Week 9: 12th – 18th November
This week I submitted my first ever conference abstract. I was a bit nervous, so I did a bit of googling to find out what was involved, (what did people do before the internet?). For people who have also never written an abstract before, or just want a succinct way to publicise their research, there are a few main points to remember.
The word limit is generally around 250-300 words, and is intended as an overview of the research. The first paragraph should contain a background of your specific field, including the problem you wish to address. The second paragraph includes information about your experience and methodologies applied to the issues. The last paragraph concludes your findings and suggests further developments in the field.
This particular conference was an annual event for Art Historians to share developments in the professional practice and understanding of art history, and, although I am fairly well versed in the Western Canon, I was still a little nervous about presenting my work in front of a room full of seasoned academics. However, the specific session that I’d seen advertised was about curating the book in a museum context, and was organised by a curator at my university. Given that this is exactly the kind of thing that I do in my practice, it seemed like a perfect opportunity, so I typed my 250 words and pressed send.
Medieval art
Ever since the artist talk I attended on Neomedievalism, I’ve been finding more and more relevance between that and my work in the context of contemporary art practice. As I’d recently been considering the symbolism within historical artworks, I decided to try to determine some fundamental aspects of the Medieval time period. I began by listing the main features that I could see in the work, just as I would in an interpretation exercise. Particular observations included bold black lines, a flat plane, portraits tended to be in profile or ¾ poses, and lots of smaller scenes made up one image.
A popular technology for producing images at the time was woodcut, and a search online for medieval images actually led me to a site of alchemic woodcuts, bringing me full circle to the link between art, science and magic again. As an aesthetic, I quite like woodcuts, but I settled on using screen print with acetate stencils for expediency in the first instance, as I felt it would create a similar effect.
Calligraphy
Illustrated manuscripts are also a big feature of the Medieval landscape, which given their inherent link to books, created yet another avenue to explore, in the form of calligraphy. Although as an artist, I think I have fairly good drawing skills and hand/eye coordination, my handwriting is pretty apalling, as it’s mainly a way to get thoughts out of my head and onto paper quickly. Despite this, I thought I’d give it a go so I bought a book and started to practice. I was actually pretty pleased with the results and resolved to figure out a way to include it in my work.
Art as a language
The more I consider the idea of symbolism and meanings within art, the more I come to see the work as a kind of personal language. I think this is also a good analogy for interpretation, as one wouldn’t attempt to read a book in a foreign language without first understanding what the words meant. However, in contemporary art, this language can be difficult to decipher, because, unlike historical bodies of work, we are not looking retrospectively at the connections within the oeuvre of an artist. So the question is, how can we apply that knowledge to the present?
