Trespassing disciplines and binding together practice and theory, Telling Stories: Visual Practice, Theories and Narrative crosses strange territories and occupies liminal spaces. It addresses a contemporary preoccupation with narrative and narration, which is being played out across the arts, humanities and beyond, and considers how visual and performative encounters contribute to thinking. How might they tell theories? Telling Stories results from a series of symposia, held at Loughborough University School of Art and Design in 2007. The programme included papers, screenings and performances and was based around the convenors' shared interests in Peggy Phelan's notion of 'performative writing' and in the examination of inter-disciplinary forms of narrative and counter-narrative. It specifically focused on three aspects - experimental forms of Theories and Criticism, Objects and Narrative and the particular form of the Cinematic Essay and explored how the performative move could also be said to apply to forms of contemporary art practice: to what photography, film, objects wish to say. This resulting edited collection presents contemporary making and writing practices as multi-faceted, interdisciplinary and trans-medial and is indicative of an attitude that sets out to encounter the world, its social conditions, its global perspectives and the nature of aesthetic discussion that is no longer confined by formalism.
About the Author: Jane Tormey lectures in Critical and Historical Studies at Loughborough University School of Art and Design. Her research explores how art practice exchanges ideas with other disciplines. She co-edits the electronic journal TRACEY - Contemporary Drawing Research. She is currently completing a book entitled Contemporary Photographic Realism: practice and theory (Manchester University Press). Gillian Whiteley is a curator and lecturer at Loughborough University School of Art & Design. Her interests focus on trans-disciplinary practices in socio-political contexts, from cultural activism in the 1960s to contemporary practice. She recently published in H. Crawford (ed) Artistic Bedfellows: Histories, Theories and Conversations in Collaborative Art Practices (2008) and is currently completing Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash (IB Tauris).