Personal possessions of nursing home residents can contribute to their sense of home. This study investigated which of the personal belongings were considered most important, and if these items indeed contributed to a sense of home. A qualitative research was conducted with 27 nursing home residents. Photographs, paintings, and pieces of furniture are objects with sentimental value. The television set is valued for its practical function. Residents of larger rooms have more flexibility in bringing along personal items, including pieces of furniture. The results of this study can be used for the design of nursing homes or for making informed choices during the process of institutionalization.
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Many affective experiences and learning processes including attachment patterns from early developmental phases manifest during psychotherapy. The first 15 min in art therapy can potentially reveal clients’ preferred ways of processing information or Expressive Therapies Continuum components, attachment patterns in the material handling process, and emotion regulation strategies during art making. This article discusses how, through clients’ choice of materials and manner of interaction with those materials, information about attachment patterns and preferred emotion regulation is available in art therapy. Paying close attention to the first image and material interaction provides crucial information that will guide the goals and course of art therapy. Two case vignettes demonstrate that within the first 15 min of art therapy information is readily gathered about attachment styles, Expressive Therapies Continuum components, emotion regulation, and the course of art therapy.
DOCUMENT
The Hungarian artist Judit Kis was one of the artists who gave a performance during Video Vortex #12 in Malta, in September 2019. This is where I was introduced to her very personal work. In the following months I engaged with her work and decided to approach her for an (email) interview. In an artistic sense, Judit Kis fits well into the ‘intermedia’ category. She produces videos (https://vimeo.com/user9166179), photo documentations (here her older Tumblr site), prints, paintings, ceramics, performances and installations consisting of blankets, lightboxes and bricks. She prints sentences on textile and engraves words into ceramic bricks (all in English). Titles of some of her video works: I have never happened, Detoxification, Dedication, Disillusion, Distance, I love you, and a confronting one: Enough.
MULTIFILE
Society continues to place an exaggerated emphasis on women's skins, judging the value of lives lived within, by the colour and condition of these surfaces. This artistic research will explore how the skin of a painting might unpack this site of judgement, highlight its objectification, and offer women alternative visualizations of their own sense of embodiment. This speculative renovation of traditional concepts of portrayal will explore how painting, as an aesthetic body whose material skin is both its surface and its inner content (its representations) can help us imagine our portrayal in a different way, focusing, not on what we look like to others, but on how we sense, touch, and experience. How might we visualise skin from its ghostly inner side? This feminist enquiry will unfold alongside archival research on The Ten Largest (1906-07), a painting series by Swedish Modernist Hilma af Klint. Initial findings suggest the artist was mapping traditional clothing designs into a spectral, painterly idea of a body in time. Fundamental methods research, and access to newly available Af Klint archives, will expand upon these roots in maps and women’s craft practices and explore them as political acts, linked to Swedish Life Reform, and knowingly sidestepping a non-inclusive art history. Blending archival study with a contemporary practice informed by eco-feminism is an approach to artistic research that re-vivifies an historical paradigm that seems remote today, but which may offer a new understanding of the past that allows us to also re-think our present. This mutuality, and Af Klint’s rhizomatic approach to image-making, will therefore also inform the pedagogical development of a Methods Research programme, as part of this post-doc. This will extend across MA and PhD study, and be further enriched by pedagogy research at Cal-Arts, Los Angeles, and Konstfack, Stockholm.
Create and test the effect of different audio and movement interactions on virtual museum experiencesA virtual museum was created in order to conduct research, specifically designed for the Samsung Gear VR. In the virtual environment there are interactive compositions the user can hear, and react to while seeing a virtual reality exposition of stunning Japanese paintings. The objective of the latest study was to find whether differences in audio (i.e., interactive or non‐interactive) and movement types (i.e., fixed or free) had an impact on the experience of presence for the user in a virtual environment that represents a museum. The audio variable is composed by and is researched on behalf of Musica Nova, a company that produces music for new forms of media. The results of this component illustrated that interactive music increases feelings of engagement and presence. As to the movement types in a virtual museum, users indicated that free movement caused for a more engaging virtual environment. The research was extended for research on different paintings (e.g. VanGogh).
