We Are Publication is a research group based at Kingston School of Art’s Contemporary Art Research Centre which seeks to test out innovative forms of contemporary art publishing. The group consists of a fluctuating number of staff and current and past research students, brought together by a shared sense of experimentation and the possibilities inherent in collaboratively conducted research. To date the group have produced speculative publications in the form of a launch event (ICA, London, 2015), a 5 minute video (Stanley Picker Gallery, 2015), the 60 minute radio broadcast Diagram of an Hour (Resonance FM, London, 2016) and a vinyl record documenting the broadcast event (Curved Pressing, 2017). We Are Publication‘s latest project, Notes on a Carpet has taken the shape of a rug presented alongside a series of readings and performances at Five Years, London in April and at Black Tower Projects, London in June 2018. We Are Publication took part in the London Art Book Fair at the Whitechapel Gallery in September 2018 and will present Notes on a Carpet at Pratt Institute, New York in February 2019.
Author: JC
We Are Publication at Twenty-One
We Are Publication took up a one-day residency at Focal Point Gallery’s Unit Twenty-One on the 17th October 2018. During this time the group produced an experimental and speculative publication; the shape and form of which was determined on the day and presented to the public between 4pm and 6pm.
17 October 2018, 4-6pm
Unit 21
Pier Approach
Western Esplanade
Southend-on-Sea SS1 2EH
London Art Book Fair
We Are Publication will be sharing a table space at the Book Fair with artist-led record label and publishing imprint Oh (John Lawrence/Mat Jenner).
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/events/table-share/
We Are Publication will be presenting a new version of Notes on a Carpet featuring the Diagram of an Hour double album.
We Are Publication’s latest project, Notes on a Carpet has taken the shape of a rug presented alongside a series of readings and performances at Five Years and Black Tower Projects in April and June 2018 respectively. The group are currently working on a presentation for Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea in October 2018 and will show Notes on a Carpet at Pratt Institute, New York in February 2019.
Notes on a Carpet
Saturday 7 April 2018 2–6 pm (live events and video stream from 3pm)
Five Years, Unit 2B1, Boothby Road, Archway, N19 4AJ
Part home-furnishing, part-collage, Notes on a Carpet is the latest collaborative iteration of We Are Publication, a contemporary art research group based at Kingston University, London. At Five Years, a luxurious hand-tufted floor carpet stages underfoot the research concerns of the group’s current contributors. How can the mutability of textiles foster individual critical interests as collective representation? This question attempts to embed the conventions of publishing i.e.,contributors, editors, printers, alongside live aspects of performance and theatre, allowing the carpet to function as magazine, as stage, and as a record recounting the groups’ own sense of shared play and experimentation.
Performance running order:
Mind to Mind & How, 1951, Austin Osman Spare (extract) – Jonathan Allen
A Machine Chamber in 4 parts, part 1 – John Hughes
Bergman’s House – Jenna Collins
A Machine Chamber in 4 parts, part 2
Pastiche by Gareth Jones
Le Gai Savoir, 1969 Jean-Luc Godard (extract) – Jenna Collins
Your Singing Eyes and Fingers (after Elizabeth Frasers Song to The Siren, 1983) – Rachel Cattle
A Machine Chamber in 4 parts, parts 3 + 4 /Lift Safety Devices, 1928 (extract)
+ Carpet Bodies, augmented reality app – Daniel Shanken (throughout)
Carpet constructed by Christian Newby
Mandy Ure
Associate Professor, Head of Department of Fine Art
In Mandy Ure’s paintings there is an absurd investment, a committed doubt, in producing paintings that address temporality, belief and scepticism in a paintings ability to signify anything. Her paintings rehearse the rhetoric of painting, using the precedents and conventions of mark making, picturing and construction. These mechanistic methods are absorbed and conflated with an expressionless declaration of physical fact and a fascination with the desire for a potentially stable pictorial referent. The paintings fluctuate – by way of production and forms implied – between a simulation of meaningful activity and a belief that the temporality of painting can (still) allow for an alternate (s)pace of understanding.
Recent research includes exhibitions Native, Durden and Ray, LA, Here, there and somewhere in between, Horatio Jr, London, Welcome to Corfu, Depot, London and symposium ‘Women; Art, Books and Printed Matter’, Hauser and Wirth, Somerset.
Diagram of an Hour
Vinyl record by We Are Publication
Launch at Cubitt’s studio 5, 6pm -8pm, 4th July 2017.
8 Angel Mews, Islington, London N1 9HH
Diagram of an Hour is a 60 minute radio broadcast first aired at 11am on the19th of June, 2015 as part of the Modulations series on Resonance 104.4 fm. Proceeding from a diagram of an hour on paper, the sound work was produced and assembled by We Are Publication, a collaboration between researchers in the Centre for Useless Splendour at Kingston University, with contributions from; Jonathan Allen, Anat Ben-David, Rachel Cattle, Lucy Coggle, Jenna Collins, Cullinan Richards, Volker Eichelmann, Dean Kenning / Maria Yashchanka, Katie Macleod, Andrea Stokes, Stine Ljungdahl and Roman Vasseur
This record documents the broadcast in 15 minute segments as it was received in several places, as well as the final section of the original composition.
Record 1
A Side. Stream (repeat) recorded London, UK. 21/07/15 16:45:00
B Side. Stream (live) recorded Visby, Sweden, 19/06/15. 12:00:05
Record 2
A Side. Broadcast (104.4 FM) recorded London, UK. 19/06/15. 11:00:00
B Side. Master, produced and compiled London, 2015.
Recordings of broadcasts made by Jenna Collins and Andrea Stokes, compiled by Jenna Collins, cover by Daniel Shanken, supported by the Contemporary Art Research Centre, Kingston University. 2017.
Louis Nixon
Professor, Associate Dean Research
My research is underpinned by an on-going engagement with an expanded sculptural practice. I produce kinetic sculptures, sound works, films and paintings, which combine a manipulation of technology with the creation of new modes of presentation.
I continue to define my work as part of an expanded practice of sculpture, which experiments with new ways of configuring sculpture in a wider social context.
A developing research theme, which equates with the physical and political components of landscape is encapsulated in the idea of borders. Recent work traces borders, most often making journeys by car and travelling the boundary of a landscape, particular site or territory where a route of circumvention may be dictated for geographical or political reasons.
Black Rock (pictured) is a sculpture that looks like a rock, it has motors and sensors which make it move forwards and backwards across a space or landscape, changing its direction when it encounters another object.
Volker Eichelmann
Associate Professor, Director of Postgraduate Research CARC
In 1925, Stephen Tennant (1906–1987), perhaps the most intriguing of England’s ‘Bright Young Things’, contemplated a novel about “high life with a capital H & full of crude impossibilities”. He favoured amongst other titles The Monkey House, as well as Gutters of Gold. Despite his elaborate preparations, this book, like so many others imagined by Tennant during his life in a sequestered Wiltshire manor house, was never to materialise. Volker Eichelmann has resurrected Gutters of Gold as an intriguing visual essay. In this publication Eichelmann’s paintings, collages and photographs overlap and underlie Tennant’s drawings and personal ephemera. Reflections on landscape gardens and water-features, Greek antiquities and ruination, horticulture and eighteenth century découpage emerge as joint preoccupations that shift and expand in proximity as they unfold in a succession of scenarios conceived by Eichelmann under evocative chapter headings.
(from: Volker Eichelmann with Stephen Tennant, Gutters of Gold, Black Dog Publishing, 2017)
Felicity Hammond
Portals in the Urban Terrain: excavating the virtual ruins of rendered architectural propositions
Monumental billboards concealing construction sites have become commonplace in towns all over the world, with images envisaging desirable, aspirational and unfathomably clean living and working environments. On closer inspection however, these projections quite literally disintegrate. This practice-led research addresses the spatial inconsistencies provided by simulated architectural propositions, and challenges their material status when they intersect the post-industrial landscape. We are at a key moment in image production, where as the software that is used to produce computer generated imagery becomes more readily available, the rendered image starts to break down. Through the interdisciplinary nature of my practice, I am arresting images that although temporal, have a lasting impact on the social and economic fabric of the urban landscape. I am paying particular attention to the ‘slippage’ that occurs in these propositions, and it is this unintentional error that I am adopting as my methodology for creating new photographs and installations.
Jeanine Richards
Associate Professor, Joint School Director, Research
Jeanine Richards has worked with Charlotte Cullinan as part of an artist duo since 1998. They initially collaborated as artlab and subsequently began working as Cullinan Richards in 2006.
Cullinan and Richards have chosen to work within a tight partnership that facilitates engagement with a wider set of conceptual frameworks, with support structures central to their art making.
In past exhibitions Cullinan Richards investigated expanded definitions of making and activating paintings through works created in the studio and on site, using exhibitions to express abstraction and figuration as inseparable concepts and an interconnected material instability.
Recent shows have extended these interests into fracturing and dualities associated with new ideas around re-evaluating archives and a feminine materiality. The overall conceptual processes include staging and re-staging works, performance events, display strategies and repositioning histories and ideas in favor of the ‘Feminine’.
Goodbye Charles, Charles H Scott Gallery, Vancouver (2017), Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? Parts I, II Cooper Gallery DJCAD Dundee (2016); No Fun Without EU – Artists in Common, Vyner Street, London (2016); Display Show, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2015-16); DORA, Stanley Picker Gallery (2015); Paradigm Store, Howick Place, London (2014); The Ultimate Materiality of Women Part III, Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe (2013); STAG, Dispari&Dispari Gallery, Italy, (2013);
As a reflection of their interest in artists providing platforms to support other artworks, in 2006 they established the Savage School Window Gallery using the window of their studio on Vyner Street, London to display texts by writers, artists and curators. In 2013 they changed this into 4COSE, collaborating with curator Andrea Sassi, to create an Italian grocery shop-as-artwork open for artists interventions and top quality parmesan cheese.
Marianne Keating
‘They don’t do much in the cane-hole way’ Representing Caribbean Whiteness and the Irish Diaspora in Jamaica through visual and material culture.
Duration 5min and 6 sec
My research harnesses post-colonial and archival theory to analyse the migration of the Irish diaspora to Jamaica.
Through re-examining and documenting this largely unknown and unaddressed history, my research traces the migration of the Irish from 1835 to 1842s and their arrival in Jamaica through narratively reconstructing this history through its archival traces. This research addresses fragmented identities via archival and postcolonial frames and the creolization of the Irish in Jamaica and the resulting legacies in contemporary Jamaica.
Through postcolonial theory and archival theory, I analyse and respond to the cultural legacies of colonialism and the human consequences of imperialism. And I seek to determine new historical narratives in response to the dominant “master narratives” of Western nationhood, identity and culture. The repercussions of colonial rule can still be felt today, and my work focuses on the rewriting of histories of the dominated “Other” and returning a voice, which had been rendered mute.
Situating my practice within the historiographic turn in contemporary art discourse and in relation to the archive, notably through the examination of unrecorded, private and disregarded histories, my multi-disciplinary approach to the research, the archival record and the archival image questions the legitimacy of the archive and falsification or lack within the recorded image and text.
mariannekeating.com
Simon Josebury
Beautility: printed matter, moving image and the question of Use
My research takes as its framework the beauty-utility opposition in aesthetics to then probe and explore how the formulation of aesthetic distance is constructed conceptually and echoed socially. This study will be pursued theoretically in written research, and practically through an expanded conception of publication as practice, investigating mechanical and digital reproduction in the widest sense. This research will practically interrogate the formal representation of aesthetic theory, and question what is at stake in the notion of aesthetic distance, producing both printed matter and digital video that address the social and political implications of concepts of taste, value, and judgement itself.
Dr Sarah Bennett
Head of School Art & Architecture
In her artistic research Bennett critiques the historical and contemporary contexts of psychiatric provision through embodied actions, digital recording methods and site-based interventions. Her four channel video installation Safe-keeping (Custodia) (2014) was developed through an invitation to work on an interdisciplinary and international research project Geographies of affect and memory at the Museo Laboratorio Della Mente, in Rome. The project explored the creative methods by which the museum constructs a contemporary mental health promotion message by forcing an emotional engagement with histories and memories of institutionalisation and the phenomenon of mental illness. Related projects include: Reformations (2010) and Institutional Traits (2012). Her published conference papers explore links between sited art practices, psychiatry, cultural geography, visual anthropology, museology and architecture.
John Hughes
At Night On The Railway I Watch Animals Appear Live On Screen
At night on the railway I watch animals appear live on screen. I watch how they are not constrained by the threat of being watched. I watch as they patrol the platforms, ballast and rails. I listen. I wait. I watch as they run, hide, re appear and vanish. I look on as the rules of everyday surveillance are broken and subverted.
By watching animals on the railway at night what can I learn about notions of control and communication in urban space? What are the affects of being under permanent surveillance? What are the consequences of being hyper-aware of this everyday monitoring?
Taking a psycho-geographical approach I am mapping a kind of London history: marking territories, drawing mis-connections, inking in vanished lores, re-drawing erased lines of history, re-discovering forgotten London literature and film. I am using combinations of writing, film and sound as a method to delineate London’s preternatural anxious state.
Jo Addison
Joint Course Leader / Senior Lecturer BA Fine Art
The relationship between objects and the body, and of objects to one another is intrinsic to the haptic and spatial curiosity at the heart of Addison’s sculptural research. Drawing from Bruno Latour, James Elkin, Jane Bennet’s theories on things, and Tim Ingold and Richard Sennet’s writing on making, she implements methods by which her decisions are governed by the behaviour of materials. Additionally, in collaboration with Natasha Kidd, Jo is engaged in a collaborative practice through which they explore learning as form. To date, this has included the production of a number of significant educational resources, objects and events, participation in educational research groups and contributions to national and international conferences and symposia.
Recent activities include: No Working Title, Tate Exchange and Blip Blip Blip, Gettin’ the Heart Ready, The Royal Standard; Good Things to Come, The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art; Buffetd’art, Meinblau Gallery, Berlin; Stop Bugging Me | Frame 3, Tintype London 2015; Alioli, Outpost Norwich 2015; Combines #1, Model Liverpool 2014; Ideas are Faster, Five Years London 2012; Easy does it, David Dale Gallery Glasgow, Aid & Abet Cambridge, Supercollider Blackpool 2013.
joaddison.com
instagram/joaddisonartist
tintypegallery.com/artists/jo-addison/
noworkingtitle.co.uk
instagram/nwtinstruct
noticer.uk
Dr Henry Bond
Senior Lecturer
Research interests: Virilio’s prism of military strategy, military tactics, and defense organisation is my current focus with a monograph book on this topic forthcoming 2020-21.
Zoe Childerley
Senior Lecturer, Photography
Through her practice-based research, Zoe has explored the rural experience and relationship to place, how this forms identity and represents belonging told through story. She is interested in landscape, the concept of wilderness and the search for a primordial connection. Her work in the American desert demonstrates a particular interest in combining a desire to experience the ‘sublime’ with the inexplicable seduction of the abyss. She explores the precarious nature of the photographic medium itself, where the truth is always interpreted, testing the narrative potential of photography in relation to its abstract capacities. Zoe is expanding her approach to sound, drawing and text, exploring how the media intertwine with her photographic practice, to express a narrative around territory and cultural identity on UK borders, building on research themes in her practice, of nationhood, landscape and connection to place. Zoe is interested in how the landscape shapes society, how “place” is constituted, deconstructed, augmented, discussed, experienced.
Melissa Gordon
The Value of Gestures
My PhD aims to address the question of how the value of a gesture is determined in a painting. In my approach I have considered contemporary debates around paintings post-condition and its aggregate nature, as well as research into the value form of negative gestures of withdrawal. I have developed new bodies of work that aim to make visible the invisible procedures of labor in the production of painting and exhibition making (as the framing device of the painting). My PhD is developing a language around gesture that envisions it as fluid, and uses the philosophy around early cinema to determine where a gesture happens (between images). This PhD aims to expand the discussion of value around contemporary painting, focusing on how painting gestures are both a conduit for the movement of value to and from certain spaces in the contemporary art world, but also as a potential fluid conduit for outsider, radical positions which question the role of value distribution through terms such as ‘author’ and ‘genius’.
Charlotte Cullinan
Professor of Fine Art, Course Leader MA Art and Space and MFA
Charlotte Cullinan has worked with Jeanine Richards as part of an artist duo since 1998. They initially collaborated as artlab and subsequently began working as Cullinan Richards in 2006.
Cullinan and Richards have chosen to work within a tight partnership that facilitates engagement with a wider set of conceptual frameworks, with support structures central to their art making.
In past exhibitions Cullinan Richards investigated expanded definitions of making and activating paintings through works created in the studio and on site, using exhibitions to express abstraction and figuration as inseparable concepts and an interconnected material instability.
Recent shows have extended these interests into fracturing and dualities associated with new ideas around re-evaluating archives and a feminine materiality. The overall conceptual processes include staging and re-staging works, performance events, display strategies and repositioning histories and ideas in favor of the ‘Feminine’
Goodbye Charles, Charles H Scott Gallery, Vancouver (2017), Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? Parts I, II Cooper Gallery DJCAD Dundee (2016); No Fun Without EU – Artists in Common, Vyner Street, London (2016); Display Show, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2015-16); DORA, Stanley Picker Gallery (2015); Paradigm Store, Howick Place, London (2014); The Ultimate Materiality of Women Part III, Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe (2013); STAG, Dispari&Dispari Gallery, Italy, (2013);
As a reflection of their interest in artists providing platforms to support other artworks, in 2006 they established the Savage School Window Gallery using the window of their studio on Vyner Street, London to display texts by writers, artists and curators. In 2013 they changed this into 4COSE, collaborating with curator Andrea Sassi, to create an Italian grocery shop-as-artwork open for artists interventions and top quality parmesan cheese.
Christian Newby
Among the Living: Articulating Craft Methodologies Beyond Ornament and Skill in Contemporary Art Practice
My research examines how the use of applied art and handicraft techniques in the production of artworks can focus a spotlight on and put forward new ways of understanding how nodes of instability and conditionality within the definition of craft offer it as a crucial social tool for understanding the ever-changing propositions of material culture.
christiannewby.com
spaceinbetween.co.uk/artists/christian-newby/
Daniel Shanken
Unconscious and pre-programmed systems of influence and their implications within art practice
Daniel Shanken is an artist from Los Angeles, living and working in London. Recently his work has been shown at Studio RCA Riverlight, Art Basel Hong Kong, Yvonne Lambert Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, CCA Glasgow, Nottingham Contemporary, CFCCA Manchester, Kiasma Helsinki, and CGP London.
Seyyed Sadegh Aleahmad
Anxieties of Difference
As a young Iranian artist living in the UK, the examination of my position in the cultural space that exists between the West and the Middle East is an instrumental voice in my research. In order to address and disarm the habitual notions of Islamic Identity I have adapted subversive approaches to my practice including Maddahi singing, choreography with mirrors and cameras, and performances with fake explosives.
My work questions the ideas of self as a site of conflict between an entity and its projected re-presentation, and explores underlying assumptions and clashes between artistic intensions and viewer’s perception. This is stimulated by the tension present between the presumed role of an active artist being mistakenly recognised for a terrorist
Adam Gillam
Senior Lecturer/Course Leader BA Fine Art
Revelling in material and visual flippancy, Adam Gillam fidgets, probes and tweaks the abundant dark matter of studio experimentation and collected pound-shop tat. The resulting images, objects and accumulations present a potential, momentary resolution between improvisation and refinement.
Adam Gillam studied at Liverpool John Moores University from 1991-1994 and at The Royal Academy Schools, London, from 1994-1997 and is currently represented by Tintype Gallery, London.
Adam Gillam currently lives and works in London.
Mark Harris
Associate Professor in Fine Art
Mark Harris’ key area of research and specialism is the history of the printed image and the processes and journey it takes through reproduction, translation and documentation. His own practice is informed by the language of print, using discarded publications as material to create collages, sculptures and multiples that explore themes of Utopian landscapes and interpretations of unrealised architectural schemes and models.
He has presented at International Print Symposiums in China and New Zealand. Recent exhibitions are a solo show at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK, and the 2015 London Open at the Whitechapel Gallery. In 2016 he was invited to give a Public Lecture at The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia, in response to the exhibition Proof: Work of Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, and Robert Longo.
Gareth Jones
How to fabricate the ideal city
I’m looking at how to fabricate the ideal city, using a methodology that I’ve called the Tablescape. This is a form of architectural model making that employs found and repurposed materials to create fictive spaces that become a springboard for different forms of publicity. To fabricate is both to make and to fake, and the ambiguity of the word is key to my research. I am making, through the process of assemblage; I am faking, by constructing stories about the ideal city from these fragments.
This is not based on an abstraction. I grew up in a modernist utopia called Milton Keynes, an ideal living environment planned for 250,000 people on a large area of North Buckinghamshire. My research considers the possibility of vision in the public realm, moving between art, architecture and design. A testing ground for this is a project called City Club, an ambitious scheme to remodel and curate an area of Central Milton Keynes according to the utopian perspective of the city’s first architects and planners.
Bill Leslie
What happens to a sculpture when it is filmed and photographed?
What happens to a sculpture when it is filmed and photographed? How is it effected and changed by this process of capture and representation? Can sculpture and media act together to produce something which has its own particular force and existence? Can a mediated object be considered as an art object in its own right?
This practice-led enquiry will open out the possibilities of the pictured sculpture, conceiving of the act of mediation as integral to the creation of the art object, a radical transformation and fundamental constitutive act without which the object would not be what it is. Using various representational media – still, moving and virtual – I will test the power of the media to transform the sculptural object giving to it unexpected qualities, altering its perceived scale and materiality, finding ways for the pictured sculpture to exceed its origins entering into the viewer’s perception as something distinct yet inseparable from the process of mediation.
This research will take into account key philosophical debates around the nature of objects and of representational media, alongside phenomenological analysis articulating the complex and intertwined relationship of object, and the media through which it reaches the viewer, not merely as something seen visually but perceived bodily. This will be underpinned by an analysis of how the art object has been forged historically in relation to the photographic image and how artists over the past century have used representational media to put the integrity of the art object into question. This research will create new understandings of the nature and possibilities of the pictured sculpture, establishing it as a locus of practical and theoretical inquiry which is at the heart of image production in contemporary art.
Maryam Tafakory
Devotion and absence: towards a cinematic écriture féminine
This research proposes to investigate the intersection of documentary, experimental video and ethnography within the context and theory of Helene Cixous’s écriture féminine, exploring how socio-political and allegorical narrative is channelled through the self as implicated in the wider social structure.
Bringing into dialogue feminist theory and cinematic auto-ethnography as a device for challenging the assumptions attached to identity in order to open up new forms of writing, alterity and resistances within the system. I aim to research both practice-based and theoretical constituents of feminist cine-writing, developing film pieces testing these investigations into emergent, poetic relationships between visual text and speech act.
Dr Claire M. Holdsworth
Early Career Research Fellow
An archivist and researcher, Holdsworth specialises in British artists’ moving image.
By considering the voice and authorship her work investigates narratives and narration – ‘aural’ histories and the voice – exploring sound, the archive and historiography. Recent research mines intersections between experimental sounds, films and videos of the 1970s and 1980s using archives and interviews, with projects/writings often extending to the archive, feminist theory and social collectives. Parallel research interests include kinetic art, the artists Stefan and Franciscka Themerson, computer art and media theory. As a researcher interested in sound and discussion she organises events and when based in the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection at Central Saint Martins (UAL) during her AHRC funded PhD, co-organised the symposium ‘Writing Histories of the Moving Image’ (CSM, 2015). Holdsworth has written for Vertigo, the anthology Other Cinemas (ed. Clayton and Mulvey, May 2017) and the Moving Image Review and Art Journal.
Jenna Collins
We Are the Road
Contemporary archival art practices utilise their artefacts in a variety of ways. My approach foregrounds certain artefact’s own internal and pre-existing complexities, separate from the complexities of an archive. This is distinct from archival art practices that focus on specific histories and their misrepresentation or absence; and practices that critique the archival construct itself.
I undertake the research through the production of moving image and sound artworks that seek to adopt and critically reformulate the processes of commercial film production and the artefacts it produces (such as the location report and the screenplay). This manoeuvre responds to the notion of instrumentality, criticised in philosophical thinking about technology.
The artefacts located by this project are the material remains of non-technical aspects (communities, ideas, events) that have accumulated around the development of moving image and screen-based technological products since the late 20th century. Their continued existence as digital files and second-hand products is not the result of an organised recognition of their worth, rather, they have accumulated in the wake of technological advancement as so much junk floating around at the margins of the archive. The intention of the project is not to rehabilitate overlooked materials but to explore the idea that these unheroic fragments and their stubborn specificities actualise moments of lived experience entangled with technology.
Andrew Hunt
Early Career Research Fellow
Andrew Hunt is a curator and writer based in London. He is currently a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at Kingston University and Co-Director of Reading International. Recent independent projects include ‘As You Change So Do I’ a series of public art commissions for Luton, UK (2016 to 2019), ‘The Green Ray’, Wilkinson Gallery, London and ‘Concerning Concrete Poetry’, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (both 2016).From 2008 to 2014 he was Director of Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea, and in 2012 he was a member of the Turner Prize jury. He contributes to magazines and journals such as Art Monthly, Domus, frieze, Mousse Magazine, and TATE ETC., and is founding editor of the Slimvolume imprint, which to date has published editions and books by over 250 artists.
Dr Dean Kenning
Research Fellow in Fine Art
There are two main aspects to my art practice. Firstly art as a form of generative exploratory communication and thinking through drawing. This includes allegorical and diagrammatic based philosophical, political and economic investigations such as the Metallurgy and Capital projects, as well as the pedagogical Social Body Mind Maps. Secondly, material object based work that is compulsive, humorous and engages a B-movie horror aesthetic. In particular my kinetic rubber and sound sculptures. The two aspects come together most clearly in video and performance work. I often work as part of art groups. My work has been shown at the ICA, Grundy Art Gallery, BAK and the Whitechapel Gallery.
I have written on art and politics, ‘idiot art’, and art education, publishing in journals such as Art Monthly, Third Text and Mute, and co-organising symposia at Tate Modern, Whitechapel and the ICA. At Kingston I have published a series of booklets based on transcripts from the Stanley Picker Public Lectures series.
Lucy Coggle
Digital Scurvy: shimmering the screen
Surface tension and perpetual vacillation in the digital; a practice based investigation into the effect of digital onto language in all its forms – visual, verbal and spoken.
Diagram of an Hour Radio Broadcast
Diagram of an Hour- Scoring, Composition, Publication
In this programme, We Are Publication, the Fine Art Research Group at Kingston University, score an hour into seventeen discrete sections of various lengths, according to a prescribed notation.
This programme was made by We Are Publication Research Group at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Kingston University London: Jonathan Allen, Anat Ben‐David, Rachel Cattle, Jenna Collins, Lucy Coogle, Volker Eichelmann, Dean Kenning, Stine Ljungdalh, Katy Macleod, David Panos, Cullinan Richards, Andrea Stokes, Charlie Tweed, Roman Vasseur, Martin Westwood and Esther Windsor. Edited by Jenna Collins.
It was first broadcast on Friday 19 June 2015 as part of the first series of Modulations: Broadcasting Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, on Resonance 104.4fm.
Katy MacLeod
Reader, Fine Art
Art research, particularly within the framing of a PhD: artists’ research processes specific to the practice of Art; PhD submissions, especially written texts and their relation to PhD exhibitions and ensuing research.
Funded research, including AHRC, into student and supervisor experience of PhDs in Fine Art; examples of PhD, Fine Art submissions, Macleod, K & Holdridge, L, 2001-2003; artist researchers’ specific approaches to research subject identification and related research processes through to submission, Macleod, K & Chapman, N, 2009-2012; particular thought processes inherent to and engendered by art practice research and their broader relevance to other research arenas.
Research training aimed at underpinning art practice research; also experimental writing; research group collaboration and reading group work; Art theorisation.
Mike Nelson
Professor of Fine Art
Mike Nelson’s work has centred on the transformation of narrative structure to spatial structure, and on the objects placed within them, immersing the viewer and agitating their perception of these environments. The narratives employed by the artist are not teleological, but multi-layered, and often fractured to the extent that they could be described as a semblance of ‘atmospheres’, put together to give a sense of meaning. The more discrete sculptural works are informed by this practice, often relying on their ambiguity to fade in and out of focus, as a sculpture or thing of meaning, and back to the very objects or material from which they are made. By working in this way the more overtly political aspects of the early works have become less didactic, allowing for an ambiguity of meaning, both in the way that they are experienced and understood. This has led to the possibility of the viewer being coerced into a state where the understanding of the varied structures of their existence, both conscious and sub-conscious, are made tangible.
Professor Elizabeth Price
London-based artist Elizabeth Price (British, b. 1966) creates richly multi-layered narrative moving image works made specifically for gallery environments. Often beginning with research undertaken in archives and museum collections, Price draws on varying references, such as architectural sites, social and political histories, as well as and the language of advertising copy. Composed of collaged imagery – analogue and digital photography, animation, and motion graphics – Price’s works almost always include scrolling text, sometimes read out loud by a narrator’s computerised voice set against a musical background. Through the artist’s choice of composition, archival footage is brought into conversation with digitally rendered imagery, blurring the boundary between historical fact and fiction, real and imagined narratives. Editing plays a key role in Price’s practice, and her arresting works are widely regarded for the interplay of the visual and aural – the rapid succession of imagery combined with layered soundtracks.
In 2012 Price was awarded the Turner Prize for her solo exhibition ‘HERE’ at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. The same year she also won the Paul Hamlin Award for artists. In 2013 she was awarded the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award, a commission prize which enable her to make a work for the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. She was featured in the British Art Show 2011, and has since had solo presentations at Bloomberg International and Chisenhale Gallery London; The New Museum, New York; Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf; The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; Kunsthalle Winterthur, Switzerland, the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal and the Neuer Berliner Kunstverien, Berlin.
Forthcoming she will be presenting major solo exhibitions at ISAW, New York and the Chicago Institute of Art in 2017; The Walker, Minneapolis; Nottingham Contemporary; Berlin Natural History Museum in 2018 and a major survey show at the Whitworth Manchester in 2019.
Charlie Tweed
Re-writing the overcode
Charlie Tweed’s practice based PhD research project ‘Re-writing the overcode’ has developed from in depth research around the history, materialities and agency of machinic technologies and their relationship with theories of control. During the PhD he firstly created a number of video works which have tested out particular ‘escape routes’ and new forms of machine assemblage voiced by various non human personas. For the final output he has developed a large scale audio work ‘The Signal and the Rock’ along with an accompanying publication that channels the utterances of the post-human ‘ghosts’ of obsolete and decaying technologies from a fictional research space located below one of the world’s largest e-waste sites.
Charlie Tweed (GB), born in 1974, is an artist and academic based in Bristol. He has an MFA in Art Practice from Goldsmiths, London, and is currently completing his Arts and Humanities Research Council funded PhD at Kingston University. Recent solo shows include: “Notes I, II & III” at Spike Island, Bristol; “Animate Projects” and “Alma Enterprises”, London; “i am algorithm” at Aspex, Portsmouth and Exeter Phoenix. Recent group shows include: WRO Media Art Beinnale: Draft Systems (2017); “Selected VI” (videoclub touring programme); “Both Sides Now III: Screenings in East Asia” (videoclub); “Silent Signal” (multiple venues); Oberhausen Short Film Festival; “Cold Bodies, Warm Machines”, NRW-Dusseldorf; Inland Art Festival; “dragged down into lowercase” (Sommerakademie) at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland; “The Box Season 5”, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales; “The London Open”, Whitechapel Gallery.
Dr Rachel Cattle
I am a Stylus: Play, Erase, Replay and Overdub as Strategies for Contemporary Fine Art Practice
Climbing the stairs and stepping out, its pitch black. I’m disorientated, my eyes are wide open, but I can’t make anything out. Once they become accustomed, I make out tiny lights winking blue and yellow coming from banks of electronic equipment, linked together by long black wires. Thinner brightly coloured wires hang in coils across the space, looping down between the equipment, a series of receivers, amplifiers and tuners, the debris of an abandoned radio station. I notice that everything is connected.
The air is soft, malleable, and as I start to feel my way around my fingers leave small indents. How to convey this? ((((((((((((((((())))))) ((((((((((((((((()))))))))))))))) I turn up the sound and you hear a woman’s voice softly humming on a repeated loop.
Lucy Renton
Associate Professor
Lucy Renton studied Fine Art at St. Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art, and is currently working towards a Professional Doctorate in Fine Art at the University of East London.
Lucy’s research addresses the experience of excess in colour, repetition, and ornament, with recent artworks using an expanded definition of printmaking, drawn and painted figure and line, and appropriated domestic objects and patterns.
Lucy is currently artist in residence on the Arts Council funded Bummock project, led by artists Danica Maier and Andrew Bracey. This five-year research project explores artists’ use of archives, including the Nottingham Lace Archive, where Lucy has been researching and making work, participating by invitation in the Nottingham Trent University ‘Summer Lodge’ artist workshops in 2016/17. In October 2016 Lucy co-curated the artist residency and symposium inside inside in the parallel programme of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennale.
Dr Jonathan Allen
Casting for the voice of Strength || Austin Spare and the cultures of cartomancy
This project takes direction from a forgotten deck of fortune-telling cards, hand-painted circa 1906 by the English artist and mystic Austin Osman Spare, and recently rediscovered within the collections of London’s Magic Circle museum. Seen more broadly as one of many contested sites of enchantment within late modernity, this directive object here prompts its own historical overview, and a range of contingent fictocritical readings.
mitpress.mit.edu/books/lost-envoy
stanleypickergallery.org/news/casting-for-the-voice-of-strength/
jonathanallen.info
Andrea Stokes
Associate Professor, Fine Art
My research is through a Fine Art practice that uses video, drawing and publication to interrogate space and place, informed by a feminist politic that treats ourselves, our bodies and histories as material.
Recent work includes: Net Curtain (2014) a collaborative drawing made by 25 women creating trompe-l’oeil curtains in the Thelma Hulbert Gallery situated in the historic lace-making town of Honiton, reanimating the presence of the overlooked eponymous artist and engendering conversations about women’s work and the textiles industry.
Contemporary Dance for Beginners (2014) a video made and shown at the Whitechapel Idea Store, an iconic building and controversial replacement for the local library. Working alongside the women participants of a ten-week evening class I inhabit and map space through the repetition of choreographed dance sequences.
In current work resulting from a residency in Northern Greenland, I adopt the persona of Captain Janeway from the US TV franchise Start Trek, inhabiting the site of a controversial zinc mine with an embodiment of imperialism.
Dr Martin Westwood
Through [sic]_[[sic]], I ask a question: how can the material fixity of embodiment and the mobility of information be performed together by practice and by theory?
Addressing this, through text and exhibit, this project illustrates and produces cognitive sequences of information in technical, material, formal and somatic transitions.
stanleypickergallery.org/programme/centre-for-useless-splendour-residency/
Robin Tarbet
Senior Lecturer
Robin Tarbet’s practice is concerned with the physical materiality of everyday technology, from consumer products to industrial systems. Much of his research resolves around the notion of examining the residue of technological progress and he creates physical responses to data in the form of futuristic monuments, fossil ruins and present day technological relics. Tarbet assumes the role of a curious folk scientific explorer, which leads him to dismantle, dissect, and distort everyday technologies and appliances to examine the aesthetic and conceptual properties of the built environment to the increasingly complex yet mysterious worlds within. It is with this real stuff that his own fascination with perceived reality, science fiction, illusion and the unusual effects of scale and perspective combine. As an artist he substitutes his precise lack of technical understanding with the notion of play, imagination and the potential for what could be, rather than what is.
The image is from a 9 minute film titled Orange Buckets (2016) which documents myself on site at Wylfa Nuclear Power station in Anglesey, and it is exhibited as a singe screen installation as part of the touring exhibition Power In The Land.
Alexis Teplin
Senior Lecturer in Fine Art
Alexis Teplin’s practice is routed in painting and performance that extends to include sculpture and large scale installation. Concerned with the language of abstraction, Teplin constructs performative installations based in seduction, artificiality and cultural signification.
Exhibitions include Arch (The Politics of Fragmentation), the 20th Sydney Biennale, Drag, Push HOOT, Mary Mary, Glasgow, HE and HO for O, Rise Projects, Silvie Fleming Collection, London, Sacre 101 – An exhibition based on the Rite of Spring, P and C, Migros Museum, Zurich, San Marino Calling, Museo D’Arte Modena e Contemporanea, San Marino, sss T !!, Hayward Gallery, Project Space, London, The Party, performances at Tramway for Glasgow International, Glasgow and the Serpentine Gallery, SANAA Pavilion, London.
We Are Publication video
Experiments elaborated intensive collaborative studio workshop props words object text image performance imagine the edit. We are sequence we are movement we are cut up we are reel.
01:22 extract of 05:00
A video presentation by Kingston’s Fine Art PhD research group ‘We Are Publication’ with contributions from Jonathan Allen, Anat Ben-David, Rachel Cattle, Jenna Collins, Lucy Coogle, Volker Eichelmann, Dean Kenning, Stine Ljungdalh, Katy Macleod, Cullinan Richards, Andrea Stokes, Charlie Tweed, Roman Vasseur and Esther Windsor. Edited by David Panos.
Presented at the Stanley Picker Gallery Evening Salon, November 2014, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, February 2015.
Roman Vasseur
Senior Lecturer
My artworks, curatorial projects and writing redeploys fragments of cinema, architecture and cultural narratives to explore conflicting or transitional materialities and economies. The transportation of a crate of earth from Transylvania to Los Angeles via London and New York resulted in the merging of a gothic fiction with the banalities of transporting a material to its cinematic point of origin. More recently I was commissioned to reinterpret a post war town’s master plan, questioning the role of art in its original vision. The ensuing art works questioned the function of these spaces and objects in the present and the how economies of information supersede and alter these objects potential for agency.
I have exhibited at Cubitt Gallery, London (solo), the ICA, London, Jeffrey Charles Gallery, London, Project, Dublin and Raid Projects, Los Angeles. I have contributed to conferences and panel discussions at Tate Britain, the ICA and Milton Keynes Gallery and published with Mute Magazine and the Journal of Visual Arts Practices.
We Are Publication
Kingston’s Contemporary Art Research Centre presents an evening a series of events with publishing as it’s focus on and around publishing.
It’s hubris, hu… bris. We know about the dangers. That you might think it meaningless. That if nothing much happens you will give it up. And that if his magic trick doesn’t quite work you will feel shortchanged. She says people shouldn’t take these things for granted. She says it can exist just as well this way. We insist on serving up the scraps. We insist on second thoughts. Then we can stop and think of the other things – the emperor, the ink, the blindfold. Because it’s not supposed to end properly.
Ex libris – Volker Eichelmann
Bookmark – Stine Ljungdalh
Torn page – Rachel Cattle
Coffee stain – Martin Westwood
Folded corner – Jonathan Allen
Marginalia – Audrey Reynolds
Crease – Anat Ben David
Organised by Rachel Cattle and Jonathan Allen.
Presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 2014.
Esther Windsor
Ugly Beast
Esther Windsors’ PhD, Ugly Beast, is a practice led project in contemporary fine art, framed by a lived experience of a curatorial history. It uses manifesto, novel and exhibition as strategies of research, which repositions the curators voice and agency, questioning the expanded field of curating, social sculpture and subjectivity.
Ugly Beast Manifesto responds to her curatorial archive, held on www.estherwindsor.com proposing life as art. It was informed by: 70’s feminist practice; Stuart Hall & CCCS; New Left Review; Kaprow’s Happenings; Irigaray’s psychoanalytic language; Warhol’s pragmatic address book and personal experience of BANK, in tabloid, fax backs and events in 90’s Shoreditch, London. Ugly Beast Novel tells a story of art world characters, a teacher, artist, dealer and gallery director.
Esther Windsor is a curator, artist and writer, teaching critical theory on MFA at Kingston with specialism in subjectivities and psychoanalysis.
She has curated at The ICA, Camerawork Gallery and Darkroom, The Photographers’ Gallery and established two art school galleries, the waiting room, University of Wolverhampton and mirror, LCP London. She was director at Hull Time Based Arts and co directed 1000 000 mph, London.
Completed PhD projects
Rachel Cattle – ‘I am a Stylus: Play, Erase, Replay and Overdub as Strategies for Contemporary Fine Art Practice.’ 2017
Jonathan Allen – ‘Casting for the voice of Strength || Austin Spare and the cultures of cartomancy.’ 2017
Martin Westwood – Through [sic]_[[sic]], I ask a question: how can the material fixity of embodiment and the mobility of information be performed together by practice and by theory? 2017
Anat Ben-David – ‘Composition as Alienation in Art.’ 2016
Stine Ljungdalh – ‘How can the idea of ‘the event’ be identified in European alchemy and within broader discourses of subjectivity?’ 2016
Mark Greenwood – ‘The Performing Body in the Event of Writing: ‘Lad Broke’, 20 April 2012, Camp Furnace, Liverpool.’ 2013
Emma Hart – ‘How to Do Things with Cameras.’ 2013
Susan Barnet – ‘Journeying to Eudemonia: Travel as a Creative Consideration’ 2012
Arnaud Desjardin (AHRC) – ‘The Everyday Press, an Imprint of Books by Artists.’ 2012
Dan Hays – ‘Painting in the Light of Digital Photography.’ 2012
Anastasia Souliotou – ‘Art and Movement in Public Transport Networks of Contemporary Metropolises [MA by Research]’ 2012
Matthew Thompson (AHRC)– ‘Fragments from a Future Archive.’ 2012
Ailbhe Ní Bhriain – ‘The Aesthetics of Exile- An Exploration of Location and Dislocation within the Image Space and its Application to Textuality and Visuality in Ireland.’ 2009
John Russell – ‘Staging and the Event: Performative Strategies in Contemporary Art.’ 2007
