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Hatching characters thumb

Hatching characters

They remind me now of this prototype protagonist, who has been newly hatched from the egg of my mind with no idea of what their world might hold for them…because I haven’t thought that world entirely through yet!

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In praise of poetry sequences thumb

In praise of poetry sequences

I never fail to be amazed at how much a single poem can sometimes contain. It might contain ideas, images, ambiguities and multiple interpretations. It can be full of sound and music, and give the reader a powerful narrative. There is so much a poem can do.

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Produce, Re-use, Recycle… thumb

Produce, Re-use, Recycle…

In 2005 an 8 year old girl was told by a security guard to stop sketching Picasso and Matisse paintings as ‘they’re copyrighted’ (Jardin 2005). So what is a copy and how much new, creative work is required to term the work as ‘influenced by’, or an ‘homage’?  Is her version in a different medium a copy?

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Writing the Future thumb

Writing the Future

We human beings love to try and predict the future, from the football scores to the next world conflict. Authors including Margaret Atwood, George Orwell and Kurt Vonnegut are amongst those who have famously done so. Futuristic, speculative fiction is big business, especially at a time when even the news can sound dystopian.  

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Some thoughts on criticality thumb

Some thoughts on criticality

Critical Art can be hard to understand – it’s designed to be challenging after all – but the bracing experience of having one’s expectations re-calibrated so that we can understand everything anew, or at least from a different point of view is to be encouraged.

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Rejection letters : A survival guide thumb

Rejection letters : A survival guide

I hope you’ve all been getting your work out into the world following my short blog series on ‘Getting Your Poetry Out There’ but it seems only fair to come back with some tips for dealing with the one inevitability of a writer’s life: rejection.

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Book Review: Anne D’Alleva’s 'How to Write Art History' thumb

Book Review: Anne D’Alleva’s 'How to Write Art History'

Writing about works of art can be tricky, especially if you’re trying to build up a body of knowledge from a standing start as well as link it — perhaps at the repeated behest of your tutor — to work that you’ve made. Finding a way to turn the experience of looking at something into meaningful text isn’t easy, but developing a way of clearly writing about the visual is an important skill to acquire when studying art.

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Posting images post-digital thumb

Posting images post-digital

We all use – and therefore copy – artworks to illustrate our own research, but as we have seen taking and using these images is complicated. In this post I am using the primary source of artworks – galleries – as a case study to examine the post-digital shift in how copyright is thought of and applied.

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What has Hogarth ever done for the digital artist? thumb

What has Hogarth ever done for the digital artist?

The question of copyright is one that has recently perplexed the student forum: a tangle of legal, moral and financial issues. Creative talent occupies quite a rare position in society, one deemed worthy of automatic protection against duplication and exploitation. In a series of blog posts I will attempt to clarify three related issues: the capture of images that may infringe copyright, the use of other people’s images as illustrations and the appropriation and altering of artworks to produce ‘new’ work.

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Being curious thumb

Being curious

To be a student is innately to find out more about a subject. To explore and investigate, to delve deeper and make connections between seemingly unrelated sources.

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