the artefact is infectious and makes you think again about all the paintings you have simply brushed off as being shallow.

Cardiff School of Art & Design 13

CSAD MAGAZINE

Meet our Technician Demonstrator and Administration Team

Nigel Williams Who are you? A typical day at CSAD: Days are not typical at CSAD. At the start of the academic year I am mostly involved with first year BA Fine Art and Designer: Maker students, showing them the process of safe use and techniques of the machinery. The rest of the taught year is split up among all three years, contributing ideas and help with the students toward their coursework.

Meet our Technician Demonstrator and Administration Team

Matt Leighfield Who are you? I’m based in BA Graphics but work with staff and students across the School. I am also responsible for the CSAD website, and update the School’s Facebook and Twitter feeds along with other social media. My main area of interest is web technologies, but I’m also developing an interest in motion graphics. What’s a typical day at CSAD like for you? The morning usually starts by checking my emails. If I’m running a workshop, I will prepare the computer room. There are usually amendments and additions to be made to the CSAD website, or news items to be posted on Facebook and Twitter. Throughout the day students will book out and return equipment. If I have any spare time I try and develop my skills at the moment I’m learning After Effects and HTML5. Often, current and ex-students and staff will send me links to interesting course related things on the web, and I’ll add them to the BA Graphics blog, and tweet them. What is your favourite piece of art/design/making/architecture? The opening credits to It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World by Saul Bass. Or the scene at the end of the Woody Allen film Love and Death where he dances with Death to the music of Prokofiev. Or Prince’s career between 1980 and 1987. Is there a book/film/album/artwork that has had an impact on your life in some way? Billy Liar, the book and the film. The pathos of Billy’s thwarted ambition had a powerful affect on me as a youth, feeling, as I did at the time, that the good life was out there somewhere for Billy (as for me), that meant London. Unlike Billy however, I didn’t miss the last train, and I spent 7 amazing and awful years there.

Cardiff School of Art & Design 15

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Matters

Carla Rapoport CEO of Lumen Prize Last autumn saw the announcement in Cardiff of the winner of the international Lumen Prize Exhibition for digitallycreated fine art. Tommy Ingberg of Sweden collected first prize for his piece Torn which depicts a man ‘torn’ between the sky and the ground by balloons and a boulder.

16 Cardiff School of Art & Design

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Graduate

Meirion Ginsberg Meirion Ginsberg answers the phone and his warm North Wales’ accent greets me with a strange familiarity. Ginsberg is in Chester and is taking a break from his painting to speak to me.

“I'm a full time artist and I paint for a living,” he says proudly. “I'm living in Chester at the moment. I was living in Liverpool for the past few years.” Born in 1985, Ginsberg says he has always enjoyed painting and it's quite obvious within minutes of the start of our conversation that he has. “I had to take a number of different part time jobs and factory jobs to fund my painting,” he tells me. “It gave me time to improve as a painter. Then, The Martin Tinney Gallery in Cardiff saw and liked my work and have taken me on as one of their gallery artists. That allowed me to go full time, as I was now selling work. I go there by pure grit and determination.” After a foundation year at Coleg Menai, Ginsberg made the move south to Cardiff where he studied for a BA Fine Art at the School of Art & Design. After graduating from that course in 2007, Ginsberg moved to Liverpool where he has been working, until recently. In between shifts at 'factory jobs', he has been busy exhibiting and now has an impressive CV of past exhibitions for someone as young as Ginsberg. A solo show in Canary Wharf in 2008, then Caernarfon in the same year (followed by another there in the same town in 2010) and a final solo show in Cardiff in 2010. That's not including all of the group shows, of which he has been a part (on average, one a year), since his career started back in 2003. He tells me that his next solo show will be in January 2013, which will be in Oriel Tegfryn Gallery in Menai Bridge, Anglesey.

18 Cardiff School of Art & Design

“They are mostly portraits and they're quite small. I'm planning on doing some larger pieces in the next few months.” Ginsberg is looking to move away from producing small canvases though. For this forthcoming exhibition he plans to try a few new things, “It's more minimal and it's mostly a figure and a plain background,” he explains. “A lot of the work is more spontaneous now and it's a lot of sketching. I didn't feel like I wanted to work in the same way I did previously.” Ginsberg's work is intriguing. On the one hand, the foreground of his canvases are usually figurative portraits which are sometimes wonderful, sometimes discomforting, but always full of life and vibrancy. On the other hand, the background to his work is an abstracted world of swirling colour and shape that contrasts sharply with the detail of his characters. “I don't see it personally as a particular style. I know what my influences are and I try to imitate them all the time. Eventually it becomes its own thing, just by doing it and learning through trial and error,” he says. “I'm continually looking for new inspiration. I think it will eventually become a thing of its own anyway. Every artist you look at, for instance Bacon, if you look at his early work, they've got a Picasso-esque quality to them, but eventually through trial and error, he found his own style. It's just by doing it and seeing where it goes…” Ginsberg freely admits to being heavily influenced by Francis Bacon in particular.

“It's not so much the painting - whenever I see them in the flesh I'm not really blown away by them. His vision! I think he's seeing something that you can't categorise. You can only say it's Bacon-esque,” he says when I asked him why he liked the painter so much. “I can only really appreciate something that someone has created on their own back. Bacon wasn't really part of a group - he hung around with numerous artists but he wanted to concentrate on his own thing and that's what he did. He goes into it with different ways of thinking as well. It's not just about a palette and paint. He'd scrape the paint off, use sponges and his hands and I find that quite inspirational.” Creative people often find it hard to escape the shadow of their idols. It is hard for a painter to

“I really enjoy abstract work but I'm not an abstract painter. I would like to be and so I guess I try to force it in somehow and incorporate that,” Ginsberg continues. “Every time I try and make an abstract picture, a figure comes out. I'm toying with the two things.”

“I was a massive fan of Norman Blackwell as a child. Earlier on I was looking through the house at books. My father was an art teacher and I remember seeing Bacon's work and finding it interesting. All of these things around me,” he recalls. “I've been very lucky and very privileged. My father never taught me how to draw, but just having those things around me was very inspirational. I noticed in my friends’ houses as a child, you'd never find an art book. I was lucky to have that.”

It’s even harder still to avoid being derivative when you have, from your earliest childhood, been surrounded by an artist's work and taught to enjoy it. That's something that Ginsberg identifies with.

It isn't hard not to see that a childhood of being surrounded by great art and ideas has paid off for Ginsberg. He is accomplished and already his work looks like the work of someone who has been painting for far longer than he has.

not try and paint like a person they very much admire because they have spent such a long time studying the minutiae of the paintings that artist painted.

Cardiff School of Art & Design 19

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Graduate

Fleen Doran BA Ceramics 2007-10

Ceramicists and potters are always interesting to speak to. Their love of clay and kiln is so infectious and their enjoyment of their craft is so evident. Fleen Doran is no exception.

“I worked at a little gallery called the Candover Gallery. I started working there without really knowing that it was a prestigious gallery. It was a great introduction to some brilliant pots and potters,” she explains. “After college, I first went to Staffordshire University to do a course in 3D Design Crafts, but having decided that it was clay that I wanted to work with full time I went to Cardiff because it's the place to be for Ceramics! That's when I started making pots and it's functional pots that really interest me: objects you can use everyday in the kitchen and home.” In 2010, when she graduated from the course at CSAD, Fleen received funding from the organisation Adopt-A-Potter to go and be an apprentice at Bridge Pottery under the very well respected potter Micki Schloessingk. “I had already planned to work with Micki for the summer. But we decided to apply for funding for a year long apprenticeship. The idea of Adopt-APotter is that the funding goes to the student so that they can focus on their apprenticeship full time,” Fleen explains. Having already completed a work experience at Bridge Pottery the year before she graduated, Fleen was keen to return to learn more from Schloessingk about salt-glazing and wood-firing, the two methods in which she is expert as well as learning how to run a pottery practice as a business.

20 Cardiff School of Art & Design

“That's a more unusual way of firing pots. As well as the kiln being heated by wood, the whole pottery is also heated by wood,” Fleen says. “We do lots of chopping! The point of firing with wood is that the firing is as much a part of the creative process as the making. The pieces are made individual through the process.” You would be forgiven for not understanding the nuances of using wood as opposed to gas or electric. Unlike an electric kiln - which can be programmed and left to complete the process, firing with wood requires constant stoking and monitoring. The kiln is responsive to the pattern of stoking, it is affected even by weather conditions and the type and size of wood used on each stoke. “It is very engaging way of firing my pots,” Fleen explains. “We fire for around 30 hours. Towards the top temperature, we put salt in the kiln that forms a vapour which is drawn through the kiln and glazes the pieces. With a standard kiln, you would usually fire the pieces twice and glaze them in between the firing. With this process, the pots are only fired once and instead of using glazes, I use slips (clays with oxides) to get different colours, so it's really a combination of the salt, the wood ash and the slip that makes the glaze unique.” Micki Schloessingk is a renown potter because of her skill in salt glazing and wood firing methods. Her work has been exhibited all around the world. Fleen feels very privileged to have been offered the opportunity to learn from her teacher.

“It was the wood firing and salt glazing that I wanted to learn about and she's an expert in that as well as being a great mentor, tutor and supporter,” she continues. “We're a good team now! I'm able to take some of the responsibilities of running the pottery. I run my own evening throwing course, have time for my own potting and make a range of pots for the pottery.” While there is plenty of chance to learn the secrets of salt glazing, Fleen has been learning a lot about the other aspects of running a pottery too.

“As well as learning lots of practical skills in the pottery, I have also gained useful business skills as well. Each day of the week, we have a different focus,” she says. “Monday, I work on my pots. Tuesday is maintenance day; preparing clay, the kiln and wood. Wednesday is office day - website management, photography, publicity organising courses etc. Thursday is making pots for the pottery and Fridayis working on my pots again!” Having recently returned from travelling around India learning about the firing techniques that they use in making pots there, Fleen is now back at work on her own pots.

"At the moment, I throw pots on the wheel, but also I've been working on hand built pots. These are slab built pots," she explains of her current practice. "I roll out slabs of clay and I make paper templates which I cut around and then fold up the slabs into pots. I am enjoying exploring this process.” Fleen will carry on working on those functional items. Her interest in pots that you can use everyday has already taken her far. With an enthusiasm for pottery and glazing as contagious as hers, it would be difficult to see her not going far in the world of pottery. Cardiff School of Art & Design 21

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Academic

Anna Bhushan Illustrating the unseen “I come from a family of artists. Both my parents were artists as well as my grandfather. I grew up drawing and painting and it was always assumed that I would go to art school,” Bhushan explains. “I rebelled and decided to study Comparative Religion at Manchester but it didn't last very long. I missed paint and being creative in that way. So I changed track and started an art foundation in Oxford.” Following her time in Oxford, she completed an illustration degree in Brighton. It was when she left University at the end of that course that she got her first taste of travelling and working as a freelancer.

“I had a couple of years out of education after my degree, when I visited family in different parts of the world: India and Los Angeles,” she explains. “I spent time in both of those places and joined an agency. I was having my first experience at being an illustrator in the real world.” After two years of moving about the world and working wherever she could, Bhushan settled down in London for a while to complete an MA in Communication Art and Design at the Royal College of Art (RCA). “Just as I was leaving the RCA, I got in touch with Heart Illustration Agency which was the agency I'd always fantasised about being represented by. I was really fortunate that they took me on and when I left I got straight into freelancing. I was with them for four years,” she recalls. “The week I graduated, I moved to New York and got married. That was a dramatic time in my life. I was doing lots of editorial work and freelance work. I also started to show my work in galleries in New York.”

22 Cardiff School of Art & Design

Having moved back to London, as well as working for publications like the New York Times and The New Yorker Bhushan also added visiting lecturer to her CV. But, after balancing all of those different parts of her portfolio for a while, she decided it was time for a change. “I decided that I'd been a visiting lecturer for quite a while: teaching at Westminster, St. Martins, Winchester, bits at Brighton and Camberwell and various other institutions,” she explains of her decision to take a post at Cardiff School of Art & Design. “I was juggling lots of different projects and hundreds of students. Managing that was becoming a bit unwieldy so I made a commitment to one single course. That's why I decided to take this job! I love the feel of the course here.” She likes doing what she does at the School because it balances her interests in teaching, illustration and research into her specialist area within Indian philosophy. “I practice and teach meditation. I've been teaching that for a few years but have practiced since a child. It has influenced and infused the self initiated work I do,” she says. The illustrator has worked on an illustrated version of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children as well as the Bhagavad Gita (part of the Hindu canon) for the Folio Society, a publisher of quality physical books. “The Bhagavad Gita was much more key to my interest in particular philosophical traditions and meditation. It was one of the first times that I had been asked to produce a body of work directly related to those interests,” she explains. “Those two sides of my interest (making images

and Indian philosophy/yoga) intersected on that project. That was quite fantastic for me. Now my PhD research is continuing the intersection of those two areas of interest.” “Anatomical diagrams are based in information illustration now, but if you look at Persian Medieval diagrams (for example), when dissection wasn't allowed, there's a big difference. The role of imagination comes into the picture. One of the challenges that scientists face is to explain concepts that are beyond the everyday understanding. That's where my interest in working as an illustrator with scientists on some of those projects came about,” she explains. “My current research has taken a slightly different direction and I'm still looking at the idea of how images and text can be used to communicate notions that are paradoxically, beyond human imagination, which can be ambiguous, intangible and elusive. Now, I'm looking at this in terms of philosophy, rather than in terms of science specifically.” The PhD, Bhushan hopes, will be an ambitious examination of the use of image and text in authorial illustration for communicating elusive and ambiguous subject matter. This will be based upon a text and image work re-examining the teachings of Buddha and Patañjali.

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Matters

Research Seminar Series Those two tenets come together perfectly for the School's Research Seminar Series which will begin this autumn. Now a regular part of the School's calendar, the seminar series is a programme of in-formal events designed and organised by Head of Masters Studies, Dr Gareth Loudon.

One of the defining characteristics of Cardiff School of Art & Design is its commitment to crossdisciplinary research into all kinds of design and art. Another of the most recognisable values of the School is its involvement in the community and all of the ways that it relates to the city at large.

“The idea behind it is to share with staff and student something of what's going on from a research perspective inside the School. We did it last year and we got all the leading research staff to give talks on their research,” Loudon explains. “The Series ran in Tommy's Bar every week in the evenings. We're going to do a similar structure this year, only we're going to get more PhD students involved.” Last year, not all of the research staff were able to make the events for one reason or another but Loudon says that those who couldn't make it last year will be in Tommy's Bar this year in order to keep everyone up to date on their research. “The idea is to cover the full range of art and design research in the School and make sure that each subject area represents its work,” he says. “The idea is quite informal. They give a 45 minute talk and then a question and answer session. We do it in the bar to give it a relaxed feel.” The idea of a seminar series is not a particularly new one. Loudon says there are a number of other organisations in Cardiff who do a series of talks with a similar idea and there are also a number of creative industries seminars, such as TEDxCardiff, which already happen in the city.

24 Cardiff School of Art & Design

“It was selfishly motivated for me in part because I found it useful to find out what all the other research staff were doing. It was something I was enjoying doing anyway. There's a formal module on the Masters courses called Research Seminars and so in a way, it's formal for the Masters students and because I'm head of Masters that's my duty,” he continues. “But I think the idea was not to just keep it private, but to open it up to everybody and put an emphasis on raising awareness. One of the key things about research and creativity is getting ideas from different places. So getting the collaboration and cross-discipline discussion going is important.” As Loudon says, it can be quite difficult to make sure that everyone within the School knows what their colleagues are researching or working on. It's even harder then for the public to get a good perspective on the School's research output. “Everyone is welcome and that's why it's an evening event,” Loudon says. “There is a lot of exciting work going on in the school and this is an opportunity for people to realise that this is cool stuff. I don't think this has been fully recognised up until now. It creates a nice buzz

and it's good for the undergrads, because it changes their mindset. When they see their lecturers talking about their research with passion, I think it rubs off on them too. That's a real bonus.” The Research Seminar series was originally inspired by the School staff meetings where occasionally, one member of staff would give a short talk on their work. “One of the professors, Rob Pepperell, gave a talk. He's a Professor of Fine Art and I'm in Product Design,” Loudon recalls. “I didn't really know what Rob was doing and when he gave the talk, I thought it was very relevant to my work. We realised that we needed to have more of that share. You can see that mix and it probably helps to facilitate it as well.” Despite the fact that there are some obvious themes shared by the research of many of the staff at the School, Loudon is unwilling to set a theme or dictate the topics of the seminars. “For me, again talking selfishly, I enjoyed the seminars because I was getting exposed to areas I knew nothing about. I found them really enjoyable and because it was surprising, it was

more fun. If it was over one core theme, I would find it a bit boring to be honest,” he says of the decision. “My area is particularly on play and creativity which is not limited to product design by any means. It's also true for a lot of the other areas too. It's good to get that sharing going really.” This year the Seminar Series takes on a more important role than ever before because of the changes to the undergraduate degree programmes.

students and, most importantly perhaps, with the members of the community. “Research is the cornerstone of the School, to a very large extent. I might be biased but I think it is really important because it underpins the learning and teaching,” he says. “The knowledge gets passed on to the students. It can be translated into enterprise work and brings a lot to the School. We're communicating that and hopefully creating new opportunities. It's an important element to what a school of art and design should be.”

“There's a more integrated structure there. In the coming year and the second year, people have options. So it's really important that people are aware of what is happening in the School,” he says. “This is one vehicle they can use to find out what's going on. Even now, if undergraduates attend the seminar series, they'll be able to use that as a way to inform module choices for second year, when students can elect to work with one of the School’s Research Principals. Traditionally, you were in your area of product design or fine art and that's all you ever saw.” Loudon is very enthusiastic about the sharing of knowledge between the members of staff, their Cardiff School of Art & Design 25

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Current Student

Florence Walkey

Florence Walkey is a printmaker. She’s currently enrolled part-time on the Master of Fine Art (MFA).

26 Cardiff School of Art & Design

Cardiff School of Art & Design 27

CSAD MAGAZINE

CSAD Current Student

Samantha Alland Alland is a first year Artist Designer: Maker student who, only a few months into her degree at Cardiff School of Art & Design is making waves with her wonderful creations.

“I’ve got a rabbit with horns and a rabbit with wings,” is not a sentence that you would usually expect to hear. But when it comes out of Samantha Alland’s mouth, it seems incredibly plausible.

“I’ve always kind of done crafts and stuff. When I was little I was always making a mess! I started a textile course at GCSE because I had done sewing when I was younger. Then I went on to do two years of textiles at college,” she explains. “I did a foundation course and realised that I had fallen in love with clay…not just clay, because I still like working with other materials. My final college project was a mixed media deer sculpture. The skull was leather with glass eyes that I made myself. The body was scrap metal and leather with porcelain legs and hooves out of wood.” Originally from Portsmouth, but half-Welsh by nationality, Alland first decided that she would come to Cardiff after enjoying her annual visits to family at Christmas. “I love it here,” she says. “I originally applied to do Fine Art and when I came to look at that, I was told I might be better suited for the Artist Designer: Maker course. I spoke to Ingrid Murphy, the Subject Leader, and she sorted that out for me. In Fine Art, it’s more developing concepts, than building objects. I prefer the building side as it leads me to the concept.” And conceptual her work is. Samantha’s studio space is completely plastered in models of various animal’s heads, pictures of creatures both mythical and real, as well as circuit boards and wires. “We went to the museum and I saw a sculpture of a Satyr: a Greek mythological creature that’s half goat, half man. I’m looking at the animal form

28 Cardiff School of Art & Design

but also hybrid creatures,” Alland says, showing off her various clay structures. “I’ve got this horse’s head which I’m going to cover, I’m also doing taxidermy rabbit skin to attach to it and I’ve got a neck with a platform that’s attached to an Arduino board.” Arduino is an open source (developed by a community of hobbyists/professionals, rather than a company) which combines programming and electronic components in order to enable people to create interesting projects without having to be trained in electronic engineering. By way of example, to illustrate what Arduino can actually do, Alland explains her project. “My plan is to put sensors in the horse’s head so that when people walk near it, it can sense them and turn to look at them, like a real creature,” she explains. “I like things that you can interact

with; that will give audiences a more personal relationship with an object. If there’s a thing that’s sitting in a glass case, you can’t really do anything with it. But if there’s an object looking you in the eye, you don’t have a choice but to react. I like looking at enchantment. I’m into escapism. The real world’s great, but I would like to create my own world at the same time.” The idea of fantastical creatures being thought up to help people understand danger is both fascinating and central to Alland’s work. “My work is about looking at our relationship with animals and our need to create fantasy creatures to better understand the real world, to protect us and to produce fear in order to stop us from doing things. There was an interesting example from Japan where they had created the idea of a fish-monkey which drowns children,”

says Alland. “The idea was that they would use it to stop children from going out into deep water by making them believe they would be attacked by the fish-monkey if they did.” Alland’s interest in animals is of an origin that she cannot pinpoint. However, she says that she has always found it interesting. “The whole social side of animals is interesting. Everyone always thinks that animals are these dumb things that are in the background,” she explains. “But if you look at a species and then a breed within that species, they have in-depth social protocols: how they communicate, interact and do things. If you look at dogs, one dog could be aggressive, while the other is passive. Just like people.”

For now, it’s probably a bit early to ask what plans Alland has for the future. However, what is clear is that it will involve some very exciting projects that bring a fusion of technological and traditional methods. “My understanding of these technologies is very basic. I’m hoping to learn to programme Arduino so that I can get them to do what I want them to. I’ve not played around with electronics before, it’s all new,” she says. “I haven’t actually programmed anything yet as we haven’t got that far but I’ve been building bits, cut things the wrong size and had to do them again. It’s trial and error.” “I want to carry on with building things. I’d love to build full size animal pieces,” she says excitedly.

Cardiff School of Art & Design 29

CSAD MAGAZINE

Meet our Technician Demonstrator and Administration Team

Michael O Keeffe Who are you? My specialist area is high end technology and materials - I have amassed a great deal of knowledge in tooling, engineering techniques, crafts, systems or methods to solve technical problems including tensile testing, induction hardening, plasma nitriding, titanium nitride coating, high, data capture specialist software, cad cam, 3D scanning, laser cutting and etching. Born in Cork, Ireland I studied at various colleges and have over 25 years experience in a manufacturing/product design environment. I hold demonstrations of technical and lab equipment, including: tools, tensile testing, strain gauge bonding, finite element analysis, control and data capture and other processes.

I am a Technician Demonstrator who works across various departments from Product Design to the Foundry at Howard Gardens.

What’s a typical day at CSAD like for you? I don't think there is such a thing as a typical day at CSAD. It can vary tremendously, even within a particular department. I could be demonstrating to a class of 50 on how to use CAD and next be telling a masters student what process he would need to use to manufacture a product; or even testing chicken legs in the tensile tester to mimic broken bones in footballers feet. What do you like most about your job? Working with, and helping students to achieve their goals. Sometimes they expect too much but when individuals get it right it is a dream to watch. You know that you had a hand in the birth of something new and like any good mother you will feed it, watch over it, protect it, and see it flourish. I especially enjoy working with colleagues who inspire me and show me what can be accomplished. Within CSAD there is a core of individuals which is quite rare in a organization who have the knowledge and skill set that is quite unique. Sometimes (not always!) I feel privileged to be working with such individuals.

30 Cardiff School of Art & Design

What is your favourite piece of art/design/ making/architecture? In mid Wales I have seen great Dams and viaducts built by the Victorians in the Elan Valley. They always impress me when I see them and I appreciate the design and making of such enormous structures. Is there a book that has had an impact on your life in some way? “Cycling in Wales” - a book that covers the National Cycle Network a system of routes along traffic free paths linking our towns, cities and countryside and places of interest. Last year my wife and I decided to attempt to complete all 28 routes. So far we have managed 18. Five records for a desert island? The very best of Ennio Morricone by Ennio Morricone Legend Album by Bob Marley 21 by Adele Rumours by Fleetwood Mac Sgt Pepper's lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles What’s the best bit of advice you’ve ever been given? Love the life you live and live the life you love. Name one of your heroes and tell us why. Steve Jobs. A true pioneer, innovator and visionary. Name one of your villains and tell us why. Darth Vader. He tried to destroy planet Earth. What’s the best thing about working for CSAD? Working with talented people and giving knowledge and passion to people who will influence the future of things to come.

Meet our Technician Demonstrator and Administration Team

Maggie Cullinane Who are you? What’s a typical day at CSAD like for you? Most days you can find me in the Stitch Room, but that could be with anything from 1 to 25 students, and doing anything from showing a group of first years how to set up a sewing machine, to working out how to do the seemingly impossible with a third year for their degree show. What is your favourite piece of art/design/making/architecture? Thomas Heatherwick’s cauldron design for this Summer’s Olympics was a spine-tingling stroke of pure genius. It was breathtakingly beautiful, both aesthetically and symbolically, and you have to admire the nerve of someone who takes a brief that says “no moving parts” and creates 260 individual petals to be brought separately into the stadium during the Opening Ceremony, then assembled, and erected live in front of the entire world. I wonder how many different versions there were before they got that right. ‘A different shaped bowl, on a different shaped stick’ it was not! Is there a book/film/album/artwork that has had an impact on your life in some way? Oh, The Places You’ll Go! by Dr Seuss, will always cheer me up if I’ve had a bad day. Any adult who’s read it will understand why, and most Tim Burton films will guarantee to make me want to get creative. Name one of your villains and tell us why. I wouldn’t like to single out any one individual, but generally, that would be fake celebrities, famous for little more than courting publicity in everything they do, who complain about their privacy being invaded when they get caught doing things they shouldn’t!

Records for a desert island? Design for Life - Manic Street Preachers because it will always be my favourite song. Everybody Hurts - REM because it’s so beautiful in its purity. Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol because it reminds me of when my daughter was a baby. Six Months in a Leaky Boat by Split Enz because it’s impossible to listen to it without smiling, and it seems quite fitting. What’s the best bit of advice you’ve ever been given? On the day I was told that I was going to be made redundant from a previous job, my Dad told me, “Don’t worry about the future because it won’t be what you expect it to be.” It’s not a piece of advice that is always easy to follow, but it’s still true. What’s the best thing about working for CSAD? The final term running up to the third year deadline is the best time of year. The students keep you insanely busy and there can be a lot of pressure. You often have to think very quickly and creatively to work through challenges and that can actually be fun. It’s also very rewarding to see how far people have come, and however busy it is, when I think of rows of silent students sitting hunched over exam desks on other courses, the way we do things here feels like a celebration.

I’m Maggie Cullinane, Technician Demonstrator for Stitch, working primarily with Textiles students, but also students from many other courses too.

Cardiff School of Art & Design 31

CSAD MAGAZINE

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

 School of medicine ‘Show & Tell’ Staff from CSAD and Cardiff University’s School of Medicine met to discuss possible research links between the two institutions at a ‘show and tell’ event on 19 October. Hosted at the School of Medicine’s Henry Wellcome building, the event included presentations by Dr Cathy Treadaway, Dr Gareth Loudon, Prof Steve Gill, Prof Clive Cazeaux, Chris Glynn and Clara Watkins. The day concluded with fruitful conversations regarding areas of mutual interest, future collaboration and a proposed event to be hosted at HG.

The second project, Research in Art & Visual Experience (RAVE) is supported by Cardiff Met’s Research & Enterprise Investment Fund. It will aim to produce images that optimally represent the way humans experience their visual field and seek to exploit the commercial possibilities of such images. Rob has also recently participated in networking events in Lyon and Berlin with a view to discussing the potential for future collaborations. As a result of his trip to Berlin, Anja Ruschkowski has chosen to spend her Erasmus Work Placement award with CSAD.

academic, industry and community partners.

 Short on Kandinsky Dr Chris Short recently presented his paper ‘Eclecticism in Uber das Geistige in der Kunst´ at the Symposium Centenary and Impact of Kandinsky’s Book Uber das Geistige in der Kunst, Leiden University. Chris was invited to speak based on his recent publication The Art Theory of Wassily Kandinsky, 19091928.  RAVE on Professor Robert Pepperell is starting two new research projects this year. Funded by WIRAD, As Seen is a joint project with Swansea Metropolitan University and the National Museum of Wales that will investigate whether British artists of the modern and contemporary periods have made significant discoveries about the nature of visual perception in a way that has so far been largely unexplored by art historians or those studying vision in the sciences.

32 Cardiff School of Art & Design

 Wendy Keay-Bright at BBC Science Café On 2nd October 2012 BBC Radio Wales broadcast a special edition of the Science Cafe, entitled ‘Another Piece in the Puzzle?’ which focussed on Dr Wendy Keay-Bright’s Reactickles and Somantics software. Programme host, Sian Pari Huws, interviewed Wendy and met with some of the teachers and staff from schools that use ReacTickles and Somantics. This was followed by an ‘in conversation’ between David Jacksons, the Science Café producer, and Wendy at the Wales Millennium Centre. The free event in the foyer area also gave audience members the opportunity to try out the software being discussed.  Alexandros: Sent to Coventry Dr Alexandros Kontogeorgakopoulos presented at the INTIME 2012 Symposium hosted by Coventry University. The symposium aimed to discuss the notion and performance of new music and theorise current practice in these areas.

Chris Glynn, drawing of Jeptha performance

 CSAD Drawing Research and the WNO CSAD staff were given the opportunity to draw a rehearsal of the Welsh National Opera’s performance of Jeptha in September as part of the CSAD Drawing Research day. During the afternoon symposium at Craft in the Bay, Dr Natasha Mayo, Dr Jac Saorsa, Dr Cathy Treadaway and James Green gave short presentations on drawing research projects that they are currently engaged in. The day concluded with a discussion chaired by Prof Rob Pepperell about the development of a Centre for Drawing research and plans for a drawing symposium in 2013.  EBERE update: SEB 12 For the second year running, Dr John Littlewood has Chaired the invited session 'Assessment and Monitoring the Environmental Performance of Buildings' at the 4th International Conference on Sustainability in Energy and Buildings SEB’12, Stockholm. The theme is based on John’s Low Carbon Built Environment project and won the 'Best Invited Session Award’. The award was presented by the conference Chairs, Professor Howlett from KES International and Professor Hakansson from KTH Royal Institute of Technology Sweden. As a result, John has been invited to expand the 'Assessment and Monitoring the Environmental Performance of Buildings' session into a Sustainable Building session for the Mediterranean Green Energy Forum, which will host both SEB’13 and the World Renewable Energy Congress. The EBERE group also presented three papers at the conference. All papers will be

published as a book chapter in early 2013 by Springer.  CARIAD Dr Wendy Keay-Bright and Dr Cathy Treadaway have received a Research Innovation Award for CARIAD’s most recent research project, Open heart: capturing and sharing through video. The funding will support a Research Assistant to investigate the use of video documentary both to capture creativity and as an innovative inclusive design toolset. The project will explore and evidence how video can become the critical component necessary for dialogic collaboration between designers, researchers, stakeholders and end users.  Youth Muse Dr Wendy Keay-Bright has been awarded funding by Youth Music to work with MUSE on the Listening Aloud project for the academic year 2012 - 13. The Listening Aloud project will support young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEN/D) to make music using software and technology they helped design. Throughout the year Wendy will be working with MUSE to co-develop a range of music technology tools that use affordable and widely available technologies (like games controllers and smart phones) to make music more accessible. In November, Wendy will also run a workshop entitled Amplifying Ability for Scope Victoria, Melbourne. Aimed at people who interact with children and adults with complex needs, for example Parents, support staff, teachers, and therapists, the workshop

will demonstrate new resources to use when supporting someone who has difficulty interacting and participating in activities.  Inaugural Lecture: Professor Clive Cazeaux Professor Clive Cazeaux started this year’s Inaugural and Professorial lecture series with discussion on Metaphor. Taking place late October, ‘Coming to our senses, metaphorically speaking’ drew attention to the metaphorical nature of thought, how metaphor cuts all the way down to our capacity to shape and organize thought and, the structure of reality itself. At a time when STEM is everything and the arts are nothing, Clive’s lecture demonstrated the importance of seeing one thing in another.  Gill’s Skills Professor Steve Gill maybe on sabbatical, but he is using this time to re-skill, develop networks and further his research. In July, Steve attended a one week Arduino physical computing course at Middlesex University to learn various programming and electronics techniques. This was followed in August by an invitation to attend the Interaction Beyond the Desktop seminar at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany. These invitation-only events are aimed at attracting researchers of international standing and participants at this seminar included some of the world’s most prominent Human Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers. Steve also co-convened September’s 4th International Physicality Workshop at Cardiff School of Art & Design 33

CSAD MAGAZINE

Claire Curneen, St Sebastian 2006

Birmingham University. The workshop explored design challenges, theories and experiences in developing new forms of interactions that exploit human physical interaction with digital technology. In October, he led a group of staff, academic associates and students to the Isle of Tiree with a view to exploring the possibilities of computer embedded design at the 4th Tiree Techwave. Finally, in November Steve will visit SIPs partners Smalti to explore the possibility of further collaborations in partnership with Bangor University.  Natasha in Print Dr Natasha Mayo published an article in the Journal of Visual Arts Practice (August 2012). ‘Drawing into Practice’ examines parallels between drawing as a cognitive tool and the social and conversational structures of a website. Natasha will also appear as a featured artist in the new book Making and Drawing by Kyra Cane (A & C Black). Finally, Natasha continues to develop the award winning Learning and Teaching Resource ‘Making the Creative Process Visible’ and is starting a new collaboration with Valley & Vale Community Arts and Dr Meredith Gattis (School of Psychology, Cardiff University) to examine the intrinsically creative activity of children drawing.  ‘When I Woke’ and ‘Never Never’ Co-curated by CSAD Ceramics staff member Claire Curneen with Lowri Davies, When I Woke was on show at Llantarnam Grange Arts Centre, Cwmbran from the 6th October 34 Cardiff School of Art & Design

Prof. Andre Stitt with his work at the John Moores Gallery

- 17th November 2012. The exhibition, which takes its title from the a Dylan Thomas poem, featured work by Sam Bakewell, Audrius Janusonis, James Page, Lina Peterson, Tamsin Van Essen and Sophie Woodrow and examined the themes of life, death, sorrow and myth as seen through the eyes of these international makers. Claire also showed work at Never Never, an international exhibition, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, July September 2012.  Andre Stitt Update Professor Andre Stitt has had work selected for a number of exhibitions. His large scale paintings were included in the Hillsboro Fine Art Summer Exhibition, Dublin from July September, and will be shown in the John Moores Painting Exhibition at the Walker Gallery, Liverpool from September - January. Andre was also awarded the special commendation prize at this year’s National Eisteddfod of Wales contemporary art exhibition. In addition to this, Andre was invited to present a gallery talk and discuss the work of performance artist John Court at Spacex Gallery, Exeter, in September, took part in October’s Cardiff Artists Studios event and will present his paper ‘Land Marks: Location, Occupation and Representation’ based on his recent research project ‘in the WEST’ at the Conference on Landscape, The Exchange, Penzance in December. Further performances and exhibitions in Poland, Carmarthen and Leeds are planned for the New Year.

 Cathy Treadaway update Cathy has been continuing her research into creativity and wellbeing: In addition to taking part in the discussions on drawing and exploring links with the Cardiff University’s School of Medicine, Cathy and Helen Watkins participated in a community drawing event at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens as part of Urban Flows: Connected Communities, an AHRC funded project Cathy is collaborating on with Birmingham City University. With the support of Cardiff Met Seed Funding, Cathy also organised the Making a difference networking event at the WMC. The event brought together researchers from Birmingham City University’s User Lab, Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre the Touch Trust, Gwalia and members of CARIAD to discuss potential research collaborations. Finally, in her role as Research Leader, Cathy was selected to attend a PRC ‘Consultation on strategy’ event to discuss the future of AHRC funding.  Dave Ferry: South African Artists’ Books Two of Professor David Ferry’s original Artists Books have been purchased for the South African Artists’ Books collection, 'Belligerent Rock Intrusions' (2008) and 'In Lorna Doone Country' (2004). The South African Artists’ Books is one of the leading international collections of artists’ books outside of the museum sector.

Amelia Johnstone, The Function of Folk

 The importance of Play Product Design and CARIAD researchers have presented a number of papers and organised a number events over the past few months on creativity and play. Dr Gareth Loudon facilitated a half-day innovation workshop for 30 aspiring SME leaders and managers as part of the Cardiff School of Management’s 20 Twenty Leadership Programme. He also co-authored papers with Gina Deininger and Paul Wilgeroth that were presented at the 5th International Conference on Spatial Cognition, Rome and International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education, Antwerp respectively. Gareth and Dr Cathy Treadaway both presented papers at the International Conference on Design Creativity in Glasgow. Cathy presented her paper ‘No time like the present’ and Gareth presented his research in a paper: ‘Play, autonomy and the creative process’. Both papers have been published in the conference proceedings. Finally, Cathy participated in the 4th of a series of AHRC funded research workshops investigating playfulness and wellbeing in adult life. The University of Strathclyde hosted the workshop in conjunction with ‘Glasgow Life’ a Scottish government funded agency promoting community sport and leisure.

 David Ferry Around the World Professor David Ferry exhibited his collection of prints ‘The Stately Aquariums of England' at a number of exhibitions this summer. These included the London Print Studio’s London Calling, from July -August in Tehran, a two person show with British artist Stephen Mumberson at the Wharepuke Print Studio and Gallery in Kerikeri, New Zealand and BITE London at the Mall Galleries in September. For this exhibition, David was an invited artist and also contributed an essay to the Mall Galleries’ catalogue. David has been selected as one of nine artists to represent Great Britain at the 2012 International Print Triennial, Krakow, Poland, a major international exhibition for contemporary printmaking and graphic arts. The exhibition, which began in Krakow in September, will tour to Katowice, Vienna, Istanbul and Oldenburg during 2013. David has also recently been selected as the UK representative at the Krackor Biennale in Germany, which took place in January 2013.

Polychromatic Rotating Goggles

illustration. Amelia also presented a paper entitled ‘Illustration off the page’.  Paul Granjon in Australia Paul Granjon spent much of October and November completing a collaborative residency with Paul Gazzola at the Campbelltown Arts Centre, Australia. ‘The Experimental Body Extension Manufacturing Unit (EBEMU)’, explored ideas about physical body extensions and used discarded materials to create prototypes of Wearable Hybrid Body Augmentations. Granjon and Gazzola provided a fully functional temporary manufacturing unit and a selection of readyassembled prototypes where voluntary workers recruited from the local community could contribute ideas for new products and took part in their construction and presentation. The resulting work was presented as part of the Oh I Wanna Dance With Somebody! festival in Campbelltown.

 The Function of ‘Folk’ The Third International Illustration Symposium and Exhibition took place on the 8th and 9th November at the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, Poland. Co-convened by Amelia Johnstone, the symposium explored the idea of the illustrator as contemporary ‘folk’ artist. Along with the accompanying exhibition, the symposium explored themes such as the visual language and iconography of folk motifs, the collaboration between publisher and folk artists in India, and the exploration of cultural identities through narrative Cardiff School of Art & Design 35

CSAD MAGAZINE

Clara and project workers

in brief

Olwen Moseley and David Berman

in brief

Research Degrees

Enterprise

 New Students This autumn, CSAD has welcomed four new MPhil/PhD students: Martina Cleary, Ben Ewart-Dean, Emily Jenkins and Sarah Younan. Based in Fine Art’s printmaking department , Martina’s research will investigate the means by which the photographic image operates to signify, construct or preserve individual and collective memory and Ben will work with Dr Wendy Keay-Bright to explore how the craft of video-making can be used to improve the social communication skills of children on the autistic spectrum. Both Emily and Sarah will be based in ceramics; Emily’s RIA supported project will develop a comparative study of the ways in which Welsh Identity has been explored in art and Sarah’s AHRC funded project will investigate the ceramic object in light of 3D technology.

 Olivia goes to Boot Camp Supported by Cardiff Met, Olivia Kotsifa attended a one week Fab Lab boot camp in Barcelona. Born out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Fab Labs (fabrication laboratory) are fully kitted fabrication workshop which gives everyone in the community access to equipment. The one- week Boot Camp provided training in Fab Lab tools and processes by members of the Fab Lab network.

 Clara in Zambia Clara Watkins has recently returned from a research trip to Zambia with Mothers of Africa, a Welsh Medical Educational Charity that trains medical staff in Sub-Saharan Africa to care for mothers during pregnancy and childbirth. Clara’s research, which is in collaboration with the charity, focuses on the development of appropriate methodologies for informing transformative medical product solutions in rural Zambia. Clara was able to progress her own work, carrying out extensive ethnographic research to gain an insight into local cultures, politics, people and the difficulties expectant mothers’ face. The trip also identified a number of different projects for future development.

36 Cardiff School of Art & Design

 Pip at Waddesdon Manor Philippa Lawrence has completed a very successful SIP with the National Trust’s Waddesdon Manor. They are now keen to continue their relationship with the School and our students. Philippa has been asked to make pieces for their collection and summer programme within the gardens, and deliver a talk to visitors as a part of the Manor’s public engagement programme.  Cardiff Design Festival This year’s Cardiff Design Festival has attracted some high profile speakers including furniture designer Bethan Gray (who has been nominated for this Autumn’s Elle Decoration Award, named as one of Terrance Conran’s ‘ones to watch’ and has recently launched a successful range for John Lewis) and Tomas Roope of the Rumpus Room (a leading UK web design and innovation company). Both attended the Design Festival Party and Best of Welsh Design Awards where three recent CSAD graduates were amongst the award winners. Graphic Communication graduates Joe Smith (winner of two awards) and Julian Deborré,

and Illustration graduates Lauren Nicholas and Dan Peterson were praised for the quality, innovation and imagination of their work by the Award judges. Staff also organised events and contributed to events as a part of the Festival. Amelia Johnstone spoke at Ignite Cardiff. Chris Dennis curated an illustration exhibition, Charmed, on the theme of unicorns at the Printmarket Project and co-organised Project Cardiff, a photography project that sough nominations and photographed the 50 most influential doers, movers and shakers in the Cardiff creative community. The project resulted in an exhibition launched at the Senedd on 15 October and a larger show of the entire top 50 nominations will be exhibited next spring. Olwen Moseley and Angie Dutton were delighted to be selected in recognition of their work on the Cardiff Design Festival. Olwen Moseley organised Be The Boss, a morning of talks for 50 students and new graduates. The event was supported by the Institute of Directors, SeeWhatYouMean, Sing and Inspire, a representative of the Welsh Government’s creative culture team and Professor Brian Morgan (CSM), who all provided essential advice about setting up their own businesses. Olwen also arranged for David Berman, the renowned Canadian designer and author of Do Good Design, to deliver a talk to CSAD students and present a public lecture.

DoodleNoodle at the Design Festival HQ

Chris Glynn and Ruth Morgan launched their children’s book, The Gardening Pirates, at Waterstone’s book shop in Cardiff city centre. Chris and Ruth read from the book, and organised a mass drawing session supported by several of the Illustration students. The book is designed to act as a resource for teachers to support pirate themed projects on issues such as bullying, growing your own food and healthy eating. At Llandaff, Level 1 textiles students exhibited their banner designs for the CSM building on the theme of ‘Fusion’ and Carolina Vasquez organised a screening of the Living Streets, an international selection of short movies on the theme of how children, pedestrians, cyclists, cars and lorries can fairly and safely share the streets. The films were shown at different venues across Cardiff during the Festival and simultaneously shown in Barranquilla, Colombia. Former CSAD Graphic Communication and Illustrations students based at the Morgan Arcade Studios organised an open studio day as a part of the Festival and made links with a London and Cardiff design company, Precedent, to help them run their Bodystorming event for design professionals. The Festival has also been delighted with the design community’s response to the call for volunteers to take part in the annual D&AD Brief-In and Student Portfolio Clinic which gave design students at CSAD, the University of Newport, the University of Glamorgan,

Hereford School of Art and Design, Swansea Metropolitan University and the University of the West of England the opportunity to meet with designers to scrutinise their portfolios and give them advice about how they present themselves and their ideas.  DoodleNoodle at the Design Festival HQ Royal and Morgan Arcades/Helical Bar lent the Festival a shop unit to use as a Festival HQ. This proved very successful and provided an opportunity to distributing information about, for example, the School Open Days. The Festival has also secured significant PR for the School and Cardiff Met through major features in, for example, the Western Mail and on Radio Wales. This year the Festival worked hard to raise sponsorship and was successful in securing small amounts of funding from the Design Commission for Wales, Cardiff Contemporary and the Welsh Government, as well as significant support in kind from the Royal and Morgan Arcades/Helical Bar, Harley Colourprint, Howard Smith Paper and Agfa, Hoffi who again undertook all of the design work including that of the website, and illustrator Matt Joyce. It has also helped strengthen links with organisations such as the Institute of Directors, the Institute of Welsh Affairs (whose chairman Geraint Talfan Davies chaired the Festival’s opening debate), the South Wales Design Circle, the Royal Society of Architects in Wales, Design Wales and the Association of Contemporary Jewellery Wales.

COAS Learn to use the Potter’s Wheel

It has also provided numerous opportunities for our students to network with design professionals who also continue to be generous in giving their time to mentor students.  Cardiff Open Art School 2012/13 has got off to a hectic start for Cardiff Open Art School with the launch of new courses and a high demand for places during the autumn term 2011 COAS ran 8 evening courses and had 87 students; this term it is running 12 evening classes and has 131 students. This term, Morgan Hall has updated one of her ceramics courses and is now running Hand Building and Surface Decoration for Pottery and Learn to use the Potter’s Wheel , both of which, along with Laura Lillie’s updated Solarplate Etching course, have sold out. James Green’s Tuesday evening Life Drawing course has also been revised and is proving popular. Very pleasing too is that the Portfolio Development course is also full. Bookings are now being received for two weekend courses run by Sarah Edmonds; Book Binding and Festive Letterpress Printmaking.

Cardiff School of Art & Design 37

CSAD MAGAZINE

Hunt for the Golden Duck, James Green

in brief School News  CSAD New building - work begins The demolition of ‘B’ block on the Llandaff Campus is now complete, taking only a few short weeks from the first bulldozer arriving on site to the building being reduced to rubble. Work has now begun in earnest on the construction of our amazing new Art School building. As construction gets under way, images will be regularly posted on the School’s website and people can keep up-todate with progress via a live web-cam at the site.  Made in Roath Many CSAD staff, students and alumni took part in this year’s Made in Roath Festival from 12 to 21 October. PhD Student and COAS Tutor, James Green led a Hunt for the Mythical Golden Duck to promote COAS. The adventure was open to all and encouraged participants to draw the wildlife on and around Roath Park Lake. The Howard Gardens Library hosted The Library Project, various new graduates showed work in and around Northcote Lane, and Chris Dennis staged an exhibition of his embroidered artworks at Moko Tattoo Studio. New graduate Bob Gelsthorpe took part in SHOrts, a film screening of short movies and animations at The Sho Gallery and exhibited work at 38 Glenroy Street alongside other CSAD alumni including Sam Aldridge and Freya Dooley. Other students and graduates to show work as part of the Open House event included Jackie Shackston, James Green and PhD student Sarah Younan, who exhibited work resulting from the study she is undertaking with the National Museum’s 38 Cardiff School of Art & Design

archives. CSAD Alumni Dr Sara Moorhouse and Paul Wearing of Fireworks showed ceramic work at 32 Kelvin Road and BA Ceramics graduates held an exhibition at the Milkwood Gallery. Finally, Bill Chambers ran a Create an Artists’ Book session at Penylan Library.  ‘Portal Exhibition’ for CSAD Ceramics Graduates BA Ceramics Graduates Jo Barlow and Chelsea Cooney have been selected for this years ‘Portal Exhibition’ at Llantarnam Grange Arts Centre. The exhibition, which includes work by the UKs top ceramics graduates, will be shown at the Arts Centre and Oriel Davies. Chelsea’s work examines contemporary behaviour, looking at the exaggerated, humorous and carnivalesque world of nightlife, whilst Jo’s installation is concerned with the profound effect societal advancement has on local and global cultures.  Philippa Lawrence SubWOOFER Philippa Lawrence showed work as part of the subWOOFER with Ancient and Modern exhibition held at the Spike Island pop-up Space, Bristol in August. The exhibition was the third in a series of pop-up exhibitions organised by members of the Spike Island community in a new temporary gallery space and aimed to showcase and experiment with the breadth of activity that goes on in the building.

 CSAD Ceramics review The CSAD Ceramics exhibition in Seattle earlier this year has been reviewed in Ceramics Art and Perception. The reviewer writes in glowing terms about the quality of work on display: “… A vibrancy is apparent throughout the pieces shown… A measure of risk taking is apparent … Each artist has found their stylistic voice … discovered their strengths and run with it. For a brief moment in time, the creative forces of the National Centre for Ceramics, Wales, have found their way across the ocean and illuminated Seattle.” The exhibition was organised by Ingrid Murphy and Dr Natasha Mayo and coincided with NCECA 2012.  Green Apple Gold Award Winner The Quay SA1 Waterfront Swansea project has been awarded Gold at July’s Green Apple Awards, which honour excellence in sustainable construction, design and innovation of products and architectural preservation. The project was undertaken by the Coastal Housing Group with Cardiff Met as a named partner. The Green Apple Awards are hailed as Europe’s longest running environmental awards.  Howard Gardens Gallery The Gallery programme for the autumn term started with the 2012 Masters Exhibition. On show was work from our Fine Art, MDes, Ceramics and Product Design Masters levels programmes; the exhibition catalogue is available to download from the School’s website. This was followed by the WJEC Foundation Awards 2012 which included

Dan Peterson, Swan Lake

examples of work from 16 UK Foundation Studies Courses. October’s exhibition, 2012 Building Wales, organized by the Design Circle showcased images and thoughts behind the construction and development of “A Welsh Landscape” by Coombs Jones Architects+Makers, the winning entry from the inaugural National Eisteddfod pavilion competition. The term ends with Soundings: thought over time, featuring work by Susan Ryland Helen Thomas and Michael Beiert and a one-week painting exhibition organized by the Fine Art department.  Illustrious Illustration Illustration student and graduates have been featured in a number of exhibitions this term. Held at the Milkwood Gallery in conjunction with the Cardiff Design Festival Swan Lake was part of the Pointe Blank Projects devised by the Birmingham Royal Ballet and curated by Claire Hartley. Contributors were invited to create an original artwork based on the story of the ballet and gradates Ellen Leber, Dan Peterson, Ed Fairburn, James Swain and Lucy Freegard were amongst the selected artists included in the exhibition. Also in conjunction with the Design Festival, graduates James Swain and Ruth Mansley and current students Simeon Davies and Layla Holzer were selected to exhibit in Charmed and exhibition inspired by the Unicorn, and George Morton, Lucy Magee and Jacob Cozens all contributed to the production of Off the Chain magazine.

Finally, Lucy Freegard and Thomas Rees were included in Pick and Mix, and exhibition in London.  Ceramics Update The ceramics department is continuing to develop its award winning Learning and Teaching Resources which are now available through Open Access Websites: Jorum, Merlot, TES and CSAD’s National Centre for Ceramics own Virtual Learning Website: http://www.ceramics.cardiffmet.ac.uk.  Cardiff Open The work of 40 artists were shown as part of the Cardiff Open, a city centre exhibition showcasing the best contemporary art and practice in the area. Amongst the selected artists were Illustration student Layla Holzer, research student Sarah Younan, Bill Chambers and numerous CSAD Alumni including Sam Alderidge, Bob Gelsthorpe, Mike Murry, Ruth Mclees and Liam O’Connor to name but a few.  The winner is… Fine Art Printmaking MA student Florence Walkey won the Frank Brangwyn Memorial Prize for an outstanding print at this year’s RE Open. The new printmaking exhibition run by the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers (RE) promotes the best in contemporary printmaking and spotlights new talent. Florence’s A Thousand Pieces of Flesh and Bone was selected from over 4,000 entries with the best 200 being featured in the supporting exhibition at the Bankside Gallery, London. Recent MA

graduate Ian Wilkins also had work featured in the show. Fine Art graduate Alan Goulbourne is one of two recipients of the John Gingell Awards, which were established in honour of an artist whose impact on art education began at CSAD over four decades ago. John Gingell (1935-2007) was a pioneering and passionate artist and arts educator. His own work crossed many media from painting, performance, installation, to sculpture and public art and, in accordance with John’s wishes, the prize will continue his legacy by supporting the career development of emerging artists. Administered by g39 and the Gingell family, the award will provide support towards the development of a body of work culminating in an exhibition at g39, Cardiff in the summer.  Textiles Go Live! This year Textiles students are benefiting from a number of live modules and other opportunities. Lead by Sally Grant, students are working with one of the leading woollen design companies, Melin Tregwynt, as a part of the company’s 100th anniversary celebrations. Company owners, Eifion and Amanda Griffiths, who have developed the family business into an international brand, spent a day with the students, explaining their design ethos and discussing the long history of the Welsh woollen industry. The student brief focuses on ethical and ecological issues, innovative responses to materials and processes, and giving wool a contemporary twist in line with the British Cardiff School of Art & Design 39

CSAD MAGAZINE

Amelia Johnstone, Pete Hathaway & the Pheidippides Machine

Wool Board’s high profile campaign to connect the ancient fabric with young consumers and designers. Organised by Dr Cathy Treadaway, Level 6 textiles students will be working on a ‘live’ project with Festive Productions Ltd. a company based in Cwmbran that manufactures seasonal decorations and giftware. Mr. Jonathan Hughes, Creative Director of the company, introduced the students to the brief in September and the project will culminate with the selection of designs to developed and used by Festive in their international trade showrooms. Selected students will be given work experience opportunities with the company. Philippa Lawrence has three events for textiles students to learn more about professional opportunities post graduation. Eleri Evans from the National Museum Wales will talk about working in the museums and galleries education sector. Charlotte Kingston from Craft in the Bay will also provide a talk and students have been invited to attend a Craft in the Bay workshop delivered by Julia Griffiths Jones who works with wire, metals and textiles. Finally, Philippa has also arranged for three former Textiles students to deliver three professional practice lectures. Finally, former student Abi Trotman, now working as an Exhibitions Coordinator & Education Officer at the Washington Gallery, Penarth, has invited Textiles students to stage an exhibition at the gallery next April. 40 Cardiff School of Art & Design

A section of the quilt made for Mothers of Africa

 David at the London Design Festival Professor David Ferry had work featured in September’s London Design as a representative of one of the official design partners of the Festival, the London Print Studio, in an exhibition called Reincarnation.  Michelle, Angharad & Amelia run the Half Marathon Congratulations to Michelle Brown, Angharad Jones and Amelia Johnstone who both completed the Cardiff Half Marathon in October. Michelle ran the 13 mile half marathon to raise £160 for Macmillan Cancer Support and Angharad completed the course in 2 hours, 19 minutes to raise £175 for CAFOD, a charity working with local partners and communities, responding to emergencies, promoting long-term development and raising public awareness of the causes of poverty. Amelia and product designer Pete Hathaway ran in aid of the Alzheimer’s Society. The pair devised a way of illustrating while running and created one drawing per mile using a scrolling sketchbook machine named ‘Pheidippides’ after the Ancient Greek message-carrying marathon runner. Amelia, Pete and Pheidippides also hope to take part in next year’s New York Marathon.  Artists’ Books Collection Howard Gardens Library launched its Artists’ Books collections on the 18th October. The launch included a talk by Emma Adamson, Head of the Library Division and Tanya Peixoto, book artist and owner of the London bookartbookshop.

 Mothers of Africa Staff, students and friends produced sponsored squares using the themes of either ‘Mothers’ or ‘Africa’ for a quilt under the direction of Maggie Cullinane in aid of the Mother’s of Africa charity. The main activities of the charity revolve around visits to SubSaharan Africa countries to provide training for anaesthetic medical staff at the front-line of maternal care. The quilt, which is currently on show as part of the Mother’s of Africa exhibition in the Pierhead Building in Cardiff Bay, raised over £856. Also in aid of Mothers in Africa, CSAD Programme Administrators Angharad Jones and Vikki Jenkins organised a Zubmathon in October. Around 30 people attended the Saturday class to Zumba for charity and raised over £865. Well done to everyone who took part!

Cardiff Open Art School It doesn’t matter if you’re an experienced artist, are preparing a portfolio to apply for an art, design, architecture or creative industries course or if you’ve never picked up a pencil or paintbrush before, we’ve got something to offer you. What all our staff and students have in common is their passion for art and design so here’s what we’ve got planned for Spring and Summer 2013 - it would be great if you could join us.

Summer term 2013 The Art of Screen Printing Advanced level (5 weeks only) Mondays, starts 22 April, 6.30 - 8.30pm £75.00 Solarplate Etching (5 weeks only) Mondays, starts 22 April, 6.30 - 8.30pm £100.00 Book Binding (4 weeks only) Mondays, starts 13 May, 6.30 - 8.30pm £85.00 Intermediate/Advanced Painting in Oil & Acrylic Mondays, starts 22 April, 7.00 - 9.00pm £120.00 Introduction to DSLR Photography Mondays, starts 22 April, 7.00 - 9.00pm £150.00 Relief Printmaking Tuesdays, starts 23 April, 6.30 - 8.30pm£135.00

All the courses are run at our Howard Gardens Campus and unless otherwise stated run for ten evening sessions. Full course details, profiles of our tutors and lots of images of student work can be found at http://cardiff-school-of-art-and-design.org/coas/ You can simply book and pay over the phone on 029 20416628 or send in a cheque made payable to Cardiff Metropolitan University with the enrolment form available on the website to Cardiff Open Art School, Cardiff School of Art & Design, Howard Gardens Campus, Howard Gardens, Cardiff CF24 0SP. Follow COAS on Twitter at @CardiffCOAS or join our Facebook group Cardiff Open Art School at Cardiff Metropolitan University.

Hand Building & Surface Decoration for Pottery Thursdays, starts 25 April, 6.30 - 8.30pm £150.00 Introduction to DSLR Photography Thursdays starts 25 April, 7.00 - 9.00pm £150.00 Introduction to Painting in Oil & Acrylic Thursdays, starts 25 April, 7.00 - 9.00pm £120.00

Summer holidays 2013 Unpacking your digital SLR Saturday 6 July, 10.00 - 4.00pm

£75.00

Life Drawing Comes Alive Tuesdays, starts 23 April, 7.00 - 9.00pm£125.00

Digital Photography - creating your portfolio (5 weeks only) Wednesdays, starting 3 July £75.00

Life Drawing Wednesdays, starts 24 April, 4.30 - 6.30pm

Screen printing masterclass with Chris Lloyd To be announced

Learn to Use the Potter’s Wheel Wednesdays, starts 24 April, 6.30 - 8.30pm Exploring Drawing Wednesdays, starts 24 April, 7.00 - 9.00pm Developing your Portfolio Thursdays, starts 25 April, 4.30 - 6.30pm

£125.00

Letterpress Printmaking workshop Saturday 27 July, 10.00 - 5.00pm

£85.00

£150.00

£120.00

£165.00

Solarplate Etching Studio Printing Day (for those who have complete the evening course previously) Saturday 27 July, 10.00 - 4.00pm £75.00 Relief Printmaking: Studio Printing Day (for those who have complete the evening course previously) Saturday 3 August, 10.00 - 4.00pm £75.00 Cardiff School of Art & Design 41

CSAD MAGAZINE

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

Undergraduate

Taught Postgraduate

 Cardiff Diploma in Foundation Studies (Art & Design) (Bridgend) - allied programme only  Foundation Degree in Applied Art & Design (Bridgend)  Foundation Degree in Ceramics (Cardiff and The Vale College)  Foundation Degree in Contemporary Textiles Practice (Cardiff and The Vale College)  Foundation Degree in Graphic Communication (Cardiff and The Vale College)  Foundation Degree in Sustainable Building Practice (Bridgend, Pembrokeshire, Llandrillo College, & Coleg Powys)  HNC Building Technology and Management (Ystrad Mynach)

 Postgraduate Certificate in Professional & Research Skills: Art & Design  Master of Fine Art (MFA)  Master of Design (MDes)  Master of Design (MDes) SADI  MA (Cardiff School of Art & Design) Art & Science Artist Designer Maker Communication Death & Visual Culture Ecologies Fine Art Illustration Philosophy Photographic Practice Product Design Textiles

 HND Architectural Design & Technology  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)

 MA Ceramics  MSc Advanced Product Design

Cardiff School of Art & Design

Doctorates and Research Degrees     

MPhil PhD Professional Doctorate in Art Professional Doctorate in Design Professional Doctorate in Ecological Building Practices