Arts and Health Talk

Desdemona McCannon, Principle Lecturer in Illustration, will be giving an Arts and Health talk – An Unsophisticated Art: Illustration and Vernacular Creativity – at the Art House next Wednesday between 13.30 and 14.30. It will also be streamed via Teams (all being well) for those who can’t make it in person.

Here’s the link for that:
https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ODkxYjEyZDgtYzZjMC00ZDM4LTgyNjItN2I3Y2FjNDRkZTll%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%2263388041-0329-433c-a4b1-19a28fce31c6%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2277a9d9cf-f347-4c60-b351-20065a686e3b%22%7d

Her presentation will look at the creative engagement with history that contemporary artistic interest in folk art enables, positioning ‘folk art’ both as a genre of art that is engaged in tradition by imaginatively retrieving the past and as an emergent and evolving form of cultural expression.

Folk culture is always emerging and being invented through things that ordinary people make for themselves. It is an everyday creativity, made from the materials that are to hand. Illustration can be a vehicle for ‘passing on’ the tacit knowledge inherent in the folk art object, and the intangible cultural heritage that is embodied by making the work. This situates it as an artisanal mode of creative practice which re-uses inherited forms and shared imaginaries to reinforce cultural and subcultural narratives, allegiances and codes of taste, communicating stories and making communities visible to themselves.