Centre for Fashion Curation

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I think from a supervisor's perspective, one of my hopes is always that you'll be working with a student and supporting a student's research and that they'll go away from that research and have real impact on the field that they're working in on their field of expertise.

I think, especially with practitioners, to be able to help them to see how they can fit practice-based work and practice-based research into that PhD process really strengthens their ability then to take that forward, to develop their work, take it through the PhD, and out into the world in which they're practicing and working.

Practice-based PhDs are quite new. And there's something that a university, like the University of the Arts, we should absolutely excel in it because we have the academic skills, and we have the practice skills. And as such, we can offer quite a unique experience for PhD students.

Historically, at the University, students have tended to submit a text-based confirmation document, the same as the theoretical students. And it's become-- it wasn't mandatory. It was what happened, and we tended to follow that route.

But in the last three or four years, as a group in the Centre for Fashion Curation, we've become really aware that actually, it just doesn't work for a number of students and that perhaps, we're asking them to do everything that we ask the text-based students to do, but they also do their practice.

And they're very, very clever thinkers. They're imaginative, original thinkers. But writing isn't one of their practices. And they often struggle with the writing component.

And Louise was amazing because she basically said, look, this isn't working for me. And as a group, we discussed it. And she proposed a new way of working that would work for her. And amazingly, actually, the way she worked by making these archive boxes meant that the writing flowed quite naturally.

My confirmation was really concerned with participation. Most confirmations, the document is sent to the examiner about three weeks before. And then they read through, they make notes, and then they feed back to you.

So the process of a normal confirmation is you would sit in a room with your supervisory team and your examiner. And you would discuss your written document. Where is this-- it meant in having the objects that were part of my research in the room, it meant the focus wasn't on me. The focus was on the objects and on my research.

So as well as being a very differently structured confirmation, this was very, very particularly managed by Louise. So in a way, it was performed, and it was performed like a theatrical event.

So Louise welcomed the examiner and myself and Amy de la Haye to the confirmation. She gave us a very brief explanation of what it was that we were going to experience. She explained to us the mechanics of how it was going to work with MP3s, with boxes, with written material, practice-based work.

And then she took us into the archive at Central Saint Martins where she'd worked with Judy Wilcox, who's one of the archivists there, and prepared the space and laid out the boxes.

We were each assigned a box, which was the first box that we were going to investigate. And then we were left to look. And we were left to open those boxes, discover the contents, and really to experience this work in a very multisensory way.

For instance, one of the boxes contained a garment that had a really strong smell of naphtha, of mothballs. The MP3 players had recordings of Louise talking doing material culture analysis.

So we had the texture of garments. We had the smell from garments. And we had sounds as well as the written material and the more-- I guess, more conventional material from confirmation.

I guess I should start with why I selected the pink dress. So the reason I chose the pink dress is twofold. One-- or maybe threefold. The first is that it's really, when I found it, it was kind of cast aside, like it was of no worth. So it was abandoned in the top of a box alongside other fabrics and other materials.

The work that she presented to us was something that came completely fresh to me even though I had a knowledge of what might be happening.

So we went deep into an archive, and we saw a capsule, sort of five different elements laid out beautifully on a table, beautifully presented.

So instead of sitting at home trying to work through references and sentence constructions and argument building, I find myself opening boxes full of incredible objects that she'd brought over and beautifully laid out and presented.

In a way, it was the opposite of the experience of doing a confirmation. And it was a process in which I felt enriched-- [CHUCKLES] myself, as an examiner. So I was very comfortable in that area.

I think also, the student was incredibly comfortable because she had her own sense of herself. She brought it all. She put it all together. She wasn't out of her comfort zone as a practitioner. She was very eloquent in the writing and the analysis of the material that we were looking at.

I think one of the strengths of this process that we went through with Louise was that the examiner was involved. And the examiner was involved with the student and with the supervisory team as we all experienced the material at the same time.

What we did build into the process, which Louise very cleverly programmed in, was a point where Donatella was left on her own to have quiet time. She had three hours to go through the material, to read everything, in the same way that an examiner would do with a conventional written work.

So there was no lack of rigor in this process. It was absolutely as rigorous as a conventional examination, and yet the examiner was very much involved in the process itself.

I think one of the main differences with this was that Donatella Barbieri, the examiner, wasn't given the written work in advance of the confirmation examination.

So really, the whole thing was intended so that the examiner experiences the work and experiences the practice and to a degree, evoked the sense of discovery that Louise had when she very first found the material that she was working with in the stores in Birmingham. It was about evoking a sense of theater in a way.

That I come from a performance background. My mom is a performer, so I'm very familiar with performing. And obviously, I've been involved with theater since I was 13. So it's kind of a world I know really, really well.

But I think the main advantage for me, as a practitioner doing the confirmation this way, was it worked to my strengths. So actually, the ability to share my research through my practice in a performative manner, I think works to my strengths.

Whereas I think had I just had to submit a written document, I don't think it would have fully communicated what my PhD was concerned with. So I found it kind of diffused what would have been quite a stressful situation for me personally and kind of made it a much more relaxed atmosphere.

And certainly, the feedback I've had from the participants was that was also how they felt. It seemed to kind of break down those feminist barriers, let's say. It leveled the playing field as it were, which was really, really nice. So it meant the process was far more enjoyable than it might ordinarily be.

And it also felt a bit like I was playing. And again, the nature of being a creative person, that's kind of what we do. You play with materials, you play with the objects, you play with ideas. And I feel like in presenting my confirmation in this manner, it was much more authentic to the kind of motivation for my creative practice.

The advantages of working in this type of system, that for me, the student themselves are incredibly engaged in the process. The practice is brought to life in this interaction with the examiners.

That is really to great advantage for the students because in the process of preparing the interaction, they are then focusing very much on what they want to say and what is important to them.

So what I found is that with Louise, the conversation that then followed was a far more engaged conversation, even if the examiner might have been critical or even if there were things that could have, of course, developed because the confirmation is about developing the piece into a PhD, which this was successfully did.

The idea is that the students sometimes are just receiving what is happening in that moment through the spectrum of criticism. Whereas in this case, it was much more, this is a very exciting work, we've been through a very engaging experience. Now, let's talk about the PhD.

So in that way, it became far more direct and far more useful as a process to a practice-based PhD.

Louise initiated and created the format of her confirmation is something, as a center, we've been talking about. And longer term, I hope that we might use this, not as a template, because every single PhD is different, but as an alternative method of presenting a sort of document.

So yes, I hope that we, as a center, might be pioneering new ways of working with practice-based and practice-led PhD students across the University.

I think as soon as we went through the confirmation with Louise and we went through it in this structure, I was thinking of how we might introduce other students, particularly practice-based students, to think of different ways of approaching their confirmation.

And I think one of the fantastic results of Louise's confirmation is that we now have it on record. We can show current students the film. We can even introduce them to Louise to talk it through.

So we actually have live practice of an alternative approach. And I think now that we've done that, and as supervisors, now that we've supported that, I think, certainly for myself, it will make me think a lot more creatively and work with students to think more creatively about how they approach confirmation.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I think from a supervisor's perspective, one of my hopes is always that you'll be working with a student and supporting a student's research and that they'll go away from that research and have real impact on the field that they're working in on their field of expertise.

I think, especially with practitioners, to be able to help them to see how they can fit practice-based work and practice-based research into that PhD process really strengthens their ability then to take that forward, to develop their work, take it through the PhD, and out into the world in which they're practicing and working.

Practice-based PhDs are quite new. And there's something that a university, like the University of the Arts, we should absolutely excel in it because we have the academic skills, and we have the practice skills. And as such, we can offer quite a unique experience for PhD students.

Historically, at the University, students have tended to submit a text-based confirmation document, the same as the theoretical students. And it's become-- it wasn't mandatory. It was what happened, and we tended to follow that route.

But in the last three or four years, as a group in the Centre for Fashion Curation, we've become really aware that actually, it just doesn't work for a number of students and that perhaps, we're asking them to do everything that we ask the text-based students to do, but they also do their practice.

And they're very, very clever thinkers. They're imaginative, original thinkers. But writing isn't one of their practices. And they often struggle with the writing component.

And Louise was amazing because she basically said, look, this isn't working for me. And as a group, we discussed it. And she proposed a new way of working that would work for her. And amazingly, actually, the way she worked by making these archive boxes meant that the writing flowed quite naturally.

My confirmation was really concerned with participation. Most confirmations, the document is sent to the examiner about three weeks before. And then they read through, they make notes, and then they feed back to you.

So the process of a normal confirmation is you would sit in a room with your supervisory team and your examiner. And you would discuss your written document. Where is this-- it meant in having the objects that were part of my research in the room, it meant the focus wasn't on me. The focus was on the objects and on my research.

So as well as being a very differently structured confirmation, this was very, very particularly managed by Louise. So in a way, it was performed, and it was performed like a theatrical event.

So Louise welcomed the examiner and myself and Amy de la Haye to the confirmation. She gave us a very brief explanation of what it was that we were going to experience. She explained to us the mechanics of how it was going to work with MP3s, with boxes, with written material, practice-based work.

And then she took us into the archive at Central Saint Martins where she'd worked with Judy Wilcox, who's one of the archivists there, and prepared the space and laid out the boxes.

We were each assigned a box, which was the first box that we were going to investigate. And then we were left to look. And we were left to open those boxes, discover the contents, and really to experience this work in a very multisensory way.

For instance, one of the boxes contained a garment that had a really strong smell of naphtha, of mothballs. The MP3 players had recordings of Louise talking doing material culture analysis.

So we had the texture of garments. We had the smell from garments. And we had sounds as well as the written material and the more-- I guess, more conventional material from confirmation.

I guess I should start with why I selected the pink dress. So the reason I chose the pink dress is twofold. One-- or maybe threefold. The first is that it's really, when I found it, it was kind of cast aside, like it was of no worth. So it was abandoned in the top of a box alongside other fabrics and other materials.

The work that she presented to us was something that came completely fresh to me even though I had a knowledge of what might be happening.

So we went deep into an archive, and we saw a capsule, sort of five different elements laid out beautifully on a table, beautifully presented.

So instead of sitting at home trying to work through references and sentence constructions and argument building, I find myself opening boxes full of incredible objects that she'd brought over and beautifully laid out and presented.

In a way, it was the opposite of the experience of doing a confirmation. And it was a process in which I felt enriched-- [CHUCKLES] myself, as an examiner. So I was very comfortable in that area.

I think also, the student was incredibly comfortable because she had her own sense of herself. She brought it all. She put it all together. She wasn't out of her comfort zone as a practitioner. She was very eloquent in the writing and the analysis of the material that we were looking at.

I think one of the strengths of this process that we went through with Louise was that the examiner was involved. And the examiner was involved with the student and with the supervisory team as we all experienced the material at the same time.

What we did build into the process, which Louise very cleverly programmed in, was a point where Donatella was left on her own to have quiet time. She had three hours to go through the material, to read everything, in the same way that an examiner would do with a conventional written work.

So there was no lack of rigor in this process. It was absolutely as rigorous as a conventional examination, and yet the examiner was very much involved in the process itself.

I think one of the main differences with this was that Donatella Barbieri, the examiner, wasn't given the written work in advance of the confirmation examination.

So really, the whole thing was intended so that the examiner experiences the work and experiences the practice and to a degree, evoked the sense of discovery that Louise had when she very first found the material that she was working with in the stores in Birmingham. It was about evoking a sense of theater in a way.

That I come from a performance background. My mom is a performer, so I'm very familiar with performing. And obviously, I've been involved with theater since I was 13. So it's kind of a world I know really, really well.

But I think the main advantage for me, as a practitioner doing the confirmation this way, was it worked to my strengths. So actually, the ability to share my research through my practice in a performative manner, I think works to my strengths.

Whereas I think had I just had to submit a written document, I don't think it would have fully communicated what my PhD was concerned with. So I found it kind of diffused what would have been quite a stressful situation for me personally and kind of made it a much more relaxed atmosphere.

And certainly, the feedback I've had from the participants was that was also how they felt. It seemed to kind of break down those feminist barriers, let's say. It leveled the playing field as it were, which was really, really nice. So it meant the process was far more enjoyable than it might ordinarily be.

And it also felt a bit like I was playing. And again, the nature of being a creative person, that's kind of what we do. You play with materials, you play with the objects, you play with ideas. And I feel like in presenting my confirmation in this manner, it was much more authentic to the kind of motivation for my creative practice.

The advantages of working in this type of system, that for me, the student themselves are incredibly engaged in the process. The practice is brought to life in this interaction with the examiners.

That is really to great advantage for the students because in the process of preparing the interaction, they are then focusing very much on what they want to say and what is important to them.

So what I found is that with Louise, the conversation that then followed was a far more engaged conversation, even if the examiner might have been critical or even if there were things that could have, of course, developed because the confirmation is about developing the piece into a PhD, which this was successfully did.

The idea is that the students sometimes are just receiving what is happening in that moment through the spectrum of criticism. Whereas in this case, it was much more, this is a very exciting work, we've been through a very engaging experience. Now, let's talk about the PhD.

So in that way, it became far more direct and far more useful as a process to a practice-based PhD.

Louise initiated and created the format of her confirmation is something, as a center, we've been talking about. And longer term, I hope that we might use this, not as a template, because every single PhD is different, but as an alternative method of presenting a sort of document.

So yes, I hope that we, as a center, might be pioneering new ways of working with practice-based and practice-led PhD students across the University.

I think as soon as we went through the confirmation with Louise and we went through it in this structure, I was thinking of how we might introduce other students, particularly practice-based students, to think of different ways of approaching their confirmation.

And I think one of the fantastic results of Louise's confirmation is that we now have it on record. We can show current students the film. We can even introduce them to Louise to talk it through.

So we actually have live practice of an alternative approach. And I think now that we've done that, and as supervisors, now that we've supported that, I think, certainly for myself, it will make me think a lot more creatively and work with students to think more creatively about how they approach confirmation.

[MUSIC PLAYING]