The Politics of Pace

28 June 2017

Conference workshop in: The Politics of Place, Sheffield Hallam Space & Place Group

Participants will be provided with a range of images of spaces (for example shop interiors, domestic spaces, train stations, meat packing factories), and will be asked to use these images to ‘look’ at our university / educational spaces. The activity of ‘looking’ involves participants exploring the surrounding rooms and buildings to make hybrid images on their smart phones that superimpose the supplied images onto the ‘real’ educational spaces. We are particularly interested in the ways educational spaces might suggest other forms of spaces. Participants will reconvene to load their photographs onto a laptop; images will be projected for an informal 'art crit’ where we will jointly read the politics of these hybrid spaces.

Studio inside, Studio outside is a research project developed by James Corazzo (Graphic Design), Dr. Becky Shaw (Reader Fine Art) and Dr. Jerome Harrington (Fine Art) at Sheffield Hallam University.

https://lukebennett13.wordpress.com/2017/05/04/the-politics-of-place-the-2017-shu-space-place-group-workshop-28-june-2017/

Practice based PhD completed

February 2016

In 2016 I completed my Practice based PhD. The title of my research was Process made visible: in and outside the object.

The social and theoretical context for my research is the well- documented sense of estrangement from manufacture processes of the materials and objects that surround us (described by a range of thinkers: Karl Marx, James Heartfield, Matthew Crawford, or the artist Robert Morris).

At the centre of the study is ‘The Archive of Manufacture’, an ‘archival artwork’ (Hal Foster) especially collated for the research. The Archive responds to the question – how do we know how something is made - and gathers together ‘points of visibility’ - secondary sources where process is made visible, from industry, craft, popular culture, and press coverage.

Methods of art practice were employed as critical forms of looking to explore specific examples from The Archive. In particular, close reading as a ‘meticulous visual analysis’ (Shepard Steiner), was developed to incorporate the written form of ekphrasis, and interrogative material and visual making processes.

Through the production of a body of artworks, I explored the misunderstandings and mythologising of making process that can form through misreading visual and material evidence, thereby describing a major effect of our distanced relationship with manufacture as described by Marx etc

Project Supervisors: Becky Shaw (Director of Study), Penny McCarthy, Andrew Sneddon

Examiners: Professor Paul Seawright (Ulster University), Dr Rowan Bailey (University of Huddersfield), Professor Ian Gwilt (Sheffield Hallam University)

The glass-maker [without glass]

6 September 2015 ​ Conference presentation in: Extreme Glass: a focus on process and material. Northlands Creative Glass, Lybster, Scotland

​ My presentation responds to / and explores one of the question posed by this conference: “how far is it possible to push the idea of ‘the glass-maker?” ​ By presenting recent work (both from my current PhD, and my wider practice) I want to explore the ‘edges’ of glass practice and investigate an expanded conception of ‘the glass maker’ - The glass-maker (without glass). ​ I use this title because although glass and glass making are a core part of my investigation – none of the work I show involves me actually making glass. Instead the work I will show includes producing an archive – writing – drawing - animation – film, and using teaching projects as a method to produce work. ​ I want this presentation to function as a provocation for glass as an area activity which is material specific / material centric – what does it mean to think about glass but not use it?