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.
Painting no. 108, 2016. Credit: Andy Keate
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.
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.
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, 2017. Jesmonite, paint, motors, micro controller and ultra sonic sensors. 300cm x 200 cm x 200cm.
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.
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)
This is a painting from 2005 that I have made into a new artwork by making it the site for a fireworks display. The fireworks were attached to the painting with oil paint and discharged on Guy Fawkes night in 2016 in London Fields. It is from a series that take finished paintings and alter their meaning by making them functional, the site of an activity or otherwise redefined.
Firework Display, 2005-2016 (207 x 147cms). Fireworks, wood, painting.
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.
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’.
Feeling guilty about painting, 2017. For Goodbye Charles, Charles H Scott Gallery, Vancouver.
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.
‘They don’t do much in the cane-hole way’ Representing Caribbean Whiteness and the Irish Diaspora in Jamaica through visual and material culture.
Still from Interview with Ms Dunna, Jamaica. 9/1/2017 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
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.
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.
I am undertaking a series of audio field recordings of subterranean machinery. Collected during London Underground’s night turn engineering hours these recordings reveal the inner workings of the city’s sub-surface; a deep level microcosm with its own rules, behaviours and hierarchies that runs parallel with the city it serves. My approach is to use these mechanical underground sounds as a metaphor for the invisible worker. This also questions the rise of automation and the normalisation and acceptance of the ever-increasing levels of surveillance and control in everyday life. By doing so I aim to link the surface of technological consumer society with the dehumanisation and mechanisation of the sub-surface worker.
I am asking the following questions: How does the texture of mechanical sound connect the surface and sub-surface of technological consumer society? What are the global-political and cultural implications of the anthropomorphism of machines? How does this relate to the 21st Century commodification of labour?
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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’
Pleisto-scene, 2017. For Goodbye Charles, Charles H Scott Gallery, Vancouver.
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.
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.
Unconscious and pre-programmed systems of influence and their implications within art practice
Common Descent, HD Video (still), 11:30 min
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.
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
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.
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.
Pro-Patria EGH5 (160 x x120cm) collage on canvas, 2016
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.
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.
