The Good Grief Workshop is a unique Canadian group-delivered creative arts program for children who have experienced the death of a loved one. The purpose of the present study was to acquire a detailed understanding of the program with the additional intent of identifying implications for the school context. A case study research design was used and data collected from multiple sources. The student researcher participated in two training sessions for volunteer facilitators and then participated as a facilitator in the November 2006 offering of the Good Grief Workshop in Montreal, Quebec. Six individuals were interviewed: four volunteer facilitators, two former child participants, one of whom subsequently returned as a volunteer facilitator. Results suggest that the program is exemplary and represents contemporary directions in theory and practice. Findings include a rich description of the program illustrated with photos, and eight themes identified in the interview data: (a) motivation for participating in the workshop; (b) the importance of finding and creating a safe place, (c) being open in discussing death, (d) the experience of grief as not something you get over, (e) death education in schools, (f) challenges associated with participating in the workshop, (g) the use of music as an emotional release, and (h) ideas for future directions. Findings have implications for researchers as well as for helping professionals working with children and their families.

The Good Grief Workshop is a unique Canadian group-delivered creative arts program for children who have experienced the death of a loved one. The purpose of the present study was to acquire a detailed understanding of the program with the additional intent of identifying implications for the school context. A case study research design was used and data collected from multiple sources. The student researcher participated in two training sessions for volunteer facilitators and then participated as a facilitator in the November 2006 offering of the Good Grief Workshop in Montreal, Quebec. Six individuals were interviewed: four volunteer facilitators, two former child participants, one of whom subsequently returned as a volunteer facilitator. Results suggest that the program is exemplary and represents contemporary directions in theory and practice. Findings include a rich description of the program illustrated with photos, and eight themes identified in the interview data: (a) motivation for participating in the workshop; (b) the importance of finding and creating a safe place, (c) being open in discussing death, (d) the experience of grief as not something you get over, (e) death education in schools, (f) challenges associated with participating in the workshop, (g) the use of music as an emotional release, and (h) ideas for future directions. Findings have implications for researchers as well as for helping professionals working with children and their families.

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This thesis takes as its point of departure Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s conceptualization of art. Art for them is the expression of A Life in the living. A Life is the ontological and genetic condition of that which we are and ordinarily experience, it is the vital and material transcendental plane of immanence which characterizes Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology. Their conceptualization of art, however, sits uncomfortably with contemporary art in rejecting conceptual and photographic practices, and in its radical rejection of human experience. The aim of this thesis is to expand their conceptualization of art whilst remaining close to what is argued to be its core or essence: a commitment to A Life. This thesis explores three paradigms of commitment to A Life that move beyond the paradigm of A Life in the living. These paradigms are developed through the application of concepts developed by Deleuze and Guattari to contemporary mediums and artworks, with the aim of broadening the relevance of their philosophy for contemporary artistic practices. Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetics is analyzed and expanded through an engagement with works by Francis Bacon, Thomas Struth, Pierre Huyghe, Francis Alÿs and Peter Doig. By finding a commonality between these artists in their commitment to A Life, this thesis hopes to develop a conceptualization of art which allows us to understand how contemporary art practices engage with A Life, the infinite inside which we live and which lives inside us.

Despite the ‘post-media condition’ of contemporary practice, some materials continue to be more equal than others. Cloth has a problematic history in Western art, frequently dismissed for its perceived inability to convey meaning beyond its own materiality, or a narrow idea of identity. The following thesis reconsiders this perspective and argues that it arose from the concurrence of heterogeneous post-war groups such as Post-Minimalism, and Fiber and Tapestry Movements, and the plethora of textile-based work they created. I review the accompanying critical responses to demonstrate how they sought to differentiate the use of fabric within these movements through the entrenchment of boundaries between valourised ‘art’ and denigrated ‘craft’. The thesis analyses how these categories were further complicated by mismatched lexicons of textile terminology. While fibre movements referred overtly and directly to fabric, the coinciding art theory primarily described its functions and affectations. We talk about the ‘softness’ of Oldenburg’s sculptures, not the cloth that makes them. This research argues that while there has been increasing scholarship surrounding these suppressed ‘craft’ textile practices, there is little exploration of the parallel and distinct material history of fabric within Western canonical Fine Art. The project addresses this asymmetry by focusing on the unspoken instances of cloth in mainstream twentieth century sculptural work and identifying the particular ways that artists have used this material. Artists have long employed the quotidian and shifting nature of textiles to convey ideas of instability, an impulse that can be traced back to Marcel Duchamp's 1913 work 3 Standard Stoppages. In order to critically interrogate the existing histories of textiles in twentieth century sculptural practices, the historical narratives presented in a number of exhibitions and catalogues are investigated. These accounts are considered in relation to three case studies that examine instances of structural, spatial and temporal instability in which cloth disrupts and untethers notions of fixed forms and static spaces. Investigating these narratives highlights historical cloth omissions, allowing for an understanding of how amnesiatic textile gaps affect practitioners today. My own cloth-based sculptural practice gives me a material authority and alternative perspective with which to question these received art historical narratives, and that in turn allows me to re-contextualise my decision to consistently work with this medium. My research-led practice centres on fabric objects that reference architectural forms; pieces that explore and exploit the unstable nature of cloth through their unfixed nature, and that I constantly reposition, resisting a final placement. By documenting these movements through photography and video, different temporalities are suggested, and a series of works that fluctuate between stasis and fluidity, order and chaos, are created. Accompanying these works are passages in the dissertation that reflectively a ddress the process of making and contending with the legacy of cloth. This project argues that fabric has been under-recognised but widely used in sculptural practices for over a century. Through explicitly articulating this narrative, a richer historical context for works that use fabric can be ascertained, and the insufficient complement of textile language in contemporary artistic discourse can be redressed.

This practice-led PhD aims to answer the question: how can processual/improvisation, spatial and plurilingual poetics be used to adapt text from other sources in order to create new effective forms? T=Y=W=Y=S=O=G=I=O=N is a discursive long sequence that aims to answer this question through variously translating, transforming, appropriating and adapting text drawn from the Welsh medieval cycle of stories the Mabinogi. In addition, this thesis uses specifically the Oxford Jesus College MS. 111, (The Red Book of Hergest) as its source. The creative work is broken into three sections which deal with these separate motifs. ‘The Red Book of Hergest Ward’ uses spatial and multilingual motifs to explore the word Hergest. ‘Cych’ explores spatial and improvisatory motifs. Finally, ‘Branwen’ deals with improvisation and adaptation. While the creative work seeks to explore the three critical strands of the thesis it also obeys its own aesthetic logic, and in so doing omits and includes different thematic motifs beyond the remit of the three critical chapters. The critical part of the thesis explores the individual thematic strands separately, answering more specific questions that address aspects of the creative work. The foundation of these chapters are close-read examples of authors who use the relevant approaches in their work. Finally, I discuss writers who show hybridity in their work incorporating more than one of these (critical) strands in their writing, David Jones as an example of a writer who uses all three strands. Comparisons with my own work are drawn throughout this thesis. Audio recordings of performed work from the creative portfolio accompanies this thesis, recorded by and with improvised accompaniment from Dario Lozano-Thornton.

This thesis ‘Making places: performative arts practices in the city’ results from a research project focused on a practice of placemaking informed by performative and social practice artforms. The research is concerned with grassroots arts-led interventions in the urban realm, participated in by citizens with an aim to improve the urban lived experience and to form and cultivate connections between people, place and community. This has come to be termed in the course of the research ‘social practice placemaking’ (social practice placemaking3), a practice observed in the placemaking sector as an approach that is informed by social practice arts and an attention on these arts as a means of urban revitalization. Operating at the intersection of arts, placemaking and urban theory, and place attachment thinking, the research has used a comparative approach based on participant observation and interviews at three case study sites: Art Tunnel Smithfield, Dublin, an outdoor art gallery and garden space; The Drawing Shed, London, a social arts practice predominantly operating in housing estates in Walthamstow and Wandsworth; and Big Car, Indianapolis, an arts organisation operating across the whole of this Midwest USA city. Findings are along three themes. Firstly, of the art practice and process of social practice placemaking, revealing the collaborative social practice placemaking art experience. Secondly, of urban space and place and social practice placemaking as a means of reinterpreting both spatial and cultural activities of the city. Thirdly, of place attachment and social practice placemaking and its role in and citizenship conscientisation and the politics of social practice placemaking activity in the urban public realm. The research presents an original typology of practice for the placemaking sector and examines the practice, process and role of arts in the placemaking sector and positions social practice placemaking in the social practice arts field. Significantly, the presentation of data includes the voice of the artist and non-artist protagonists. The research has various implications for the sector. Firstly, for creative and urban professionals and communities, by revealing how social practice placemaking can deepen an understanding of the relative agencies of the various modes of arts in place. Secondly, how this practice may advance placemaking practice as a whole by its use to better understand differences and similarities between placemakings within the placemaking sector, and from this, better communicate its practices to constituent stakeholders in the creative, urban design and community sectors. Thirdly, how this practice can inform the understanding of collective progressive citizenship in the urban realm and inform generative planning practices.

The opening of the Commonwealth Institute in London in 1962 was a striking expression of confidence in the emergence of a united and diverse Commonwealth. For its director Kenneth Bradley, the ambition was to create a building that would be “a worthy expression of the Commonwealth of today and tomorrow”.1 For Bradley, the Institute’s hyperbolic paraboloid roof and its displays inside were positive representations of the political and social ideals which marked the emergence of the new Commonwealth. However, despite the such a forward-looking ethos, the building was also a legacy of Britain’s imperial past; many of the exhibits inside were developed by the Commonwealth Institute’s predecessor, the Imperial Institute, where they had long supplied material for the domestic imagination of the British Empire. This thesis is the first diachronic study of the Imperial Institute and the Commonwealth Institute’s exhibition galleries, starting with their establishment in 1887 and ending with their closure in 1997. If the display of Empire depended on the encyclopaedic assemblage of natural resources, then the presentation of the Commonwealth depended on the legibility of distinct national cultures assembled within an equitable framework. It analyses the manner in which such imaginative projections shade from one to the other in order to understand how the transition from Empire to Commonwealth was articulated to the British public. Drawing on a interdisciplinary framework including museum studies and critical postcolonial theory, this design-historical study locates the Institute’s exhibition galleries as significant spaces through which ideas about imperial trade, national identity and belonging were communicated during processes of imperial rule and decolonisation. Paying close attention to the methods by which the concepts of Empire and Commonwealth are ‘imagined’ reveals important clues about how specific techniques of display, not just the things shown, can convey powerful messages. This thesis shows how the Institute specialised in immersive display technologies which engaged visitors through the senses, and argues that such techniques reinforced the sustenance of an imperial political economy. Moreover, it demonstrates how such displays could, nonetheless, be destabilised by the political negotiations that characterised the processes of decolonisation. In doing so, this thesis locates the ambiguities of imperial discourse and investigates how colonial stereotypes continue to resonate long after the end of Empire. As representations of both Empire and Commonwealth, the Institute’s exhibition galleries were simultaneously powerful and unsteady projections of British influence.