Anna Lucas

Looking, looking away, looking again – The photographic still as an object on film

What perceptual transformations occur when the photographic image is (re-)looked at through another lens? How can physical manipulation of photographs on film evoke an embodied response in the viewer?

This practice led enquiry focuses on the physical characteristics of photographs as objects alongside their visual content, at a moment of image saturation, digital transformation and screen-based image consumption.

I am interested in the shared act of looking, performativity and gesture, the charisma of the photograph as an object in which layers of imagery, shared experience and time unfold, overlay and intersect. The work considers how inclusion and influence of others affects creative practice. Using the double ‘look’ at a photographic image through another lens as analogous to dialogue.

Using the camera as a research tool and filmic conventions to prompt physical interaction with diversely sourced photographs in studio and lab spaces I am exploring the material implications of the printed photograph in film aiming to focus attention on it’s ‘volume, opacity, tactility, and physical presence in the world’ (Batchen G1997 Photography’s objects).

This heuristic process allows for accidental events and playful uncertainties to confound our expectations of physical and virtual, abstraction and representation, stillness and movement in order to question the illusion of effortless digital image manipulation.
The work is situated within a context of artists moving image that considers structuralist, documentary and essay film as relevant. Through an investigation in film, photography, anthropology and material culture theory, this research will take into account contemporary philosophical debates around the nature of photographs, their ‘magic’, mutability, role in making meaning and inscribing the past, and their relationship to time and movement.

This research enquiry is significant and innovative in its use of the intangible nature of film to represent an embodied understanding of the photograph as a material object, reflexively establishing practical and theoretical agency for both mediums whilst challenging our cultural dependence on digital technologies.

www.annalucas.co.uk

Mandy Ure

Dean, Kingston School of 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.

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.

theartsandcultureunit.com

Louis Nixon

Associate member
Director of the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong

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.

Volker Eichelmann

Director of Postgraduate Research, School of Art & Architecture

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.

felicityhammond.com

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.

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

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

Fagotto, 2014

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.

sarahbennett.org.uk

John Hughes

Surface and Sub – Surface Subversion UNDERGROUND: experimental inter-disciplinary fiction in contemporary art

I am experimenting with combinations of text and sound.
I am asking:
What happens when text is punctured by sound?
How does the use of sound change the narrative?

Sample DATA: The Gunnersbury Triangle part 1, LIVE!
Description: audience wear latex animal masks whilst listening to performed soundscape. 12 x found / captured animal noises (plus impersonations) composed using SAMPLR App / CASIO SKI Electronic Keyboard. Samples feature an Otter, Badger, Nightjar, Barn Owl, Crow, Mole, Fox, Pigeon and Horse. Recording Date: 09/01/19, ICA Studio, CARC Duration: 12:26:00 Notes: #sound collage  #narrative  #voice

Listening to The Gunnersbury Triangle, LIVE! CARC, ICA Studio, 2019

soundcloud.com/john-patrick-hughes

Jo Addison

Course Leader 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.

Bisanbos, 2015. Hanging object, mixed materials, jesmonite, 200mm diameter (approx)

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.

mitpress.mit.edu/authors/henry-bond

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.

zoechilderley.co.uk

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’.

melissagordon.info

Charlotte Cullinan

Professor of Fine Art

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.

cullinanrichardscollapse.com

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

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.

www.dshanken.com

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

sadeghaleahmad.com

Adam Gillam

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.

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.

markharrisworks.com
instagram.com/markharrisworks