John Danvers

Teaching interests

Teaching interests include:

- the philosophy of art practice and the relationships between philosophical ideas and arts practices

- the ontology of learning and teaching

- developing a radical pedagogy for arts and design subjects

- the synergy between experimental literature and poetics and the visual arts

2000-2008: UoP Representative on ADC-LTSN reference group (now ADM within HE Academy).

Appointed to consultant role within ADC-LTSN, Dec. 2002.

 

Staff serving as external examiners

1998-01. MA Education (Art & Design), University of Wales Institute, Cardiff.

2001-2004. BA/BSc Art and Community, University of Surrey, Roehampton.

2002-2006. MA Art & Design, Gray’s School of Art & Design, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen.
2006 to date. MA Art, University of Wales, Newport.

 

Research interests

Currently working on two writing projects:  completing the writing of a book (provisional title: Sweepings & Starlight: An Artist’s Journey) – nearing completion. Narrative text + anthology of experimental texts + gallery of images. About development of artist’s identity and career, through travel and exhibitions in Canada – and about art milieu of the period (1967-1974); almost completed writing of new book (provisional title: Sceptics & Mystics)  - concerned with tracing connections between ideas and practices in early Greek scepticism, Christian mysticism, Daoism, Barthes, Heidegger, Madhyamika and Zen Buddhism – and poetics and aesthetics. Discussed and analysed in relation to practices of selected artists and poets.

In the spring of 2006 I completed a book entitled, Picturing Mind: Paradox, Indeterminacy and Consciousness in Art & Poetry, published by Rodopi.

This book marks a synthesis and distillation of various strands of research undertaken over the past six years. It articulates an unusual multi-disciplinary approach to debates about contemporary art and poetry, ideas about the mind and its representations, and theories of knowledge and being. Arts practices are considered as both enactments of mind and as transformative modes of consciousness. Ideas drawn from poetics, philosophy and consciousness studies are used to analyse the work of a number of contemporary and historical artists, poets and writers. The book contains an important and distinctive visual dimension with photographs and drawings by the author and texts employing unorthodox syntax and layouts that exemplify the themes under discussion. An innovative aesthetics and poetics of indeterminacy, paradox, uncertainty and discontinuity is articulated – for instance in the idea of the contrarium – a liminal ‘coincidence of opposites’ in which we negotiate our way through the instabilities and contradictions of contemporary culture.

URL : http://www.rodopi.nl/

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My pedagogic research is particularly focused upon: art education as an emancipatory and transformative project; and, the conflict between quantitative and qualitative modes of assessment in art(s) education.

Three broad questions are addressed in my other research: in what ways are philosophical ideas reflected or enacted in aesthetics and poetics between 1900 and today?; how are we constituted as subjects in the light of theories/experiences that destabilise Cartesian, humanist, Romantic & modernist accounts of subjectivity and identity – leading to a notion of the indeterminate subject in an indeterminate cultural/material environment?; and how are we implicated in the world?

The trajectories of research are multi-directional, including engagements with the ideas and practices of, for instance: Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus; Nagarjuna; Heidegger; Barthes; Gary Snyder; Kenneth White; Guy Davenport; Thomas McEvilley; Marjorie Perloff; et al.

Over the past few years I’ve been making drawings, photographs, texts and mixed-media presentations that are enactments and interrogations of consciousness and mind – ‘mind’ in the Buddhist sense (inclusive of the body, sensations, feelings, etc.). I’ve been trying to construct, and give form to, an aesthetics and poetics of indeterminacy and awakening through multi-linear visual and textual narratives and notations. I’m particularly interested in using compositional modes drawn from early modern and postmodern poets, and from John Cage, the sumi-e ink painting tradition of Zen Buddhism and, perhaps oddly, John Ruskin and the European tradition of topographical drawing.

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Member of Editorial Board of Internet Journal: Consciousness, Literature and the Arts (http://www.aber.ac.uk/~drawww/journal/).

Member of international editorial board of book series: Consciousness, Literature & the Arts, publisher Rodopi.

Member of the advisory board of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI) based in Israel.
Consultant for the Art, Design & Media subject centre of the Higher Education Academy.

 

Other research

February 2003. Paper: Towards a Radical Pedagogy: Provisional Notes of Learning and Teaching in Art & Design. iJADE (International Journal of Art & Design Education), Vol. 22, No.1, p. 47-57.

2002-03. University of Plymouth Learning & Teaching Development Fund award for research project: Beliefs & Expectations: Understanding and Enhancing Student Learning Experiences in the Transition Year

 

Creative practice & artistic projects

Website: http://www.johndanversart.co.uk

My art practice involves a multi-disciplinary investigation of the ecology of becoming/being. Exploring the layered histories and cultures of identity through drawing, writing, photography and mixed-media narratives, often as a participant in particular landscapes.

Current work includes:

drawings (Ragas) exploring structural notation derived from the Fibonacci series layered into indeterminate fields of marks and forms derived from landscape, archaeology and biology;

experimental texts presented in the form of inkjet prints, small bookworks and photo collages;

The Hermitage - an interwoven set of narratives, drawings, photos, movie clips and texts for exhibition, paper publication and website; and Epitaph for Victor (live spoken text with digital projection) – a meditation on identity, hybridity and time, constructed from narrative fragments, still and video images and poetic texts. Reference is made to Victor Hugo, Jorge Luis Borges and a character named John Danvers;

The River Interludes - a series of narrative works for voice, digital projection and recorded sound.

Development of Heinrich Wohl archive on the web: http://www.heinrichwohl.com

Presentations:

2010    July.  Refereed paper: Creative Awakening: Buddhism, Art and Everyday Life, at Creative Awakening Seminar Series – Seminar One: Ordinary or Extraordinary Living. Institute of Oriental Philosophy, Taplow Court, Maidenhead, UK.

2009    Sept. Refereed paper: Kith & kin: on being at home in the world, at All Our Futures 2: getting real – investing in our future – by design, international conference, Centre for Sustainable Futures, University of Plymouth, UK.

 

2009    June  Refereed paper: Zack hitti zopp: creativity, Buddhism & the arts, at Buddha Mind: Creative Mind conference. Institute of Oriental Philosophy, Taplow Court, Maidenhead, UK.

2009    May  Refereed paper: Smoke without fire: some thoughts on Leonardo’s sfumato, at Consciousness, Theatre, Literature & the Arts, Third International Conference. University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

2008    Nov. Presentation: Towards a sustainable self: art, poetry and being-in-the-world, at Institute for Transdisciplinarity, Hochschule der Künste, Bern, Switzerland.

2008 Sept.  Refereed paper: Towards a sustainable self: art, poetry and being-in-the-world, at All Our Futures: Education Waking to Threat, Hope & Possibility, first Centre for Sustainable Futures international conference, University of Plymouth.

2008 Aug. Refereed papers: A ladder to the stars: narratives of origin and journeying in art and poetry; and, Stuff & light: paradoxes of transubstantiation in art & poetry, at Language and the Scientific Imagination, ISSEI 11th International Conference, University of Helsinki, Finland.

2007 July. Refereed 'trigger' paper: Assessment in the arts: qualitative and quantative approaches, at ELIA Teachers Academy international conference. University of Brighton (European League of Institutes of the Arts).

2007 May. Refereed paper: Drawing, emptiness & presence, at Consciousness, Theatre, Literature & the Arts, Second International Conference. University of Wales, Aberystwyth + performance of Five River Interludes for voice, digital projection & recorded sound.

2007 March. Refereed paper: Between many truths: art, empowerment & letting-go, at Discourse Power Resistance: Talking Truth to Power conference. Manchester Metropolitan University + performance of Five River Interludes for voice, digital projection & recorded sound.

2006 November. Multi-media presentation: Epitaph for Victor: Migrations of Identity, keynote presentation at International Conference, Jaume I University, Castellon de la Plana, Spain 

2006 Apr. Refereed paper: A coincidence of opposites: notes on inbetweeness in art-as-enquiry, at Discourse Power Resistance: Research as a Subversive Activity conference. Manchester Metropolitan University

2005 May. Keynote address: …Of the Spangled Mind: notes on art, awakening, becoming…; & multi-media presentation: Epitaph for Victor, at Consciousness, Theatre, Literature & the Arts, First International Conference. University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

2004 May. Multi-media presentation: Epitaph for Victor: Questions of Identity, at postgraduate research seminar, University of Wales, Aberystwyth

2004 Apr. Refereed paper: To ramble & ruminate – beliefs & issues in art & design education, and multi-media presentation: Epitaph for Victor: Questions of Identity, at Discourse Power Resistance: Global Issues, Local Solutions conference, University of Plymouth

2003 Apr. Refereed paper: Stuttering at the Owl: Poetic Displacements & Emancipatory Learning, at New Directions, New Moves: Discourse, Power & Resistance conference, University of Plymouth, UK

2001 RECENT WORK ON PAPER, Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London (solo)

DORSET FRAGMENTS, Dorset County Museum, Dorchester (solo).

1999 MAP – LAND & LANDSCAPE IN CONTEMPORARY ART, Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London

RECENT WORK ON PAPER, Danna Center Gallery, New Orleans, USA (solo)

TRACES, Art Process Research Group exhibition, Thelma Hulbert Gallery, Honiton, E.Devon

 

Publications

July 2009. Chapter: Being-in-the-World: The ability to think about the self in interconnection and interdependence with the surrounding world, in Stibbe, A. ed. 2009, The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy: Skills for changing the world, Dartington: Green Books, pp. 185-190.

Oct. 2008. Chapter: Epitaph for Victor: Migrations of Identity, in Prado-Perez, J.R. & Llorens-Cubedo, D. eds. New Literatures of Old: Dialogues of Tradition and Innovation in Anglophone Literature, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 174-187.

Jan. 2008.  Chapter: Drawing, Emptiness and Presence, in Dinkgrafe, D. ed. 2008. Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts 2007, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 386-399.

Oct. 2007. Book Review: Williams, D.R. 2005. The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. In The European Legacy, Vol.12, No.6, p.756-758. Routledge. (Journal of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas)

July 2007. Feature article: Qualitative rather than Quantitative: assessment in arts education, in Networks, the journal of Art Design Media Subject Centre of the Higher Education Academy, Brighton, UK: ADM HEA / University of Brighton, pp. 14-19.

Summer 2006. Chapter: The Knowing Body: Art as an Integrative System of Knowledge, in: Art Education in a Postmodern World, ed. Tom Hardy, p. 77-90. Intellect.

Spring 2006. Chapter:  …of the Spangled Mind: notes on art, awakening, becoming…, in: Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts, ed. Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe, p. 296-318. Cambridge Scholars Press: Newcastle, UK.
February 2006. Book: Picturing Mind: Paradox, Indeterminacy and Consciousness in Art & Poetry, 368 pages. Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York.
2005. Chapter: In Beauty I Walk: Beauty, Nature & the Visual Arts in Meyer-Dinkgrafe, Daniel ed. 2005. The Future of Beauty in Theatre, Literature and the Arts. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, p.1-12.
April 2004. Chapter: Stuttering at the owl: poetic displacements and emancipatory learning, in Satterthwaite, Atkinson & Martin, eds. 2004. Educational Counter-cultures: Confrontations, Images, Vision. Trentham Books, p.165-182.

April 2004. Chapter: St Jerome @ the Villa Grimaldi, in: European Culture in a Changing World: Between Nationalism and Globalism. Edited by Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe. Amersham: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2004. ISBN 1904303331
Autumn 2003. Interview by John Lane: In Search of Awareness, in: Lane, J. & Kumar, S. eds. 2003. Images of Earth & Spirit: A Resurgence Art Anthology, Green Books, p.134-135.

October 2003. Book Review: Atkinson, D. 2002. Art in Education: Identity and Practice, Kluwer Academic Publishers. In iJADE (International Journal of Art & Design Education), Vol. 22, No.3, p. 355-357.

April 2003. Book Reviews: de Bolla, P., 2001. Art Matters, Harvard University Press; Shusterman, R., 2002. Surface & Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture, Cornell University Press. In Internet Journal: Consciousness Literature & the Arts (CLA), Vol 4, No 1, April 2003

 

Reports & invited lectures

Visiting lecturer at:

Cardiff College of Art; Winchester School of Art; museums & colleges in Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, Australia; Vancouver City Art Gallery, Canada; Chelsea School of Art; Coventry School of Art; University of Wales Institute, Cardiff; Loyola University, N. Orleans, USA; Sharpham College, Dartington; University of Wales, Aberystwyth; Dartington College of Arts; Hochschule der Kunste, Bern, Switzerland.

 

Links

Website: http://www.johndanversart.co.uk