Discussions about sexuality often entail examinations of ethics and acceptable behaviors. It is difficult to create an environment in which honest conversations about sexual mores are supported and discussed without judgment My aim in this thesis work is to explore such taboo sexual practices as dominant/submissive relationships without attempting to define its ethics or psychological indications, as well as document the progress of my artwork as I examine both my sexuality and that of the women of my generation. I have created a series of drawings and photo-collage constructions entitled Willing Participant, which visually explores sexual practices that have traditionally been deemed deviant or unacceptable. The research for this thesis includes an examination of my visual work preceding this series, a survey of the sexual attitudes of my peers and research in established Feminist theory. The result of this work is a springboard from which my artwork can progress? alongside my generations emergent and evolving sexuality.

In recent years, public art has evolved to take a central role in urban regeneration in public places and, more recently, has been integrated into city branding. Published research and selected reports revealed that public art frequently opens up sensitive issues like social acceptance, ownership and cultural relevance, and showed that a participation-based approach can be used to address these issues. The literature review confirmed the main issues and the need for a theoretical platform to support future practice. The researcher has been a professional practitioner in the field for many years and was aware of the gap between contemporary practice and academic underpinning, resulting in divergent practices with unpredictable outcomes. Key elements found in the secondary research and overlaid with the fieldwork experience of the researcher were combined to create an analytical tool to analyse 46 practical cases of public art and design. This revealed five invitation elements [triggers to induce participation] which were found to be connected to four participation elements [patterns of participation]. A first conceptual model was formulated to investigate the interactions and transformation processes between these invitation and participation elements. The model was further developed and its validity was tested through two distinctive action-based research projects in which the researcher played a leading role. The projects confirmed the validity of the transformation process in the model and emergent pragmatic value. Expert interviews confirmed the validity of the model and understanding of how it may become sustainable, resulting in a toolkit for implementation to engender debate in the academic and practitioner community. The final theoretical model offers new thinking for leading public art and design practitioners and related stakeholders, to achieve consistent add-value.

This PhD by publication critically reviews the background, context, and reception of work published from 1978-2008. The work surveyed, comprises popular music biography, texts on art school influenced bohemia and counterculture, and on celebrity and fan culture. The social and cultural context of the work is mapped and methodological and stylistic issues addressed. The origins of the punk aesthetic through the Sex Pistols is charted. The turn in celebrity studies towards a "fan culture" based approach is demonstrated by the publication of 'Starlust' in 1985. Subsequent work on "fan culture" is discussed. Issues relating to researching and theorising popular culture and cultural and design history are debated. Extracts from the publications cited are provided.

This thesis explores the way in which interior decorating developed as a practice during the interwar period in Britain and seeks to address broader contexts of gender, class, taste and styles. While traditional design histories have tracked the development of the interior design model through a direct sequence of movements and ideologies through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this thesis addresses issues which have been problematic within the context of art and design history. It acknowledges the more linear dimension of the original strand and seeks to offer a complementary appraisal which considers and appreciates the role of class, wealth and privilege and deconstructs boundaries which have marginalized gender and obscured certain important influences. The study examines the way in which decorators, many of whom were female, negotiated a design agenda which engaged with modernity without fully renouncing hard-fought signifiers of their class, taste and individuality. It argues that in the development of its practices, significant alliances were formed with fashion and that the vital role performed by media representation and social commentary underpinned its commercial profile and provided the public locus of its discourse. The nature of professional decorating is explored against a background of emerging practices in the first decades of the twentieth-century which included the antiques trade; grand scale establishments such as Lenygon & Morant, White Allom, Thornton-Smith and Keebles; department-store studios including those at Heal’s, Waring & Gillow and Fortnum & Mason; and individual practitioners and designers including Syrie Maugham, Sibyl Colefax, Dolly Mann and Ronald Fleming. In a period rife with social and political upheavals and conflicting ideologies as well as technological advancement and life-style changes, the study’s analysis aims to provide a broader understanding of the way in which decorators proactively negotiated such conditions and presented a cultural and aesthetic response to modernity through the diversity of their styles.

This thesis aims to investigate students’ qualitative experiences of assessment in art and design higher education using storytelling and visual representations. It aims to investigate whether collaborative storytelling can encourage students to reflect on, and learn from, each others’ experiences of assessment. In order to examine these aims, an on-line tool, ‘StoriesAbout… Assessment’ was designed and developed, based on an adapted model of storytelling as a reflective tool in higher education. Visual representations of students’ experiences were also used to identify the affective aspects of the assessment experience. In using these novel methods, the research aimed to highlight the whole student learning experience and how assessment affects that experience. Traditional methods of surveying and evaluation do not usually focus on this, nor do they provide a reflective, learning process for students. The analysis of stories led to a greater understanding of students’ experiences of assessment in art and design by identifying a number of key issues: the impact of negative experiences, the need for greater clarity of assessment criteria due to the subjective nature of the discipline, the tension students perceive between their role as creative practitioners in an educational setting and their role in the wider art world, the value of peer support and appropriate feedback. The storytelling model enabled students to view stories from different perspectives and to consider changes to their practice, and the model has demonstrated its efficacy in supporting reflective thinking and transformative learning. The emotional aspect to students’ experiences was particularly evident in their visual representations which often used strong imagery to depict how the stress of assessment affected them. The drawings also showed stereotypes of assessment, such as images of exams, indicating that these previous experiences had become synonymous with assessment, despite there being few formal exams in art and design. In summary, this thesis contributes two new methods for understanding and enhancing the student learning experience, which have been proven in the context of art and design higher education.

The ‘Avant-Garde’ in architecture seems a challenging subject: first, because the term has not yet clearly defined, despite the ubiquity of its use; second, because through that ubiquity it has become a buzz-word that is empty of precise meaning; third, because although this use includes the history of modern architecture, its application to this field has been largely unreflective and often unconsidered, as this thesis demonstrates. There is ambivalence as to which architectures are ‘Avant-Garde’ or should be regarded as ‘Avant-Garde.’ Therefore, there is a challenge in any question such as: what is the Avant-Garde in architecture? How can the architectural Avant-Garde be defined? What is the concept of the Avant-Garde in architecture? My thesis is a sociological conceptualization of the Avant-Garde in architecture. It is based on the mapping of the use the‘ term ‘Avant-Garde’ in architectural history, theory and criticism and its analytical tools are sociological. While it belongs to the above fields, it is informed by art theory and history, cultural studies, and the sociology of the professions, and includes sociological, cultural and political analyses. I suggest that the Avant-Garde is an Operation internal to architecture; a mechanism that does not only describe it but formulates it, motivates it, or else, influences our perception of it. I propose that the Avant-Garde is directed by prominent elements of its internal domain. It includes a filtering process, a rough selection process, and a selection process, by which one or more architectures internal conditions - are introduced to the discipline to renew the profession toward the desired and necessary, for the element who directs the operation, direction (see fig. 2, appendix). The end result of the selection process is what we commonly understand as ‘Avant-Garde’ architecture, e.g. Russian Constructivism or Bauhaus. I also propose that the Avant-Garde lies in and operates within the socio-ideological sphere of architecture and that renewal of the architecture's internal domain is necessary, thus the Avant-Garde is necessary, so as to make architecture respond to each time new external conditions and so endure, as a profession, over time. The Avant-Garde is for me an operation of renewal, a driver of difference and change in architecture (see fig. 1, appendix). The methodology adopted is as follows: I first introduce my analytical tools, some key sociological concepts, and concepts from the ‘Avant-Garde’ discourse (chapter 1). I then examine the filtering process and rough selection process in architectural history: I map the usage of the term in a historiographic corpus and arrive at the more frequently and the less frequently named ‘Avant-Garde’ architectures, which become my two case studies. These are Russian Revolutionary Architecture and Italian Rationalism (chapter 2). The third step is to arrive, through the comparison of my case studies, at those parameters that are crucial in being selected as ‘Avant-Garde,’ i.e. their ‘Avantgardification’ - this occurs after 1960 when the term starts being used describing architectures (part 2). The fourth step is to examine the period of the extended 19605 when the term starts appearing as a means of describing architectures and thus the selection process begins (chapter 6). As a fifth step I research the selection process in the discourse of architectural theory and criticism: I investigate in a particular corpus of writings which architectures, by whom they are chosen as ‘Avant-Garde,’ and the reason why, as Well as which are the concomitant effects of the usage of the term on architecture. In other words, beyond concentrating on which architectures or architectural movements are ‘Avant-Garde' in these writings, I focus on the effects of this selection and denomination (chapter 7). As a sixth step, I examine the selection process of my two case studies in architectural theory and criticism, i.e the Avantgardification of Russian Revolutionary Architecture and less of Italian Rationalism. I investigate when, by whom, and the reason why the first architecture is mostly selected as ‘Avant- Garde,’ as well as which are the concomitant effects on architecture (chapter 8, see also fig. 3, appendix). As a final step I examine the Avant-Garde as a sociological concept based on the key-concepts introduced in chapter 1 (Conclusions). A sociological conceptualization of the Avant-Garde is important for shedding light on issues beyond those of ‘Avant-Garde’ architectures. Through such a concept of the Avant-Garde we recognize issues of the profession, issues which are wider than questions which are directly connected to those architectures selected as such. Looking through the ‘Avant-Garde’ we understand the ways by which architecture is being renewed and Operated. By recognizing the conditions, in which the ‘Avant-Garde’ architectures have been created, and the way and time in which the term was employed to describe them, we understand the mode in which architecture, as a discipline, functions. My thesis is a hermeneutics of the architectural profession through the term ‘Avant-Garde.’

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In an industrial hallway, the pipes and garage doors are echoed with a soft, yet plastic skin.Intense filtered sunlight streams through a sheath of fuchsia--we walk beneath it and it washes our faces with color.A monochromatic corridor is transformed by unexpected passages of turquoise, red, and pink. A demure sheetrock wall becomes ethereal and gentle, luring us behind to only find ourselves.The works are celebratory and act as a landscape, tombstone rubbing, line drawing, and uberquilt--all wrapped into one.

Until the 1960s there was more interest in Josef Albers as an artist. Albers' successful teaching career began in 1923 at the Bauhaus where he was eventually placed in charge of the whole elementary course. Albers' American educational career centered around Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Yale University where he was chairman of the Department of Design.This paper, in effect, will deal with Albers as an artist, teacher, and theorist. Albers as an artist will be explored by a study of Homage to the Square, the series from which much of Albers' present fame is derived. Albers' color theory is contained in his writing, Interaction of Color, a book dedicated to his students which records his method of teaching color. It is the purpose of this paper to show Albers' theory and his paintings, Homage to the Square, exemplify many principles of perception: the realization that color experience is a subjective, inward experience, the Gestalt notions on "good" forms, and the awareness that our knowledge is of the perception of things -- not of things themselves. In order to pursue such a course of study, it will be necessary to investigate other color theories, theories of perception, Albers' work and evaluations of his works.

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE ARTISTBy Matthew Dale Gamble, Master's of Fine ArtA research statement submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master's of Fine Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.Virginia Commonwealth University, 2005Committee Chair: Ruth Bolduan, Associate Professor Painting and PrintmakingIn this paper I start at the very beginning in my life and introduce the reader to my earliest surroundings, the structure of my family life and the dynamic of the individuals involved. I write about the major points of my youth and continue into adulthood, concluding the first chapter with how I came to be here. I than go into my artistic development, major role models, color theory, writings of interest, and my personal theory on art making. I finish the essay with my personal habits and outlook on my future.