Research Portfolios | University for the Creative Arts

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Innovative Practice-Based
Creative Research

This collection of research folios represents some of the practice research projects developed by academic staff at UCA and submitted to REF 2021.

The folios present a rich and diverse range of approaches to practice research across diverse areas of creative practice, including art, performance, architecture, crafts, film, textiles and photography. The folios can be downloaded, providing details of each project including the research context, research methods and processes, outcomes and dissemination.

The intention of this collection is to show the many ways in which creative practice research may be realised. As an online and open-access platform, it is freely available to all. Details of more research outputs by UCA staff can be found at UCA Open Research.

UCA’s Research Excellence 2014-2021 Catalogue

All the research outputs submitted by UCA in REF 2021, including written outputs (books, chapters and journal papers) as well as practice outputs, are listed in the REF2021 Catalogue.

Download the Catalogue

Amanda Couch

Two books, two exhibitions, a journal article and a number of performances which explores and enacts embodied ways of knowing and becoming.

Andrew Kotting

Feature film, double vinyl LP and publication telling the story of a whalebone found washed up on the shores of the Scottish Island of Harris and made into a box by artist Steven Dilworth.

Andrew Kotting

A crossover project between narrative film, contemporary art, performance and documentary. The film was inspired by the award-winning play Ivan And The Dogs by Hattie Naylor.

Anna Fox

Series of images of the leisure industry in Beauvais, France exploring the way leisure has become embedded in contemporary society with equal status to work.

Anna Fox

Photographs commissioned by the Glynn Vivian Gallery and based on the Dillwyn archive. The project investigates how space reserved for the leisured classes is being democratised today.

Anthony Heywood

For Pafos 2017, European Capital of Culture, Heywood created a table sculpture, using reclaimed timber collected from Cyprus and neighbouring countries symbolically bringing together nations.

Anna Fox

Photographs of Butlin’s Resort, Bognor Regis, showing the great British fascination with dressing up and investigating sex/gender inversions in British leisure.

Andrew Kotting

Film, publication and performances that commenced with a pilgrimage in memory of Edith Swan-Neck, wife of King Harold. A poetic odyssey taking the audience from 1066 to the present day.

Andrea Gregson

Two exhibitions (Grizelda Forest Visitor Centre gallery, Cumbria and Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London) exploring the connections and conflicts between local industry and nature.

Ashley Howard

An exhibition of ceramic works and accompanying catalogue. The research began in 2014 when Ashley Howard took up a residency at Shigaraki Ceramics Cultural Park in Japan.

Erasure

Scouring, scrubbing, sweeping, all these words refer to different ways of cleaning and were used to make the works in this exhibition at Hanmi Gallery, Seoul.

Bashir Makhoul and Gordon Hon

Edited collection and exhibition providing a practical investigation and theorizing of contemporary Palestinian art.

Birgitta Hosea

Participatory performances investigating whether it is possible to make site-specific, live animation and aiming to combat the vulnerability that women and minority groups feel about walking in the city at night.

Catherine Yass

Film and light-box photographs that depict a grand piano circling above the BBC Television Centre during its conversion into residential property.

Catherine Yass

Film by a Turner nominee Catherine Yass which acts as a protest against a London urban development site.

Ori Gersht

Based on Zen temple gardens around Kyoto, the research interrogates the evolving nature of the camera, which increasingly creates our world rather than only documenting or recording it.

More about Floating World

Catherine Yass

A film of the Royal London Hospital as it is being demolished. The project builds on Yass’s concern with public institutions and her ongoing focus on verticality.

Connor Kelly

An ongoing research project shared by Conor Kelly, Moyra Derby, Nicky Hamlyn, Joan Key, and Jost Münster who have developed a model of collective and experimental installations.

Chris Hunt and Mavernie Cunningham

Film installation and spoken performance performed at the Whitstable Biennale of Film and Performance in 2018. The work explores themes of departure, migration, race, slavery, and nostalgia.

Francis Summers

Video work, journal article and poem investigating how the trope of grieving points towards alternate or subcultural online culture that refuses formatted play.

Chris Rutter and Evelyn Bennett

Live performances that tested the constraints of the dancing body, exploring liveness and improvisation against inherent restrictions in bodily movement, sound, and form.

Greig Burgoyne

Exhibition exploring the themes of chance and risk in historical and contemporary art practices. Burgoyne’s artworks consisted of a series of live, then subsequently projected, drawing performances within the gallery.

Iro Tsavala

Illustrator Tsavala and author Martin investigate the parallel development of text and images as a new method of constructing narrative, allowing for different interpretations by each reader.

Edward Chell

These exhibitions explore the concept of ‘phytopia’, the influence plants and organic forms have on nearly every aspect of visual culture, and the ‘Tree of Life’ motif which is present in many cultures and traditions.

Emmanuelle Waeckerlé

O aims to make sense of erotic literature by bringing together the history of Story of O, the 1954 erotic French novel, with a graphic reworking of the text in both English and French, audio work and related text scores.

Edward Chell

This exhibition celebrates the (re)discovery of 19th century botanist Anna Atkins’ work and investigates the discrepancies and overlaps found between creative expression and scientific investigation.

Mike Marshall

Series of photographic prints showing different arrangement of four wooden blocks from a game of Jenga. The research explores the relationship between contemplation and action.

Jason Dee

The research explores how the fragmented layers and edges of cinema could be used to examine how the analogue past is viewed through the digital present.

Karen Knorr

Photographic series investigating Japan's cultural heritage and the role of animal life within it. Knorr digitally places images of animals into photographs of architectural heritage sites.

Gabor Stark

Public art projects addressing the liminal space between architecture, installation and sculpture, and investigating the capability of collaborative art practice to impact on the co-creation of the civic urban realm.

George Barber

Akula Dream is part of a series of films that propose poetry can be as effective as documentary in communicating the tragedy of war, politics, and environmental crisis.

George Barber

These two films are part of Barber’s The Mindset Suite series of films, collectively proposing that poetry can be as effective as documentary in communicating the tragedy of war, politics, and environmental crisis.

Lesley Millar

The exhibition Fabric: Touch and Identity at Compton Verney and The Erotic Cloth book focus on the use of contemporary and historical artworks to materialise the sensuous relationship between the body and cloth.

Kathleen Rogers

This video installation and series of photographs explore the conceptual and visual expression of stem cells in regenerative medicine.

Edward Thompson

A creative investigation into the medium of infrared photography, presenting new interpretations of experiments made by scientists in the 20th century.

Harry Whalley

Five components of research (musical compositions and poetry) collectively respond to geological process and geological time.

Jean Wainwright

An article and three chapters that explore the ethical, art-historical and methodological questions raised when conversing with artists.

Peipei Yu

This large scale wall installation of 112 glazed porcelain tiles presents an abstracted world map based on digital layering and manipulation of different cartographic representations of the world.

Jessica Voorsanger

This exhibition and accompanying book by Jessica Voorsanger, Bob and Roberta Smith RA and their daughter Etta Voorsanger-Brill explore the role of women artists and gender prejudice in the art world.

John Dargan

Animated documentary commissioned by Dover Arts Development and based on the account a WW1 soldier at the Dover fort.

Lesley Millar

Exhibitions and catalogue publication exploring the contemporary relevance of the traditional Gobelins tapestry technique as a carrier of narrative reflecting its time of making.

Lesley Millar

Exhibition re-contextualising contemporary craft practices through the re-mediation of traditional, enduring skills. This was exemplified by works which engage with the ephemeral and transient culture of Kawaii.

Ori Gersht

Series of photographs and video installation investigating the still-life form in an exploration of the relationship between painting and photography, and between virtual and material worlds.

Maren Hahnfeld

The films North of Eden and Winter in Eden reflect the perspectives of members of the remote community of Eden in Southern Idaho and the artist and researcher Hahnfeld, an outsider to the community.

Mark Selby

The research explores the use of automated technology in relation to the manufacture of sculptural objects ‘by hand’.

Minna Pöllänen

These exhibitions use multi-material installations to explore the relationship between art and feminist activism and how to encourage seepages between the two through objects.

Jean Wainwright

Two exhibitions and a book that together explore the different ways contemporary artists have engaged with seas and oceans.

Neil Bottle

Series of 13 wall-hung textile art works investigating society’s transition from analogue to digital processes for the creation of family photographs and the storage, preservation and transmission of memories.

Rebecca Waterworth

A recording of collaborative hearings and mis-hearings, collectively shaped through a range of experimental, improvisational and traditional recording techniques working with sound and music.

Sam McElhinney

Free multi-platform software tool designed as an intuitive interface to advance the learning and adoption of spatial analysis techniques.

Shelly Goldsmith

Textiles artworks concerned with exploring the fine veneer of cloth that stands between us and the world, for an exploration of the psychological theory ‘Locus of Control’.

Simon Olding

International exhibition and book on British studio pottery commissioned by the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), Yale University in a collaboration with the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.

Steffi Klenz

Research centred on a 1973 Associated Press archive photograph of a damaged section of the Berlin Wall. The work embraces repetition as a technique of abstraction, creating images through a process of mutation.

Sława Harasymowicz

Installation aiming to bring back the lost voice of T.S. Eliot’s wife Vivienne. Harasymowicz also curated a group exhibition of female artists of non-British origin whose works tackled issues of violence, otherness, and power.

Steffi Klenz

In 'Beun', images of trauma, in particular of World War II concentration camps, are reconsidered using new digital technologies. The work embraces repetition as a technique of abstraction.

Stephen Connolly

The film explores how the inequities embedded in everyday urban landscapes in North America can be represented in image and sound.

Simon Olding

Exhibitions at the Crafts Study Centre in Farnham, UK, and the Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art in Japan, both exploring the life of the influential studio potter.

Stephen Featherstone

Film combining live-action and animation in collaboration with Stopgap Dance Company. It depicts Stopgap’s inclusive approach to dance by representing both disabled and non-disabled dancers.

Sunil Gupta

Series of photographs depicting the lives of seventeen queer women, men and trans people in India’s capital city, Delhi.

Sunil Gupta

Series of black & white photographs documenting the emergence of gay public space in New-York.