Jerwood Contemporary Makers 2010

The Jerwood Contemporary Makers 2010 exhibition is the third and final in a curated series intended to give voice and profile to some of the applied arts world's most playful, thoughtful and skilled artists, at a valuable point in their development. The selectors and curators of 2010's show, Hans Stofer (chair), Richard Slee and Freddy Robins have negotiated their carefully made curatorial decisions not based on the use or function of the objects seen in the show, but on their inherent value as things

Jerwood Contemporary Makers 2010

Jerwood Contemporary Makers showcases work by the new generation of UK makers. Selected by Hans Stofer (chair), Richard Slee and myself, the exhibition investigates the notion of making by bringing together a broad range of work from across craft and the visual arts. Twenty-nine makers took part, each exhibiting one work and receiving an equal share of the £30,000 prize fund. Supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation. A catalogue in the form a newspaper broadsheet was produced with an essay, ‘The Making Game’ commissioned from Jeanette Winterson. A series of Monday evening events accompanied the exhibition. These included Emmanuel Cooper (ceramicist and craft writer) in conversation with Hans Stofer, Richard Slee and myself also a panel discussion exploring the notion of amateur making, chaired by Stephen Knott, (PhD student, School of Applied Art, RCA) with the research student that I supervise Emma Shercliff, (PhD student, School of Fashion & Textiles, RCA). At the National Craft Gallery, Kilkenny, Ireland I conducted a gallery tour and delivered a lecture and workshop on Curating Contemporary Craft alongside curator David Littler. The exhibition received considerable press including Crafts, July/August 2010 (Dr.Jessica Hemmings), Design Week, 27 May 2010 and The Independent, 29 June 2010 (Michael Glover)

The Nature of Things

Stofer created an installation for ‘The Nature of Things’, a joint exhibition curated by Sarah Griffin at the Artists’ House, New Art Centre, Wiltshire (2012). The Artists’ House is a contemporary cottage in the grounds of the New Art Centre (http://sculpture.uk.com/about/). Originally built as a residence for artists working in the sculpture park, it is now used to display exhibitions of domestic-scale works of art. ‘The Nature of Things’ presented a juxtaposition of domestic household items with larger-than-life creations inspired by the ambiguous nature of the displays at the Centre itself, where perception oscillates between display, art, nature, accident and intent. Stofer’s installation took over the bedroom on the house’s ground floor, where he unpacked a personal miscellany, turning the room into a sort of confessional. He filled the room with personal items and collected ephemera – tenderly remaking the most (seemingly) inconsequential materials into jewellery and autobiography: a mixture of found objects made meaningful through artistry and intention. Stofer thus handed over and exposed what appears to be a very private space to the viewer, inviting intimate scrutiny of an interior world and evoking the feeling that the viewer is somehow intruding into a personal space. ‘The Nature of Things’ was reviewed by Sara Roberts in Crafts (2012): Roberts described Stofer’s installation as ‘insistent, edgy and energetic. Found objects are deployed in new object narratives, cut and graffitied, bundled and bound…objects are collected and amassed, not to be revered, but to be altered and “improved” and introduced to other objects, brought together in dissonance. Process is evident; material is delivered with a wry twist.’ It was also reviewed in Wallpaper (2012: http://www.wallpaper.com/art/the-nature-of-things-at-artists-house-uk/5633)

Thing, Tang, Trash

Stofer produced a series of seven new pieces of work for the international ceramic exhibition ‘Thing, Tang, Trash’ at the Permanenten, The West Norway Museum of Decorative Art, Bergen (2011–-12). The exhibition was initiated by curator and ceramic artist Heidi Bjørgan in a collaboration between Bergen National Academy of the Arts and the Art Museums of Bergen. It was part of ‘Creating Art Value: A Research Project on Rubbish and Readymades, Art and Ceramics’ (www.k-verdi.no), which received support from the Research Council of Norway and was part of the Research Programme on Assigning Cultural Values (KULVER). The frequent closure or relocation of European porcelain factories has created a new situation for everyone who works in the field of ceramics. While studio ceramics used to be the antithesis of industrial production, a new kind of art and design have emerged in which the old oppositions between machine-made/handmade, mass production/singular objects and industry/craft/art no longer apply. Stofer’s works used broken ceramics as a readily available raw material, treating the debris left over in abandoned factories as the raw material for new artistic narratives. The works created expressed his interest in the act of repair and the symbolism associated with broken objects and object re-birth: not so much ‘upcycling’, but seeing the ‘stuff’ we are surrounded with as raw material to build from, intellectually and physically. Stofer presented a paper entitled ‘Biting into a cherry does not prepare you for the stone’ at ‘Making or Unmaking? The Contexts of Contemporary Ceramics’ (Terminus Hall, Bergen, Norway, 2011), a conference organised to coincide with ‘Thing, Tang, Trash’. The exhibition attracted a total of 7,160 visitors. It was reviewed in the Norwegian Art Yearbook 2012 and in Bergens Tidende (2011), and featured in Bergensavisen and Brostein

Comparing Experts and Novices on Scaffolded Data Visualizations using Eye-tracking

Spatially-based scientific data visualizations are becoming widely available, yet they are often not optimized for novice audiences. This study follows after an investigation of ex-pert and novice meaning-making from scaffolded data visualizations using clinical inter-views. Using eye-tracking and concurrent interviewing, we examined quantitative fixation and AOI data and qualitative scan path data for two expertise groups (N = 20) on five versions of scaffolded global ocean data visualizations. We found influences of expertise, scaffolding, and trial. In accordance with our clinical interview findings, experts use dif-ferent meaning-making strategies from novices, but novice performance improves with scaffolding and guided practice, providing triangulation. Eye-tracking data also provide insight on meaning-making and effectiveness of scaffolding that clinical interviews alone did not

Neuland Magazin

Stofer is a regular contributor to Neuland Magazin, contributing 13 articles since its inception in 2010. His essays have explored diverse topics including ‘Thames or not Thames’ – the impact of the temporary removal of the Thames from the tube map in 2009; ‘Chewing gum’ – gum as a permanent keeper of our DNA and its potential for cloning; ‘It doesn’t rain money in London’ – the invention of the umbrella and James Smith & Sons; ‘Kunst ist Herrlich (Art Is almighty)’ – a review of the first solo show of the Swiss-born artist Urs Lüthi at Gallery S O in London. Neuland is an online journal published every two months. It acts as a new and independent platform for discussion and exploration of new territories of thinking. It aims to promote different ways of sharing knowledge through a condensed and interdisciplinary format. Neuland has gained a reputation as an innovative online platform for new ideas and as a new model of online journalism. Stofer’s articles are written in a distinctive narrative format, with the intention of offering a close-grained observation of aspects of life in contemporary London. Their innovation lies in the concise format and juxtaposition of image and text, using words as image/pattern, a strategy which invites the reader to reflect further and ‘read between the lines’. A recent innovation has been the adoption of alternative presentation conventions, such as postcard and text messaging formats, in order to create ever more concise ways of conveying meaning. As a direct outcome of the publication of the Neuland series, Stofer was invited to give a lecture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich (2013). The lecture, ‘To make a mark’, further explored the theme of the need to make our presence visible (a subject addressed in several of Stofer’s Neuland articles)

Evaluating macrolichens and environmental variables as predictors of the diversity of epiphytic microlichens

In contrast to the frequently assessed macrolichens, microlichens are rarely considered in biodiversity assessments despite their high species richness. Microlichens require generally a higher species identification effort than macrolichens. Thus, microlichens are more expensive to assess. Here we evaluate if macrolichen richness can be used as an indicator of total and threatened microlichen richness. Furthermore, we tested if different sets of environmental variables (modelled climatic variables, forest structure, altitude, etc.) improve the regression models based on macrolichens only or even replace the macrolichens as predictors. Multiple linear regressions were used to model species richness of microlichens, and Poisson regressions for threatened microlichens. On 237 forest plots (200 m2) distributed randomly across Switzerland, 77 macrolichens and 219 microlichens occurred. Macrolichen richness was positively related to the richness of microlichens (=0·27) and, in combination with threatened macrolichens as an additional predictor, also to the number of threatened microlichens (=0·14). Environmental variables alone and in different combinations explained between 0·20 and 0·41 () of the total variation of microlichen richness, and between 0·09 and 0·29 () of the total variation of threatened microlichen richness. All models based on environmental variables were considerably improved when macrolichens were included. Furthermore, macrolichen richness turned out to be the most important variable in explaining species richness of all, as well as threatened microlichens. The best models for total microlichen richness reached a of 0·56. Threatened microlichens were more difficult to model with the best model reaching a of 0·29. We conclude that in biodiversity assessments with scarce resources, lichen sampling could be focused on the better known macrolichens, at least in many temperate lowland and mountain forests. In combination with environmental variables, reliable predictions of microlichen richness can be expected. If the focus is on threatened microlichens, however, models were not reliable and specialized taxonomists are necessary to assess these species in the fiel

Predicting the potential spatial distributions of epiphytic lichen species at the landscape scale

The potential spatial distributions of six epiphytic lichen species were assessed in Switzerland (41 000 km2) as a function of various key climatic drivers and forest types using logistic regression models. Cetrelia cetrarioides is ‘near threatened', Lobaria pulmonaria is ‘vulnerable', and Graphis scripta, Hypogymnia physodes, Lecanora cadubriae, Letharia vulpina are not endangered according to the Red List assessment based on IUCN criteria. Lichen presence and absence were derived from the SwissLichens database that contains spatially explicit information on both species presence and absence. The spatial lichen niches are predicted with R2 values between 0·5 and 0·75 and AUC values between 0·63 and 0·94. Model evaluation shows that the models perform well. Lichenologists reviewed the spatial predictions of lichen species on the basis of their expert knowledge and concluded that parsimonious regression models may suffice for successful prediction of the potential spatial niche distributions of epiphytic lichen specie

Des poissons et des mares : l'analyse de réseaux multi-niveaux.

Cet article propose une approche néo-structurale de la dimension multi-niveaux de la vie organisationnelle et sociale. L’approche explorée s’appuie sur une étude de réseaux multiniveaux observant deux systèmes d’interdépendances superposés et partiellement emboîtés, l’un inter-organisationnel et l’autre inter-individuel. Nous proposons un mode d’articulation de ces niveaux, la méthode du linked design structural. Cette méthode consiste à examiner séparément des réseaux complets de niveaux différents, puis à les articuler grâce à des informations systématiques sur l’appartenance de chaque individu du premier réseau (interindividuel) à l’une des organisations du second réseau (inter-organisationnel). L’approche fondée sur ce double positionnement structural est mise en œuvre dans une recherche empirique sur les variations de performance au sein de l’« élite » de la recherche française en cancérologie en 1999. Grâce à des mesures de centralité, nous identifions les acteurs que ces chercheurs considèrent comme centraux ou périphériques à l’échelle inter-individuelle (les gros et les petits poissons) et les laboratoires que les directeurs de recherche considèrent comme centraux ou périphériques à l’échelle inter-organisationnelle (les grandes ou les petites mares). Au-delà du constat trivial de l’avantage concurrentiel des gros poissons dans les grandes mares (en particulier du fait de la prime à la taille dans ce domaine de recherche), nous mettons en évidence, dans la course à la performance scientifique mesurée à l’échelle individuelle, des stratégies de « rattrapage » utilisées dans ce système par les plus petits poissons. Nous suggérons que cette méthode apporte une connaissance originale de la dimension multi-niveaux des systèmes d’interdépendances et de la manière dont les acteurs gèrent ces interdépendances. Nous pensons qu’elle ajoute une dimension nouvelle à l’exploration méso-sociologique, que ce soit pour l’étude des inégalités sociales ou pour celle du rôle des élites dans les changements institutionnels.This article proposes a neo-structural approach to the multi-level dimension of organizational and social life. Our study explores multi-level networks that observe two systems of superposed and partially interlocked interdependencies, the first being inter-organizational, the second interindividual. We propose a method of structural linked design as an articulation for these levels. The method is composed of two major steps : first, we separately examine the complete networks at the two different levels. Second, we articulate the two networks in relation to one another using systematic information about the membership of each individual in the first network (interindividual) to one of the organizations in the second network (inter-organizational). This dualpositioning, or the linked design approach, is carried out in an empirical study examining performance variations within the « elite » of French cancer research in 1999. By looking at measures of centrality, we identify the actors that these top researchers consider as central or peripheral at the inter-individual level (the big and the little fish among the elite), and the laboratories that the research directors consider as central or peripheral at the inter-organizational level (the big and the little ponds among all the laboratories conducting cancer research in France at that time). In addition to the rather trivial report of the competitive advantage of big fish in big ponds (particularly because of the advantage of size for laboratories in this domain of research), we use measurements of scientific performance to identify « catching up » strategies that the smallest fish use in this system. We suggest that this method offers new insights into the multilevel dimension of complex systems of interdependencies, and also into the way in which actors manage these interdependencies. We believe that this understanding adds a new dimension to the sociological exploration of the determinants of performance, of meso-level phenomena such as institutional change, or macro-level phenomena such as social inequalities.réseaux sociaux; Réseaux organisationnels;

Prediction of lichen diversity in an UNESCO biosphere reserve - correlation of high resolution remote sensing data with field samples

The present study focuses on developing models to predict lichen species richness in a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve of the Swiss Pre-Alps following a gradient of land-use intensity combining remote sensing data and regression models. The predictive power of the models and the obtained r ranging from 0.5 for lichens on soil to 0.8 for lichens on trees can be regarded as satisfactory to good, respectively. The study revealed that a combination of airborne and spaceborne remote sensing data produced a variety of ecological meaningful variable