Image Works: Research and Practice in Visual Culture is pleased to present our next event combining creative and critical approaches to visual culture.

Amy E. Elkins is Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College in Minnesota and an expert in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and visual art, with a particular focus on feminist craftmaking and other artistic practices. She will present a practical workshop and a public lecture connected to her teaching and research.

These events are open to all, inside or outside of Cardiff University. We especially welcome artists, practitioners, and teachers based in Cardiff and surrounds. Please feel free to attend one or both of the events. Tickets are free but RSVPs are essential!

Creative Pedagogy Workshop, 2.30-4.30pm, Room 0.23 (includes afternoon tea!)

This workshop explores the intersection of art-making and literary studies. Elkins will begin with an overview of experiential approaches to teaching literature, cultural theory, and academic writing. Examples of questions we’ll tackle include:

• How might the plastic arts facilitate deeper engagement with placemaking in literature?
• How can we employ artists’ books to teach students how to read closely and think critically?
• How can the medium of collage help us better understand multicultural novels?
• And how might the practice of art challenge students to encounter works of literature with insight and interpretive creativity?

After a discussion of Elkins’s approach to process and practice in the literature classroom, participants will experiment with these methods in a hands-on workshop. This workshop is open to all and will be relevant to anyone teaching literature or related topics, whether at university or high-school level.

Public Lecture, 5.15-7pm, Room 0.16: The Exploded iPhone: ‘Homemade Tech’ in the Age of Feminist Critical Making

This talk begins with a reflection on the state of feminist, interarts scholarship before turning to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Zadie Smith’s 2012 novel NW, and artist Sarah Sze’s multimedia installation Centrifuge. Virginia Woolf’s writings have provided contemporary artists and writers with a remarkable map for creating new representations of the multicultural, multimedia present. Drawing on Woolf, Smith reroutes characters through the same, London geographies as they shift and ripple through the work of deliberate disorientation. Smith’s contemporary characters lose their way and break new paths—experiences often represented through multimedia communications technology, which is the subject matter of Sarah Sze’s recent installation, Centrifuge. Elkins explores this aesthetic of disorientation in Smith and Sze’s work as a product of hybridised genres, and she shows how genre-bending techniques provide routes to critical making that productively intertwine digital landscapes and “homemade tech” with literary craft and feminist commitments.

About the Speaker

Amy Elkins is an assistant professor in the department of English at Macalester College, where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary British, Irish, and Caribbean literature, women’s literature, and visual and material culture. She received her M.A. in English from the University of Virginia and her Ph.D. from Emory University, where her dissertation won the Lore Metzger dissertation prize. She has published essays on Virginia Woolf and H.D., with forthcoming work on Mina Loy and Berenice Abbott in PMLA. She also writes a series of Q&A author interviews that explore the intersection of visual culture and women’s writing for Los Angeles Review of Books. Her first book manuscript-in-progress is entitled “Crafting Modernity: Remaking Feminist Time from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present.”