Pain is difficult to communicate and constrict into the verbal or numerical scales commonly used. This thesis explores how photographic images can expand pain dialogue in the consulting room to include aspects of experience frequently omitted using traditional measures. It draws on material generated by the face2 face project, a collaboration with facial pain specialist Professor Joanna Zakrzewska and clinicians and patients from University College London Hospitals. The project has many strands: art workshops for clinicians and patients to attend together; the co-creation of photographs with facial pain patients reflecting their experience at different points in their treatment journey; the creation of an image resource developed as an innovative communication tool for clinical use; and an artist’s film focusing on doctor-patient dialogue and the role of narrative. The thesis argues that photographs of pain placed between patient and clinician can trigger more negotiated dialogue in the consulting room. It presents the co- creation of ‘pain portraits’ with pain sufferers as part of a Fine Art practice, extending the boundaries of what is considered Fine Art by shifting the power- dynamics inherent within the act of portraiture. Through shared control of the lens and a negotiated aesthetic, pain sufferers retain control of how their pain is visualised, instead of being on the passive receiving end of a medical/photographic gaze. The thesis explores and questions the specificities of photography as a particularly apposite medium for this work. It validates and makes visib le the invisible subjective experience of pain, addressing its incommunicable nature. Semiotic and metaphoric analyses of the material reveal the possibility of a developing inter-subjective and trans -cultural iconography for pain. The thesis aims to demonstrate that not only is medicine capable of providing new material for the gallery space, but art is capable of bringing new knowledge into the consulting space.

The present research deals mainly with the terror inflicted by the military and with the fact and concept of victimhood, as presented by the artists Jacques Callot (c. 1592 - 1635) (in the Large Miseries and Misfortunes of War, 1633, for example), Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746 -1828) (in his series of etchings The Disasters of War), and Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) (in his work dealing with the nineteenth-century sociopolitical revolutions and wars such as the Crimean war 1853-1856 and the Franco-Prussian war 1870-1871). These artists recorded and commented upon issues of human rights embedded in the events of their time. They explored visually the multifaceted relationship between victim and victimiser within specific historical contexts. Callot represented victimhood and militaristic terror as an objective truth both thematically and stylistically. Goya on the other hand reached into the gritty realities of war and inflicted terror, imaginary or real, and commented on the consequent violence and distortions of identity that victim and victimiser endure. Daumier spares his viewers the violence and brutality of war and depicts instead its residual effects and consequences on the victims, in a way that somehow invites the viewer to share responsibility. The present thesis explores the way each artist comments on history, gives propaganda a value, and, thus, how they influenced the public opinion. It endeavours to establish the way these artists organized, explained, and presented their understanding of depicted events to the viewer. Certainly, the aforementioned artists have inspired the visual strategies of later image-makers and of war reportage.

This thesis critically investigates and analyses the development of art institutions and museums in the United States of America and Britain viewed through the career of William Shiels, R.S.A. (1783-1857). The first Chapter establishes Shiels’ early career and background in Edinburgh and London. Chapter Two examines the causes that precipitated Shiels to immigrate to New York in 1817, and the American artists he knew in London, as well as discussing the state of the arts in the USA. Shiels’ involvement in the founding and running of the South Carolina Academy of Fine Arts in Charleston is examined in detail in Chapter Three, and Chapter Four details his activities in relation to the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. The thesis establishes how Shiels as a founder, director, exhibition organiser, and agent helped create these two art academies. Importantly, both were artist-led organisations which challenged the authority of the patrician-led society. Thus the first two exhibitions of the South Carolina Academy are investigated in detail, as are the first five exhibitions in Edinburgh, to provide evidence of Shiels’ and his colleagues’ achievements. The artistic networks with which Shiels regularly communicated with in London, Norwich, and Newcastle are also examined in relation to supporting the fledgling Scottish Academy. The last chapter focuses upon the University of Edinburgh’s Museum of Agriculture, founded by Professor David Low in 1832. For the latter Shiels painted over one hundred scientifically accurate large scale portraits of livestock. The influences upon both Shiels and Low are examined in the creation of both the portraits and the Museum. This commission is studied in detail and compared both with earlier precedents, and a competitive project led by the Highland and Agricultural Society.

The work published between 1991-2000 and presented here forms a continuing meditation on, and exploration of contemporary performance. The term 'contemporary performance' is used to refer to practices and discourses in the performance arts that have occurred over the last decade. There Is a particular emphasis on those unstable, hybrid and interdisciplinary areas of performance (including performance art, installation, 'new' dance, 'experimental' theatre, 'live' art) which resist easy definition or categorisation, and which may be further characterised as postmodern in the sense of a reflexive, contextualised and knowingly problematic practice. More specifically the work builds a sustained thesis on contemporary practice and addresses in a number ways some of the central Issues surrounding the placing and practice of performance. It focuses on relationships between performance, textuality, the body, and spatiality; as well as on Issues of context, framing and the place of performance in contemporary culture. The work engages with a number key terms applied to contemporary performance Including ephemerality, displacement, equivalence and ecology, which contribute to the central thesis that contemporary performance Is an unsettled yet always contextualised practice which resists fixities and holds itself between a condition of fragmentation and integration. Contemporary performance is considered from a number of points of view: " as performance: where the events and relationships which constitute performance can be documented and mapped; " as contextuaiised practice: where the conditions that enable or disable performance can be identified; " as process : where the dynamics and media of performance can be situated; " as site : where the frames, surfaces and boundaries of performance can be examined; 7 Acts of Writing - Ric Allsopp (July zooo) Abstract " as ecology: where the Internal and external Interdependencies of performance can be Identified; " as a problematic: where the terms and assumptions that constitute a reading of performance can be Identified and analysed. Two key ideas inform the thesis that emerges from the work: firstly the recognition of an ethical stance towards performance; and secondly the search for a methodology which can disclose the dynamics of performance. The'acts of writing' are seen as an active as well as reflective methodology - an engagement with the event of performance understood as a located, contextualised practice. The published work presented here sets out some of the underlying conditions and methodologies from which my work in the field of contemporary performance proceeds. As a thesis It provides sustained evidence of a 'multiple practice' - that is a set of practices and engagements in the field of research that explore what might be termed the 'ecology' of contemporary performance from various positions. This multiple practice Is a way of locating the work and of attempting to realise an ethical stance towards performance. The recognition that the conditions of contemporary performance depend on an Interdependency of contexts and that performance situates Itself as an unstable catalyst that oscillates between these contexts has enabled me to locate my research into contemporary performance In the variety of ways evidenced by the published output collected here.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.