Date/Time
Date(s) - 19/02/2015
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Location
Catrin Finch Centre
Categories No Categories
6.30pm – Dr Sarah Gilligan – Capitol Couture: Fashion, Spectacle and Struggle in The Hunger Games
From Katniss Everdeen’s chunky hand-knitted sweater vest, to Effie Trinket’s outrageous couture dresses and designer shoes, fashion plays a key role in constructing and performing on-screen identities in the Hunger Games films. In this talk, Sarah Gilligan discusses the ways in which the seductive spectacle of high-end designer fashion is used both on and off-screen to lure audiences into desiring and consuming a range of branded goods.
Full abstract available here; https://www.academia.edu/9336182/Capitol_Couture_Fashion_Spectacle_and_Struggle_in_The_Hunger_Games
7.30pm – Mike Corcoran & Jake Campbell – Finding Oneself: Brain, Body and World: An Ekphrastic Collaboration
Who are we? Where are we? How do the cultures and environments within which we exist play their part in making us who we are?
This presentation looks to explore these questions through science, philosophy, poetry, and the visual arts, in an ekphrastic collaboration bringing together poet Jake Campbell, and visual artist Mike Corcoran. The collaboration was born out a shared interest in the stories with which we are raised, the environments which provide the settings, and how these stories and settings form an inextricable part of the people we become. They believe the individual, their surroundings and the stories associated with these surroundings are interconnected: one cannot be fully understood, without reference to the other two.
The philosophical theory of extended cognition will be discussed: arguing that our physical surroundings do not simply inform our cognitive processes, but play a casually active role in our cognitive system, and constitute an integral part of our minds. How these principles manifest themselves in the artistic works of Mike and Jake will be explored, and the results of the artists responses to each other’s works presented for the first time.
Mike Corcoran was born and raised in Wrexham in north east Wales, where the Welsh landscape and traditions played an important part in his formative years. Whilst at Durham University, Mike studied Physics and Philosophy, exploring the fundamental relationships between the mind, body and the physical world. Now back in his home town, working at Glyndŵr University, Mike continues to explore these relationships: through his academic work, through projects engaging the public in scientific debate, and through his art.
Mike is a visual artist who works predominantly in ink, oil and acrylic. His works explore our sense of self and our perception of, and relationship with, our surroundings. They draw heavily upon scientific themes, as well as on the Welsh traditional stories with which Mike grew up.
Jake Campbell was born in South Shields, in North East England. He now lives in Chester, a few miles from the border with North East Wales. At a house party in Wrexham on New Year’s Eve 2012, Jake and Mike discussed the potential of working together on a collaborative arts project, and nearly two years later, they eventually got round to it.
Whilst at the University of Chester, Jake completed an MA in Creative Writing, where he produced a long, narrative poem which explores the vacillations in landscape and memory in his home county of Tyne and Wear; particularly South Shields, which James Kirkup called “the most surrealistic town in Britain” – a statement Jake wholeheartedly agrees with. In 2011 he won New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse Award, and in 2012 he published his debut pamphlet of poetry, Definitions of Distance, with Red Squirrel Press.
