Wall Beside the Work

Derek Pigrum is an artist researcher that has for many years taught art in the context of international education. His artistic activity as a painter and a graphic artist is intertwined with research that began with his Ph.D. at the University of Bath into what he terms ‘transitional drawing’ used by a wide range of creative people to generate, share, and develop ideas using multi-sign modes. In 2009, he published a book that expanded his Ph.D. thesis into a monograph entitled ‘Teaching Creativity: Multi-mode Transitional Practices’. The book he is proposing is a deeper exploration of the meta-modes of the thesis and the subsidiary modes and of the central notion of what he terms ‘Das Gegenwerk’ or the work towards the work that avoids definitive closure in the context of the role of objects and place in the creative practices of artists. He has published numerous papers related to transitional practices in journals and a number of articles in books. At present, he is a Vienna-based senior researcher at the International Semiotics Institute at Kaunas Technical University, Lithuania.

• Introduction.- The Web of Multi-Mode Transitional Practices.- The Work of the Wall.- Potential Space and the Charge of the Transitional object.- The Place of the Studio.- The Wall Beside the Work.- Off the Wall(floor) into the Work.- When the Wall becomes a work.- Other Walls, Other Work.- The Wall beside the Work as a Theatre of Memory.- Not just another brick in the wall.- Serendipity: The Bridge between Painting and Science.- Conclusion.