http://hdl.handle.net/2160/3768 2013-05-26T05:11:27Z http://hdl.handle.net/2160/7702 East-West-Occult : esotericism through fine art practice, autobiographical referencing and historical research O'Rourke, John Peter 2011-11-22T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2160/7577 The Exile Experience : Hungarian and Czech Cold War Refugee Artists in Britain Kiss-Davies, Adriana This study is an investigation of the life and work of émigré artists who arrived in Great Britain as refugees after the 1956 revolution in Hungary and after the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. The artists selected for examination represent different aspects of cultural production and range from painters through graphic artists and designers to film-makers. The work of these artists is discussed in the wider cultural, social and political context of Cold War Europe. The human aspect, that is, the way in which exile affected individual artists and their lives and altered their perception and artistic output, is a central thread of the thesis. Other key issues that are considered include: the relationship between art and politics, exile and identity, cultural exchange and issues of communication with a foreign audience. The main argument is based on the analysis of selected artworks created in exile and the thesis is structured around eight case studies which explore specific aspects of the uprooted experience in the context of artistic creativity in exile. The major themes which the case studies focus on are: questions of identity and loss in the films of Robert Vas, the feeling of dislocation and alienation in György Gordon’s self portraits, the problems of artistic acceptance in the context of the career of cartoonist Edma, the transposition of Hungarian landscape painting traditions into English art by Gyula Sajo, the origins and artistic benefits of Josef Koudelka’s wandering existence, forms of Czech Functionalism in Eva Jiricna’s architectural designs, nostalgia and memory in the paintings of Jiri Borsky and Jan Mladovsky’s conceptual explorations of Eastern and Western cultural identities. The case studies are used to identify common artistic, philosophical and theoretical threads which connect the visual responses of the examined artists to the wider subject of art in exile. Images in this thesis are subject to copyright restrictions. Only those parts of the thesis which contain no images are available to view. 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2160/5715 Nostalgia and identity: British hand-painted ceramic decoration 1870-1920 Talbot, Kathleen This thesis discusses hand-painted decoration on British ceramics in the period 1870 to 1920 in the context of changing economic and social climates and gendered employment and occupation. The original impetus for this research came from analysis of ware produced at the South Wales Pottery in Llanelli sometime in the period 1877 to 1920. As the research expanded and links with other potteries were established, it became evident that varied innovations in hand-painted ceramic decoration were influenced by national, local and gendered responses to a period of transition in Britain. 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2160/5197 Planned Spontaneity: The Construction of a Modular System of Relief Printmaking Matrices for the Platen Press Ellis, Edwina The Modular System draws on traditional wood engraving, woodcut and letterpress practices. It comprises two printing surfaces and printing furniture specifically devised to facilitate offset and transfer relief printing. Rigid acetal resin tint blocks, hand or laser engraved, generate tone or colour that may be applied to more than one image. Multiple overprinting produces variant colour mixtures. Their function is similar to late nineteenth-century tints devised for colour letterpress printing. Compound printing surfaces of linoleum or vinyl are segmented and joined to make removable and replaceable parts. They print variable configurations in a process that resembles historical solutions to simultaneous colour printing: from the Mentz Psalter (1475), to the compound plates of William Congreve (1820) and the segmented wood engravings of John Holt Ibbetson (1819). These compound surfaces also act as receptors for impressions from the tint blocks. Repositioning and offsetting them is expedited by press furniture especially devised for the project. Registration devices are based on the simple Japanese kentō system and laser-cut circular chases derived from traditional letterpress furniture. Printing the tint blocks directly onto the flexible compound surfaces produce two viable prints that are offsets of each other. They are reversed, but one offset is also tonally inversed. It is this unpredictable tonality that has driven this experimental project. Both the construction and processes developed using the Modular System directed historical research into functional colour relief printing which consequently unearthed examples that would influence the further development of the project. This has generated both devices and processes capable of wider applications. Printing surfaces employed in the Modular System may be laser engraved or cut and adapted to use in both lithography and intaglio printmaking. 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z