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Hybrid dialogues, situational strategies : producing postcolonial visual culture

Hybrid Dialogues, Situation Strategies (hereafter referred to as HDSS) aims to explore the production of a postcolonial visual culture, through action research centered on producing and reflecting on collaborative visual artworks. The aim of the research is to use collaborative creative practice itself as the site of investigation into the way in which visual creative strategies can reflect and redefine the processes of constructing, inhabiting and exchanging complex definitions of postcolonial identities. It is suggested that the reflexive creative processes of art/design methods, can bring productive, transformative and complex re-visibilisations of accepted and contested postcolonial histories, through the application of the 'familiarity' of making clothes as a wider metaphor for exploring the construction of complex, postcolonial identities. In my thesis I set out my understanding of postcolonial visual culture and its histories and their relationship to my practice and the project presented. The research is implemented through Shade, a project situated within postcolonial visual culture and which interrogates the processes of producing that postcolonial culture. As the major practice project for HDSS, Shade is the key site of the generation of new knowledge. Through participation and reflection a new methodology of "fittings" has been developed, combining the principles of participatory action research and the craft process of tailoring, embroidering and fitting, so that the development and performance of the garments and accessories for Shade also become an important space for generation of new postcolonial cultural exchanges. Through this reflective practice, five principles of/for creative engagement with postcolonial cultures are identified. These five principles are; 'shared histories', 'radical familiarities', 'complicit spectacle', 'transgressive crafts', and 'democratic bespoke'. HDSS insists on becoming deeply implicated in acts of collaborative practice and on reflection on the construction of postcolonial identities. This has produced the key contribution to new knowledge, which can be summarised as the theory of 'shared cultural production', which suggests that no act of postcolonial cultural production can be theorised without genuine democratic participation in the conditions of its production.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:606940
Date January 2014
CreatorsPuzey, Jacqueline Michelle
PublisherBath Spa University
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/1887/

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