Tuesday 3 November 2015

Making It Known @ Curve gallery

EXHIBITION

Making It Known

Friday 13 November – Sunday 21 November 2015   |  Curve Gallery

OFFICIAL OPENING: Friday 13 November from 6pm

A Visual Communication Design Research Exhibition

WE SIT INSIDE AN INSTITUTION THAT, REGARDLESS OF ITS AGE, DRAWS ON THE RICH HISTORY OF THE ACADEMY AND ALL THAT IT REPRESENTS. THE ACADEMY, BROADLY SPEAKING, HAS A LEARNING HISTORY OF CRITIQUING, WRITING, AND THINKING THINGS. THE LEARNING HISTORIES OF OUR SPECIFIC DISCIPLINES HAVE BEEN BASED LARGELY IN A TRAINING AND MAKING LOGIC. OUR DISCIPLINES IMAGINE, DESIGN AND CREATE THINGS – BE IT IMAGES, OBJECTS, STORIES OR EXPERIENCES... THE LIST GOES ON.

Our position within in the academy is both a challenge and an opportunity. It can be a potentially difficult encounter with the established methodologies of older disciplines and discourses, but it provides the prospect of articulating the strength and benefits of research and expertise particular to our fields. As researchers we can make distinct the value of our specific ways of thinking and knowing, our connection to industry, our engagement with professional practice, and our creative commonality – fundamentally, we can communicate our unique selling proposition.


Experientially, our disciplines engage in critically reflexive processes; practices distinguished as their own research, and whose enquiry impels and informs their further practice. This exhibition asks, how do we articulate these critical processes through the creative and designerly means of our professions, and how do we visualise the research character of our shared disciplines?


What does our research look like?


As we visualise research within our disciplines as we find them at present, an interesting set of questions to ask ourselves as researchers might be:
• What do we stand for?
• What do we actually do? ­
• What is unique about what we do?
• What do we have in common… or not?
• What do we have to offer?

And maybe more importantly: What is the relationship between the making, (in whatever form that takes), and the knowing that we are required to articulate within the academy?
Essentially: How do we make the knowing of making and the making of knowing known?

KEY WORDS: research, knowledge, practice, pedagogy, design, illustration, Visual Communication Design, Natural History Illustration, practitioner, practice-oriented enquiry, creativity, academia, critical design
UON Visual Communication Design 2015
CURVE GALLERY
61 Hunter Street,
Newcastle NSW
2300