BA (Hons)

Staff Research

Lisa Richardson is currently working on a body of work entitled ‘Blood from a Turnip’ and is researching potential exhibition spaces for a solo exhibition of sculptures, films and photographs. This work explores ideas relating to motherhood, the Dorset landscape, Thomas Hardy’s novels and the artist’s body as a site for transformation. She has received funding from the AUCB Research and Scholarship committee to support this research. Her research feeds directly into teaching across a range of units including Interpretation of Texts and Professional Contexts, Contemporary Illustration: Practices and Debates and Narrative on Level 5. Experience of exhibiting, framing/display and the issues relating to the presentation of practice informs her teaching on the Extended Major Project unit as well as supporting the growing number of student exhibitions and events that are being organised across all three levels.

Joel Lardner is continuing with his extensive engagement and the further development of his professional practice having been awarded a 0.4 research fellowship at the University College. Joel contributed to the recent AUCB RAE submission and his current focus is on the development of practice at the edges of the specialist subject area, including collaborative work and an exploration of new contexts for authorial practice. Joel has lectured widely across the sector and has had his work exhibited internationally and his work has appeared in numerous industry leading international publications. Joel has also recently been awarded a professional teaching qualification from the AUCB. Joel has recently been asked to contribute to the AOI ‘Survive’ exhibition at Broadcasting Place in Leeds in March 2010. He is actively engaged in creative discourse with students regarding his research, live projects and professional practise and is developing his research into new contexts for illustration with the level six cohort, developing ideas about the audience interface.

Sharon Beeden’s creative practice relates to a body of work generated on site, associated to being awarded an Artist Residency for the past two years at Cape Cornwall. Her drawings, prints and paintings consider the notion of a ‘small world’ and reflects her passion for capturing the spirit and essence of people and place. This concept recently formed the basis for a Reportage project within the Level 4 Introductory Studies unit, where students were asked to explore a ‘small world’ within Bournemouth. The subsequent results were both diverse in terms of location, ranging from public toilets, telephone boxes to amusement arcades and launderettes, and equally innovative, in terms of outcomes.

Matt Johnson has delivered a paper to the Race, Religion and Representation Conference, University of Lodz, Poland on Status, heroism and the morality of wealth. Matt is an Erasmus scholar, involved in a staff teaching exchange to Lahti Institute of Design, Finland, in October 2009, and he is organising a cross-course collaborative project with a fellow Erasmus scholar from the Lahti Institute scheduled to take place in March 2010. His position as a legal and ethics adviser for the AOI supports his teaching in relation to business and professional skills across a range of units and has advised students across disciplines on professional practice. Matt has exhibited widely and lectured internationally and extensively across the sector, and he has recently been asked to contribute to the AOI ‘Survive’ exhibition at Broadcasting Place in Leeds in March 2010. Matt’s practice based research work combines traditional approaches to image making with new media. Recent work explores landscape drawing with digital film and printmaking, in an attempt to explore the relationship between natural and man-made forms. He regularly engages with students in practice-based workshops in drawing, printmaking and photography.

Dr Anna Middleton maintains on-going research in preparation for forthcoming academic conferences and exhibition organization. Dr Anna Middleton delivered a paper; Interdisciplinary Investigations: The Intersection of Medical Science, Art practice and Art History in April 2009 for the Association of Art Historian’s Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University and has continued to work as freelance academic reader, most recently for Polity Press in November 2009. She received funding from the Research Committee in order to produce research papers relating to post-doctoral research and related, inter-disciplinary contexts from experimental typography; postmodernism and contemporary design practice and Understanding theory through practice projects. Some research work and information from design-based conferences has fed into curriculum development for the theory units on both Level 4 and 5 of the course and helps maintain and develop the academic currency of the units within the course discipline. Current research has directly informed curriculum developments and contributed to other units in level 4 and 5 such as Word and Image (Level 4), Interpretation of Text and Narrative (level 5) as well as more general understandings of digital and post-digital design practices and how they relate to concepts of postmodernism and revisionist accounts of those discourses. Issues of craft and the interest in more analogue or narrative based design has also been a research interest and research material gathered for these topics has been used and integrated into lecture and seminar work for level 4 and 5. Current practice based research in collaboration with professional regional artists explores the development of ‘Theory Into Practice’. The project involves scientific discourses and images that are being manipulated within an analogue context then digitally enhanced and used as patterns for silk-screen printing fabric. Concepts of materiality, the hyper-real and meaning in visual design underpin the visual outcomes. Ongoing post-doctoral research also relates to wider applications of methodological approaches to visual culture and visual communication in design practices such as linguistic, discursive and contextual approaches and more post-structuralist understandings of visual communication that relate to ideas generation and visual practice. Part of this research is being developed by Dr Anna Middleton for research for a forthcoming title for AVA publishers in their Basics: Graphic Design series.