This thesis concerns drawing as a form of enquiry, figuration and knowledge, specifically relating to perceptions of the body and embodied experience. The primary method and object of research is the practice of direct mark-making in response to perceptual experience, here termed observational drawing. The skills and habits of this learnt practice have been destabilised: by attempting a phenomenological approach; by drawing faces and bodies in conditions of movement and change; by progressively subtracting elements of manual and visual control. Following from observational drawing, the creative research methodology incorporates other modes of drawing, re-working of scanned drawings, note-making, reading and writing. The thesis includes a written overview (Part I), and a digital archive of drawings (Part II), jointly comprising a narrative of the research process. The study starts by considering drawing as a cognitive process; as a means of understanding corporeality; and as constitutive of embodied knowledge. Through drawing, issues are raised regarding the contingencies and contexts of my own observational practice, and the histories that inhabit it. A retrospective investigation through reading and writing has produced twelve texts, interconnected to become one website/diagram (Part III). This research contributes to the growing recognition of art practice as enquiry. Part III of the thesis locates the manual/visual operations of drawing, and the rhetoric of the hand, eye and mind used to describe them, within an epistemological and historical context. This is done from the specific perspective of the creative practitioner. Reference is made to philosophical, art historical and feminist texts; to delineations of the animal and critiques of anthropocentric accounts of knowledge. The conclusion identifies paradoxes within my practice, and oscillations in modes of looking, that characterise its knowledge-making operations. It is suggested such provisionality enables a multiplicity of figurative outcomes that can contribute to understandings of corporeal experience.

This research aimed to explore the perceptions of students and teachers involved in school plays in secondary schools. The main aims of the study were to investigate teachers’ and students' motivation to participate and to explore their perceptions regarding the potential benefits, challenges and positive and negative impacts of involvement in this activity. Given the limited amount of research investigating this area, literature relating to the arts in education, drama and theatre in education, youth theatre groups and extra-curricular activities have been included in the rationale for studying this area. The study employed a two-phase mixed methodology design, which involved an initial phase of questionnaires completed by students and teachers. This was followed by focus groups with the students and semi-structured interviews with the teachers involved. Results indicate that intrinsic enjoyment of the activity was one of the key motivators for student participants. A number of perceived positive impacts and benefits in relation to the students’ personal and social development were identified, along with a number of perceived challenges and negative impacts in relation to the process. The findings are discussed in relation to relevant psychological theories and the practical implications for the field of Educational Psychology.

This thesis focuses on the ways in which identity and ritual converge within the emancipatory performances of the Trinidad Carnival and the Caribbean inspired Carnivals of Notting Hill and Cardiff. The work looks as the ways in which Carnival performances can be interpreted in order to investigate how these interpretations can be practically utilised within art-making or art presentation. The thesis develops an innovative reading of the word mas' (masquerade/mask) offering new perspectives that can serve as a nucleus for ways of engaging with and analysing Carnival. The consideration of mas' as a performance activity with traits that can be manifested within and outside of the Carnival environment is highly relevant and has been applied in my practical art experiment called 'Mama dat is Mas'. The project also aims to analyse the ways in which re-interpretations of mas' can engage with issues of social anxiety and feelings of displacement.

This thesis offers the first and most comprehensive re-evaluation of the UK government’s Creative Partnerships education policy (2002-11) by drawing together my seven contemporaneous evaluation reports about Creative Partnerships and applying a retrospective and reflexive commentary to them. The term of reference explicitly named or implied in all seven evaluation briefs was to measure the ‘impact,’ of the policy. The principal contribution to new understanding in the thesis is the deconstruction and conceptual analysis of impact in the context of Creative Partnerships, drawing on hermeneutics, critical linguistics and policy analysis (Ozga, 2000; Fairclough, 1989). This clarifies and illustrates the ways in which impact was interpreted by those enacting Creative Partnerships, and proposes a fuller understanding of the term. I identify two contrasting approaches to impact adopted by Creative Partnerships’ national leadership: the politically motivated public relations approach and the substantive approach. I argue that the former approach was driven by the zeitgeist of its time: the political party in power (Ward, 2010; Buckingham and Jones, 2001), the recession after 2010 and the contemporary preference for evidence-based practice (Hargreaves, 2007). Research into ‘logical frameworks’ (Harley, 2005; Rosenthal, 2000) reveals them to be an essential corollary to the latter, substantive approach and shows how the lack of a full logical framework for planning and evaluating Creative Partnerships, impoverished the extent to which its impact was recognised and monitored by those enacting the policy. The thesis shows how the imperatives of the political cycle demanded evidence of the policy’s impact well before more valid and reliable longitudinal impact studies could, in principle, be completed. As a possible solution to this conundrum, the thesis argues that my ‘predictive impact model’ offered plausible predictions about the legacy of Creative Partnerships (Wood and Whitehead, 2012). I suggest that this could be further investigated and applied to similar education policies.

This research project was developed in practice through the production of artwork. Alternating between art and reflection, my aim was to develop a strategy for artistic research that was targeted towards the goal of an intergrative project supported through information technologies. This idea developed out of my position as an artist working at a distance, from a small isalnd (Malta). My problematic, therefore, was focused around the question of territory. This research endeavoured to investigate the notion of "territory" through theories of deterritorialisation and machinic connectivity.

The following dissertation reassess previous explanations for the transmission of Byzantine iconography to western material culture that have been classified by the classical canon as being manifestations of a ‘barbarian’ ruler attempting to legitimize their fledgling culture. The tumultuous relationship between the east and the west during the Late Antique period to the middle Byzantine period and the subsequent visual culture that demonstrates cross-cultural exchange comprises the majority of my analysis. I approach the topic in a case study fashion focusing on five rulers: Theodoric, Charlemagne, and the three Ottos. The source material chosen for this dissertation varies as it has been selected based on claims by previous scholarship of demonstrating some level of Byzantine influence. My re-examination of these works includes the application of an interdisciplinary theoretical framework first postulated by Robert Hayden: Competitive Sharing. This theory suggests that material culture displaying syncretism was not a reflection of admiration, but of competition. An implication of this study is that art was an active participant in the relationship between the east and the west, serving as a communicative device, rather than as the more frequently cited passive role of a conduit for iconographical transmission or cultural legitimization.

This thesis is the first academic study of nineteenth-century artist and drawing master Samuel Lines (1778-1863) and his five sons: Henry Harris Lines (1800-1889), William Rostill Lines (1802-1846), Samuel Rostill Lines (1804-1833), Edward Ashcroft Lines (1807-1875) and Frederick Thomas Lines (1809-1898). The thesis, with its catalogue, has been a result of a collaborative study focusing on a collection of works on paper by the sons of Samuel Lines, from the Permanent Collection of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA). Both the thesis and catalogue aim to re-instate the family’s position as one of Birmingham’s most prominent and distinguished artistic dynasties. The thesis is divided into three chapters and includes a complete and comprehensive catalogue of 56 works on paper by the Lines family in the RBSA Permanent Collection. The catalogue also includes discursive information on the family’s careers otherwise not mentioned in the main thesis itself. The first chapter explores the family’s role in the establishment of the Birmingham Society of Arts (later the RBSA). It also explores the influence of art institutions and industry on the production of the fine and manufactured arts in Birmingham during the nineteenth century. The second chapter discusses the Lines family’s landscape imagery, in relation to prevailing landscape aesthetics and the physically changing landscape of the Midlands. Henry Harris Lines is the main focus of the last chapter which reveals the extent of his skills as archaeologist, antiquarian and artist.

This thesis situates the issue of representing minority groups in the debate over the role of museum spaces in the contemporary society. In particular, the thesis explores the shifting relationships between the indigenous peoples and the wider Taiwanese society which is considered to be influential in forming indigenous representations. I conducted fieldwork in case-study museums, which are considered to be leading museums that are more resourceful and influential, and places beyond museum spaces, such as local cultural centres, indigenous communities and public occasions. In this thesis, I suggest that indigenous representations cannot be understood without considering the power relationships between the represented subjects and their surrounding parties, for example, colonial history and political changes. Because of the nature of museums, this thesis has shown that although there are limitations of museum representations, museums still play a symbolic role in Taiwanese society. I also expanded my examination of indigenous representations beyond museum spaces. I discovered that compared to museum representations, these representations are more responsive to the needs of both indigenous peoples and their audience. I also argued that although indigenous peoples obtain a greater autonomy in self-representing, internal power relationships and hierarchy also play a critical role in these self-representations.

My thesis offers the first full exploration of the literature and art associated with the Genoese noblewoman Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci (1453-1476). Simonetta has gone down in legend as a model of Sandro Botticelli, and most scholarly discussions of her significance are principally concerned with either proving or disproving this theory. My point of departure, rather, is the series of vernacular poems that were written about Simonetta just before and shortly after her early death. I use them to tell a new story, that of the transformation of the historical manna Simonetta into a cultural icon, a literary and visual construct who served the political, aesthetic and pecuniary agendas of her poets and artists. It is an account of the Florentine circles that used women to forge a collective sense of identity, of the emergence of Simonetta and her equally idealised peers as touchstones in contemporary debates regarding beauty and love, and of their corresponding lack of importance as 'real' women in the conservative republic in which they lived. In doing this, my thesis makes an important contribution to our understanding of how and why female beauty was commodified in the poetry and art of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence.

This thesis seeks to contribute to the literature on Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard, but not to merely retread old debates. It is concerned instead with a re-evaluation of the work of both thinkers in a particular context: the experience of the new cultural spaces, of twenty-first century post-industrial cities, and in relation to each other. I argue, following Benjamin, that these spaces function as contemporary ‘dreamhouses’. Deploying a constellation of Benjamin and Baudrillard’s ideas to read such spaces illuminates the experience of the contemporary cityscape around the themes of spectacle, distraction, interactivity, simulation and consumption. The thesis examines how these iconic architectural projects, the technological body of the cityscape, mediate our experiences of art, nature, personal and collective memory, and notions of public culture. I argue that we must read Benjamin again after Baudrillard in order to assess the value of both thinkers’ contribution to the understanding of contemporary cities organisation of space and culture. The contingent proximity that is uncovered when reading the theorists both together and against each other, is one which ultimately argues for the persistence of certain ‘messianic’ moments; traces or interruptions which can be uncovered against the notion of Baudrillardian ‘simulation’. This is to take seriously, rather than dispense with, Baudrillardian ideas. Both Benjamin and Baudrillard, together, are necessary to understand the experience of contemporary urban culture. Taking the form of four empirical encounters between the theoretical concepts and the cultural spaces themselves, I set out to locate these messianic possibilities. Each of the analytical chapters focuses on a different cultural space: The Lowry, Salford; The Deep, Hull, The Sage, Gateshead; and The Public, West Bromwich.