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Italy's post World War II art and artisan produce and her small and medium scale ceramic production between 1945 and 1958 has been characterised I by an apparent aesthetic synthesis of avant-garde ideals, craft traditions and popular culture. This thesis examines this particular occurrence through a multi and interdisciplinary approach. It has profited from the application of methodologies deriving from the different fields of history, ceramic-, art-, applied art-, design and architectural history and from information obtained from economic and naval histories and tourist guides. This has enabled on the one hand to explain this phenomenon and to situate the ceramic manufacturing sector and the objects within their socio-historical, economic and cultural framework and on the other to employ the objects themselves to challenge dominant ideas within contemporary design-, art-, craft- and ceramic history. The majority of the data that informs this work derives from the analysis of primary sources collected and researched in Italy such as the objects and works themselves, contemporary magazines, archives and interviews. Whilst the time-span has been defined by the perceived birth and decline of the synthesis phenomenon, the period studied in this thesis includes a brief introduction to the tradition and revival of Italy's post-unification ceramic culture and industry and the general aesthetic and artistic developments which have significantly influenced the post 1945 developments. This is followed by an in-depth account of the aesthetic panorama of Italian ceramics between 1945 and 1958 through the works of its protagonists and an analysis of ceramics used as an ornamental medium in architectural structures and modem interior decorating schemes and exteriors. Another part analyses the ceramic industry from a production, economical, commercial and consumption point of view and establishes its significant role not only in relation to Italy's overall economic reconstruction efforts but in the creation of the image that constituted the ideals associated with the 'Made in Italy' label. The last part examines Italian ceramic culture between 1945 and 1958 in its contemporary design, art and craft context. It will present the history of Italian material culture and design as based on an evolutionary model which is incompatible with modernist-lead design histories. In addition, this thesis challenges the under-representation of Italian ceramics within 20th century British ceramic, art, craft and design history and the British approach to ceramic writing and aims to incite further multi and interdisciplinary approach to the history of design.

This thesis re-evaluates Italian Futurist art's relationship with the past, focusing on the years 1909-1919. This aspect of the movement is fundamental to its complex identity, yet has not received prolonged scholarly attention. In order to reconsider Futurism's temporality this thesis focuses on the fine art practice and theoretical writings of Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini, and also the writings on the movement's leader F.T. Marinetti, plus the Florentine Futurists Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici. The historiography of Futurism, which both produces the reductive antipassatista model of the movement and highlights the presence of formal similarities between the Italian artistic tradition and Futurism, is also interrogated. The first part of this thesis argues that the Futurist temporality is more nuanced than the widely accepted model of adoration of the future and repudiation of the past, and that it is related to the conflicting notions of time present in the decade in question. Using the Futurists' concept of time to analyse their relationships with the past, present and future, it argues that the present is the most important temporal mode for Futurism, but that the past and future are part of this present. This thesis approaches Futurism's relationship with Italy's artistic past in tandem with its interrogation of its temporality. This requires a consideration of the temporality of art history, the temporal orientation of avant-gardism and the connotations of tradition and appropriation in art historical practice in order to produce a spiralling art historical model in which returns to the past can be forms of progress. In the second part of this thesis, these possible appropriations of the Italian artistic tradition from Magna Graecia to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo are surveyed, using the reception of earlier art historical periods in early twentieth century Italy to consider how and why the Futurists could have appropriated them. The Futurists' continuation of the recent past of Italian and French art from Italian unification up to the launch of Futurism is also addressed, noting the anti passatismo of these precedents to show that the Futurist relationship with the past, as reconstructed in this thesis, was not sui generis. The aim of this thesis is to bring together Futurism's rhetoric about the past, understanding of time, and relationship with art history in order to offer a more nuanced understanding of the movement's antipassatismo.

This practice led doctoral thesis explores the meaning of spirituality and its manifestation in figUrative art in the wider historical, religious and artistic contexts of Pakistan, alongside the presentation of a new body of artistic work which explores the contemporary possibilities of materialising spirituality in a predominately Muslim culture. The illustrated thesis engages with these two interconnected but distinct forms of research which underpin its two-part structure. The first part, Section A, comprises four chapters which investigate the various cultural and religious contexts of figurative art with particular reference to Muslim painting; Islamic attitudes to figurative art based upon the study of Islamic law and the various interpretations of the Qur'an and the hadith. It assesses the impact of colonial and postcolonial politics on the arts produced in the Indo Pak Sub-continent and the specific area that later came to constitute Pakistan (a pre-dominantly Muslim country) after the Partition of 1947. The section concludes with im exploration of Islamic spiritual ideals of truth and beauty, through Sufi thought, including the significance of for Allah and the concept of Tauhid. or His Oneness. The three chapters in the second part, Section B, represent a critical reflection on ongoing artistic practice as a female figurative artist in contemporary Pakistan. Drawing upon autobiographical material and fieldwork conducted at Sufi shrines as part this research, I discuss the series of more than twenty five paintings, drawings and siœtcnes which aim to materialise the spiritual. These are supported by a thirty minute documentation of the shrine culture with a voice over along with a video installation film on a DVD exploring the concept of fana or 'spiritual annihilation', which is the key aspect of the shrine culture. In conclusion the vital concern of finding means to materialise the concept of spirituality by creating a body of art work is an effort to fill the gap in Pakistani painting the impact of Sufi philosophy on artistic endeavours is yet to be fully explored in contemporary painting in Pakistan.

The core of this research are the paintings and cultural context of Alan Cuthbert, a hitherto un-researched figure who trained in the English art school of the late 1950s under the Constructionists Kenneth and Mary Martin and subsequently became the Head of the Foundation course at Wimbledon School of Art from 1963-1979. Cuthbert produced a substantial body of over a hundred geometric abstract paintings, lecture papers and writing and played a significant role in training future generations of artists and designers from the 1960s onwards. This thesis proposes that Cuthbert is part of a broader tendency in British art schools and that practice and teaching is intimately connected to the reorganisation of the art schools and the introduction of the Foundation course in the early 196Ös. I put forward the argument that through a study of Cuthbert and the shifts in art schools one can map a much under-researched aspect of British art. This research encompasses the three fields of art history, art education and art practice and centres on an artist-lecturer, a subject of study largely ignored by the majority of art historical writing, which is dominated by the modernist model of monographs, movements/groupings, and periods. In placing the case study of an artist-lecturer in a critical and historical context, this study maps British art through organicism, Constructivism and the Bauhaus art school pedagogy and colour as they pertain to basic design and the changes in art school teaching between 1955 and 1979. Through this case study of a colourist and systems painter this thesis suggests a different, Continental orientation for British post-war geometric abstraction.

Conceived inside a chronological frame, which starts in 1948, the year the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London founded, and ends in 1963, when Gillo Dorfles wrote a crucial essay on industrial design, concluding more than a decade of discussions, the thesis aims to examine some artistic and cultural phenomena identified in Italy and Great Britain, and seen as the acknowledgement or as the reaction to modernity. Topics and fields taken in consideration within the thesis are technology, science (fact and fiction), vision of the future, the relationship between arts and the awareness of industrial design as a new discipline. All these aspects, that might seems unusual in relationship with visual arts, are perceived as the expression of a second phase of Modernism. The British personalities included in the thesis are Reyner Banham, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, John McHale, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson, all members of the Independent Group. With the presence of architects, visual artists, photographers, critics and, in a broader sense, designers, the group encompassed a variety of popular interests, with the inclusion of mass‐produced goods. The Italian figures presented in the thesis – Gillo Dorfles, Bruno Munari, Ettore Sottsass and Giuseppe Pinot‐Gallizio – focused on industrial design objects, viewed as a new artistic branch, to promote, to plan or to question. Other recurring figures analysed in the thesis are Max Bill, Asger Jorn and Tomás Maldonado, who give international connections to the themes and British and Italian personalities examined. In order to provide a wider understanding of the 1950s and their crucial function in the story of post‐war Europe, the thesis aims to emphasise the role played at different level by British and Italian visual artists, designers and critics, and explain the reasons that, in the following decade, would push Italy in its industrial miracle and Great Britain at the peak for its popular culture, pop music and fashion creativity.

Connections between the medieval Cornishman and translator John Trevisa (1342-1402) and Glasney College in Cornwall are explored in this thesis to create a deep map about the figure and the site, articulated in a series of micro-narratives or anecdotae. The research combines book-based strategies and performative encounters with people and places, to build a rich, chorographic survey described in images, sound files, objects and texts. A key research problem – how to express the forensic fingerprint of that which is invisible in the historic record – is described as a poetics of uncertainty, a speculative response to information that teeters on the brink of what can be reliably known. This poetics combines multi-modal writing to communicate events in the life of the research, auto-ethnographically, from the point of view of an artist working in the academy. As such, it makes a pedagogical contribution to reflective writing about creative practice. John Trevisa, in the context of contemporary Cornish culture, is a contested figure because his linguistic innovations, in the course of translating key texts from Latin into the English vernacular, make no obvious contribution to Kernowek (Cornish), which is currently undergoing revival from a position of extinction. However, Glasney College, where Trevisa is likely to have been educated, is generally regarded as the centre for the production of the Ordinalia, a cycle of medieval mystery plays written uniquely in Kernowek. This thesis considers the vocabulary that Trevisa innovated, such as concept, fiction, virtual, as crucial to research writing but calls for a new vocabulary to articulate the feminised, labile research processes that characterise this research. It also uses the site and the figure as templates to articulate wider, contemporary systems under stress socially, culturally and politically.

This practice-based PHD project tests cross/trans disciplinary approaches to historical artifacts, set in the field of contemporary fine art research. It is predicated specifically upon my discovery in 2013 of a forgotten deck of fortune-telling cards, hand painted 1906 by the English artist and mystic Austin Osman Spare. Spare's cards had lain unnoticed for almost seventy years within the collection of London's secretive Magic Circle, following their accession to the magic club's museum in 1944; before that date, no record of the deck exists. I respond to this historical find in the form of two interdependent "readings" of the artist's deck of cards. 'Reading One' provides the first in-depth descriptive survey of the deck, as well as establishing its provenance, its place in the artist's oeuvre and within the wider histories of cartomancy. 'Reading Two' adopts complementary approaches that are contingent upon, and shaped by, specific findings within 'Reading One'. These include an elaboration of the deck's release from captivity at The Magic Circle ('Facsimilate and proliferate'), an evaluation of its internal connective logic ('Combinatoric consciousness'), its introduction to the moving image ('Cartomantic cinema') and to historical time ('Making up for lost time'), and the articulation of a card that is missing from the deck ('Casting for the voice of Strength'). The relationship between these two constituent readings is explored as a continuity which follows a cyclical, rather than linear, progression - second readings are contingent upon first but often lead to renewed first readings, leading to renewed second readings and so on. Within this reanimating process, the object can be seen directing its researcher, sometimes casting her/him in particular roles that meet its needs. In the realm of art production, this orientation towards the object implies that the appropriation of historical material by artists be appropriate, with all the psychological, ethical, and political consequences that such encounters entail. While applied here to a single object - Austin Spare's cartomancy deck - the project's model of contingent and continuous knowledge production encourages other researchers to respond innovatively to the directives, even demands of their chosen objects of research.

This thesis investigates the intersection of art, feminism and postwar memory in Japan through lens of artist Yoshiko Shimada. Coinciding with unprecedented geopolitical shifts occurring in the final thaw of the Cold War, the year 1989 marks a fraught moment in Japan when spectres of the nation's imperialist past and its historical entanglements acquired renewed potency in the wake of Emperor Hirohito's death. Born in 159, Shimada gained international prominence in the 1990s for her critique of the national body, in particular, the relationship between women and the imperial wartime state. Her work, which unapologetically confronts Japan's WWII aggressions in Asia, its wider histories of occupation, and issues such as the fiercely contested legacies of former 'comfort women' vitally reflects on the social role and agency of art and artist in a climate of political unease emergent at Showa's close. Based on extensive interviews with the artist and research into her primary archive, this is the first comprehensive survey chronicling Shimad;s twenty-five year oeuvre. It situates her practice between two vectors: feminism in Japan and its engagement with Western scholarship, and traces the 1990s 'feminist turn' led by art historians such as Chino Kaori, who began to champion the application of gender perspectives in the study of Japanese art. Within the wider Asian region, the concurrent development of transnational women's art' networks, exhibitions and publications dovetailed with the burgeoning of performance art was protest. As one of the most outspoken feminist art activists of her generation, Shimada has borne key witness to the changing cultural conditions informing women artists' organised activities and the writing of their social histories. This interdisciplinary study incorporates a range of perspectives drawn from art history and gender studies, film and performance theory, memory and trauma studies, Japanese studies and cross-cultural scholarship. It highlights the formal and conceptual interactions between printmaking, performance, installation and lens-based media in Shimada's practice, and demonstrates the plural ways in which her reflexive aesthetics and visual strategies express the tensions and complexities characterising processes of remembering, forgetting and representing the past. By interweaving arguments about the crucial role of feminism in challenging dominant narratives of nation, race, sex and ethnicity, with critical perspectives central to discourse on postmodern Japan, questions are raised concerning the implications of gender, tradition and popular culture for art produced in this age of anxiety. The recent proliferation of problem-oriented, politically engaged practices following the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami marks an ostensible 'return to the social' and departure from privileged tropes of 'Japaneseness' in artistic experimentation. Taking this into account, this thesis proposes that revisiting the recent history of feminist art interventions reveals valuable insights into the role of art in understanding and addressing trauma, and engaging marginalised histories and communities. This is exemplified by Shimada's work, which offers a powerful vantage point from which to contemplate art's political inflections, its social potential and the urgency of memory work both in Japan, and in our contemporary societies today.

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