The University of Dundee's School of Fine Art has awarded its first ever PhDs. Gavin Renwick and Norman Shaw graduate today, July 10, following three years of research in their chosen fields.
The School now supports a full range of study - undergraduate, postgraduate and higher degrees, ensuring it maintains its singular national and international reputation for teaching and research.
Head of the School of Fine Art, Euan McArthur said, "The focus of our PhD programme is on practice-based research. This is still a relatively new area in which there is scope for innovative forms of approach, structure and presentation. Our students are developing approaches to PhD which are appropriate to a visual, creative discipline. They combine theory and practice in critical and creative relationships, which are notably different from the 'standard' wholly-written PhD."
"For example, Norman Shaw's PhD is not only a text but also a set of CDs, with text, drawings and related sound, which opened different pathways into his work and background research,with many links and cross-references, such that the reader could follow routes of their own choice into Norman's themes, beyond the linear written text. In Gavin's case, his PhD is essentially in the form of several 'books', with many visual elements, but which can be read in any order. Both were accepted by their examiners without change."
Both Gavin and Norman have developing reputations in the wider academic and art worlds. They are being brought into contact with a wide range of other researchers and artists, from which new developments arise, and are increasingly seen and consulted as experts in their fields.
Gavin has already embarked on an Arts & Humanities Research Board-funded project which has enabled him to continue the work with the sub-Arctic Dogrib Dene people, which earned him his PhD. Norman, who studied Romantic perceptions of Highlandlandscape, linked by the theme of 'the sonorous', has just joined the School of Fine Art's staff as a lecturer in Art History and Theory.
By Jane Smernicki, Press Officer 01382 344768 j.m.smernicki@dundee.ac.uk