ABSTRACT This article uses an autoethnographic approach to explore a researcher’s experience with the topic being investigated – human-water relationships in Australia. Specifically, the aim of this article is to map the different processes at stake and argue for combining architecture and art to potentially create a new way of seeing and understanding the manifestation of biased legacies as a mode of rationality in the context of water ownership. The study intersects the disciplines of architecture and art through the mixed methodology of walking and drawing. This approach aims to actively reimagine places in the landscape where human-water narratives intersect. Mapping these intersections re-engages contested histories through a lived experience with place. While the injustice of biased legacies and their operation can be felt tangibly, these legacies are abstract in nature and can be hard to detect. The study contributes specifically to the emerging field of cultural mapping as a creative methodology with strong potential for addressing the complex and multifaceted issues of water policy.

ABSTRACT This interview (2024–2025) with Pramodha Weerasekera examines and records various important developments in Sri Lanka’s contemporary art landscape (after the end of the long civil war, 1983–2009) as seen and experienced by the writer and curator. The conversation attempts to unpack the thought process, ways of working, themes in the work of contemporary art practitioners, creation of new spaces and initiatives and challenges faced by contemporary art practitioners working in a country dealing with economic crises amidst a host of other pressing issues. From avenues of art education to the impact of Aragalaya (2022 Sri Lankan protests) to the election of a new Leftist President, Weerasekera discusses various important landmarks and their possible consequences on the production and dissemination of art in contemporary Sri Lanka. While there’s a lot of interest in Sri Lankan contemporary art, global art publishing seems to have paid it scanty attention. This interview attempts to highlight and document the work of important stakeholders in the contemporary art scene in Sri Lanka and hopefully facilitate future research networks and artistic collaborations based on the information available here.

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the Magazine Actions by the British artist, Cosey Fanni Tutti, comprised of framed pages from pornographic magazines in which she had appeared as a model between 1974 and 1976. As one of the first instances in which an artist made an artwork documenting their own labour in the sex industry, the work was pioneering. It set an important precedent for contemporary artworks made by sex workers and those that examine sex work as a form of gendered labour. Despite foreshadowing recent debates around sex work and many issues that are central to feminism, the Magazine Actions were under-recognised within art history until the late 2000s. In the following article, I analyse the series as a document of the reproductive labour involved in working in the porn industry. Drawing on Marxist feminist scholars such as Heather Berg, I argue that by appropriating the images created during her work as a porn model, Tutti inverted the extraction of surplus value that took place as she laboured on the production of pornographic magazines, thereby resisting the gendered labour of sex work.

ABSTRACT This article focuses on common negotiations in the research of artists and draws upon a study of thirty-two PhDs completed by artists in the UK, and interviews with six of those artists. Historically, tacit studio pedagogy allows for the continuity of an ontology of art in art education, however its contact with research acts as a break that offers artists the opportunity to consider the ontology of art anew. In response to this break, some artists resort to an intrinsic defence of art, while others engage in axiology as research and question the way in which art is contrasted to science. Anxiety around the incompatibility of art and research is a perennial issue for artists conducting PhDs, and this article proposes that attention to the contest around value that occurs allows for artists’ ownership of research on fair terms.

ABSTRACT This article introduces and elaborates the concept of rigorous creativity as an approach to working with artificial intelligence (AI) in artistic and cultural practice. Emerging from the collaborative initiative Electronic Life – a year-long, public-facing programme at Tate Britain – our approach positions AI not merely as a tool but as an encounter, a partner in thought and co-creation. Drawing on historical precedents (such as the New Tendencies movement and Harold Cohen’s AARON) and theoretical reflections (with reference to cognitive assemblages, extended mind theory, and the pharmakon), we argue for a situated, process-based mode of inquiry that is open-ended, critically alert, and participatory. As such, we critique prevailing modes of AI spectacle and techno-solutionism, calling instead for an interdisciplinary practice attuned to lifeworlds, institutional contexts, and emergent human – machine ecologies. Overall, we argue rigorous creativity allows for a renewed negotiation of authorship, aesthetic value, and collective agency vis-à-vis generative AI.

ABSTRACT This text explores the porous relationship between movement and walking in place-based artistic research. Drawing upon thinking from contemporary art, research-creation, Indigenous studies, and the environmental humanities, walking as a situated artistic practice is engaged as a research method that enacts a porous attunement to movements and disturbances within place. Recounting walking experiences along Belongil Beach, within the Arakwal coastline in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, Australia, the author examines how encounters with phenomena during these walks may be reconfigured through sculptural experiments, revealing things previously masked by the tide, buried in the dunes or overlooked. The site-responsive artistic engagements examined reveal an interplay between absence and presence, highlighting fraught tensions between human and nonhuman bodies, colonial legacies, histories of mineral extraction, property and weathering within the beach. In an era marked by rising sea levels and ecological crisis, attuning to movements through walking within the intertidal zone of the beach paves the way for artistic responses that emerge from within the tensions of place, embodying the material-ethical conditions of an ever-shifting coastline.

ABSTRACT This article explores the roles that photography may have in the aftermath of a large-scale catastrophe, specifically photographic practices applied within a variety of documentary, amateur and artistic photography and film. While the primary interest is the development of professional practices, visual symbols (such as a stilled fairground ride) are also often acknowledged by tourist-visitors, to dramatise the fragility of the social order when faced with the consequences of unforeseen human actions, or to imagine the clandestine explorations of those engaged in ‘dark' tourism, or in the images of dislocated lives, those returning elderly residents who continue to chronicle their loss in what has unexpectedly become an animal wilderness. The CEZ is not simply a place in which artistic photographers document abandoned buildings, decaying infrastructure or overgrown landscapes. Whether it be a form of documentation, or amelioration, the possibility arises of a mode of photographic practice which can be programmatically applied in the aftermath of a profound technological and human failure, providing a response which Miles Orvell ([2013]. “Photographing Disaster – Urban Ruins and the Destructive Sublime.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 58 (4): 647) argued ‘combines moral and ethical revulsion with aesthetic wonder and awe’.

ABSTRACT This research shares the beginning foundations for a practice-led process of relational sense-making centring on the Mirrul Creek on Wiradyuri Country as a case study in a decolonising and indigenising arts practice. Utilising a hybrid research methodology analogous to feeling and hearing country as research, the research utilises a critical locatedness or embodied process (a being on Country in situated cognition), a practice of toponymy (decolonising, indigenising and reinhabiting maps and archives) and producing creative works (which reflect the practicalities and findings of the processes). These all circle in iterative loops and form three strands of a weave that hold each other in meaningful tension. The programme of initial research results in several creative works that utilise a contemporary drawing practice that foregrounds the importance of thinking with country, through the cosmology of the country. The research indicates several exciting spaces for future research in making the unseen, seen.

ABSTRACT This article examines Judd’s Specific Objects in light of Cézanne’s paintings and suggests that the two artists share a conception of the relation between objects and space. I argue that, much like Cézanne, Judd saw objects and space as related elements that constantly define each other. Cézanne and Judd are prominent figures who represent two distinct positions in the history of Western art. I consider these positions in relation to the topic of artistic autonomy and suggest that, even though theoreticians have framed Judd’s work in opposition to the modernist concept of the autonomous work of art—the American founding figure of Minimalism has something in common with the French ‘Father of Modern Art’. The proposed phenomenological analysis of works by Judd and Cézanne moves beyond period-based and medium-oriented interpretations and differs from much art-historical discourse, to suggest an additional perspective on their works.

ABSTRACT This article outlines and considers the emergence of (fine art) Experimental Studies at Brighton Polytechnic in 1971, as part of the art school modernisations after the Coldstream Report of 1960. Research, to date, suggests this was the first and maybe the longest-running experimental fine art media course in the UK. The photographic works of artists John Hilliard and Roger Cutforth are discussed as they taught the early years of the course, and Roger Cutforth’s work The Non-Art Project (1970–1971), an offsite project and small black and white photobook gives this article its title. The term non-art, as a category in art history is explored along with Information (Kynaston McShine, MOMA 1970), and both are suggested as an important underpinning for the emergence of Experimental Studies, which became Fine Art Critical Practice (FACP) and was run out to form a general fine art course 2020–2022. The end of the paper looks at a particular FACP student degree show from 2015 which resembles some noteworthy curatorial work of Roger Cutforth from 1971. This visual coincidence is taken as a marker – not of deliberate reference, but of a tradition that can still be used with agency and aesthetic purpose by later generations.