Tag Archives: Education

South Africa’s Blombos cave is home to the earliest drawing by a human

Christopher Henshilwood holds a 10 year South Africa National Research Foundation funded Research Chair and Professorship at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is also the Professor of African Prehistory in the Archaeology, History, Culture and Religion Institute at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Karen Loise van Niekerk is an archaeologist working on Middle Stone Age sites, specifically Blombos Cave and Klipdrift Shelter, in the southern Cape, South Africa.

Drawing, research and philosophy

Joe Graham is a Lecturer in Drawing at Falmouth School of Art, Falmouth University. He is an artist who writes about drawing and conducts research through drawing using various propositions drawn from phenomenology and ontology. His interests revolve around understanding how drawing operates as both a vehicle for expression and a mode of thought.

Drawing Science

Bethann Garramon Merkle, MFA, is a multi-disciplinary science communicator and artist who specializes in sharing science through depictions of the natural world. In particular, her work explores the role stories play in shaping public perspectives of science and ecology topics. She is currently on staff with the Wyoming Migration Initiative, a research and outreach group within the Department of Zoology and Physiology, at the University of Wyoming. There, she directs the University of Wyoming Science Communication Initiative, conducts research on art-science integration and science communication, and helps researchers with outreach initiatives, offers trainings on sharing science, and creates images, text, social media content, and other outreach materials that convey research results.

Why the search for a ‘Brave New World’ is to be found in your back yard

Jasmine Pradissitto is a physicist and a painter who sculpts and creates installations in plastics, light, metal, and geopolymers, embracing the dual worlds of the Scientist and Artist.
Described as ‘holograms you can touch’, her sculptures in new and discarded plastics, change in colour as the observer moves. Inspired by nature, the human condition, and scientific breakthroughs, forms are melted and reshaped from plastics using an innovative process she has developed, as a commentary on an unsustainable, increasingly Anthropocene world slowly being reshaped by the things we consume and then disregard.

Review: Gemma Anderson’s ‘Drawing as a Way of Knowing in Art and Science’.

In recent history, the arts and sciences have often been considered opposing fields of study, but a growing trend in drawing research is beginning to bridge this divide. Gemma Anderson’s ‘Drawing as a Way of Knowing in Art and Science’ introduces tested ways in which drawing as a research practice can enhance morphological insight, specifically within the natural sciences, mathematics and art.

Language alters our experience of time

“My new study – which I worked on with linguist Emanuel Bylund – shows that bilinguals do indeed think about time differently, depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events. But unlike Hollywood, bilinguals sadly can’t see into the future. However, this study does show that learning a new way to talk about time really does rewire the brain. Our findings are the first psycho-physical evidence of cognitive flexibility in bilinguals.”

Panos Athanasopoulos is Professor of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University. He works in the areas of experimental psycholinguistics, experimental cognitive linguistics, bilingual cognition, linguistic and cultural relativity, first, second and additional language learning.

Visions of childhood

Penny Hay is an artist, educator and researcher. She is Director of Research for ‘5x5x5=creativity’, an arts research charity and is a part-time Senior Lecturer in Arts Education at Bath Spa University. Her doctoral research was focused on how adults can support children’s identity as artists.

The secret to creativity – according to science

“Creative imagination” is what we normally consider to be creativity with a large C – composing an opera or discovering something groundbreaking. This is different from everyday creativity, such as coming up with imaginative solutions to household problems or making crafts.

Creative inspiration is notoriously elusive. Being able to train creativity or induce a state of creativity has therefore long been the aim of many artists and scientists.

But is it possible?

Between drawing and writing

Kelly Chorpening is an artist, writer and educator. She has been the Course Leader for BA (Hons) Drawing at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL since 2006. Her recent experiments explore ways of materialising the form of language in order to test the fundamental processes of naming and identification that occur in both drawing and writing. She is currently co-editing, with Rebecca Fortnum, ‘A Companion to Contemporary Drawing’, containing newly commissioned essays on contemporary drawing, to be published in 2018.