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| MA fine art staff: |
| sarah bennett |
| chris cook |
| john danvers |
| mike lawson-smith |
| contributing fine art staff: |
| steve berry |
| andy klunder |
| anya lewin |
| phil power |
| paul ramsay |
| deborah robinson |
| karen roulstone |
| steve thorpe |
| visitors: |
| faisal abdu'allah |
| ruth barker |
| cornford and crosse |
| stephanie delecroix |
| daniela kostova |
| james lingwood |
| venelin surelov |
Sarah Bennett Sarah's art practice is predominantly engaged with exploration of discursive sites and contexts, particularly our relationships with institutions and their histories in relation to discourses of power. Her practice is not bound by any particular processes or materials but is contingent upon and open to the contexts with which she works, as are the potential meanings emerging through her work, which she hopes remain fluid and open to active interpretation. Her recently completed doctoral research involved animating the vestiges of repetitious acts, performed within architectural spaces, reflecting the way in which individual agency is circumscribed by the controlling mechanisms that exist within institutions, both through their spatial rationale and their regulatory frameworks. She also uses photography as an archiving tool to produce visual essays that reflect on the ways we occupy institutional sites and contexts. For examples of Sarah's work see: www.sarahbennett.org.uk  Chris Cook Chris took an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art and then spent three years in Italy on an Italian Government Award. His symbolic and narrative painting from this time was included in major exhibitions such as 'From Bacon to Now' at the Palazzo Vecchio Florence and 'Romantic Visions' at Camden Arts Centre. A series of visits to India in the mid 90s had a profound effect on his practice, and since that time he has been using an idiosyncratic process to produce his monochromatic 'graphites' (www.cookgraphites.com). He is interested in the English Landscape tradition in Painting; Surrealism; Poetry and text-based work, and the Eastern Ink Painting tradition and associated philosophies. Major recent exhibitions include Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan, and the Today Art Museum Beijing. Chris is represented by Mary Ryan Gallery, New York.  John Danvers John studied at Cardiff College of Art and went on to undertake fellowships at Cardiff, Winchester and Exeter. He has exhibited widely in the UK, Canada, USA and Australia, where he has also been a visiting lecturer at many art schools and universities. He is the author of Picturing Mind: Paradox, Indeterminacy and Consciousness in Art & Poetry (Rodopi, 2006). Current projects include: a book, provisionally entitled, Sweepings & starlight: an artist’s journey, investigating art between 1966-1974 from the perspective of a practitioner active at that time; research for another book about mystics and sceptical philosophers; The River Interludes, a series of narrative works for voice, digital projection and recorded sound; and various texts, drawings and paintings on themes related to the above (see website: www.johndanversart.co.uk).  Mike Lawson-Smith My art practice is predominantly concerned with two strands of enquiry: one that is a 'socially engaged practice' working with groups within the community, the other is engagement with collaborative engagements with the scientific community. In 2003 I lead a large arts project with the Cornish fishing industry through the Newlyn Art Gallery, where I and a number of other artists worked with people in the fishing industry, local schools and the communities around the industry. I have also worked with another artist on a radio programme, which explored how steel workers in Cardiff (UK) and Pittsburgh (USA) coped with the demise of the steel industries in which they once worked. Prior to this I collaborating with an astrophysicist and a social anthropologist, making a video installation which explored the relationships between the phenomenology of the 'physical world' and the forms that we construct in order to represent such phenomena. My background and education is in a broad-based experimental approach to making art, working with film, video and sculptural processes. As technologies have developed, I have carried out my art work using interactive digital media and net-based systems. contributing fine art staff:  Andy Klunder Andy studied painting at Winchester School of Art, and went on to post-graduate study at the Slade School in London where he specialised in sculpture. Since then he's worked in a variety of artistic fields, including the theatre, and has designed sets and costumes for the Royal Ballet among others. His sculptural work has reflected his interest in aspects of Eastern philosophy and changing, temporary states, and consequently little of it survives! More recently he has worked in the mediums of photography and video to explore the transitory nature of the world , focusing mainly on landscape and the fleeting conditions of weather and light, all of which coincide with his interests in walking and climbing in (some of the) the wild and barren places of the world (see: www.klundera.co.uk).  Anya Lewin Anya studied Film and Video at UC Santa Cruz, in California and did a MA in Media Studies and English in New York. She went on to do a PhD in Contemporary Art at Dartington College of Art in the UK. She is interested in performance, telling odd stories, making interventions, and how new technologies have changed the way we distribute art. Her practice is varied and ranges from installations to films and videos and, recently, even commissioning hand embroidered packman tablecloths while on a residency in Bulgaria. She has a collaborative website at: www.yesandnu.com  Phil Power Phil studied at Maidstone and Reading and is currently undertaking a range of public art projects, which require collaborative working and a range of conceptual and innovative solutions to given briefs. This has meant an engagement with a varied range of professions (architects, planners, local authority. officers, regeneration specialists etc) and a practice that is very much within the real world. Phil is a member of South West Design Review Panel, as well as member of the International Panorama Council and holds a number of consultancy roles, having been artist consultant with Feilden Clegg Bradley Architects, appointed by Exeter City Council to work on position statement for Public Art Development of Princesshay City Centre retail site.  Paul Ramsay Paul has a keen interest in Sound Art, Experimental Writing, Mail Art and ideas of chance, improvisation and interactivity. He trained as a recording engineer and after this studied for a degree in Visual and Performing Arts at Brighton where he painted using acrylic and salt, composed pieces for dance and produced video installation work. After graduating, he self-published a series of bookworks including 'A Book Thrown Into The Sea' and worked as a researcher for computer firm Cognitive Applications where he was introduced to hypertext for the first time. From this experience he made a series of multimedia pieces using image, text and sound and developed an indeterminate compositional system entitled Parallel Music. As an outlet for this and other sound/music work, Paul has a website at www.chameleonlectra.co.uk and a record label called Motile. Paul is a member of Sound And Music and currently lectures in Fine Art (Time-Based and Digital) at the University of Plymouth where he is particularly interested in the development of online teaching materials. His most recent (and ongoing) sound art project is Consemble.  Deborah Robinson Deborah originally trained as an observational painter. She then moved towards abstraction and produced large scale paintings using techniques such as pouring, speed and intuition, derived from abstract expressionism. In this work it became important to find a abstract painterly language that expressed her subjective experience as a woman and mother During a year spent as artist in residence in Angeles Deborah began to explore relationship between contemporary feminist psychoanalytic/philosophic writing (particularly the writings of Luce Irigaray) and painterly processes. This became the basis of her PhD research project 'Materiality of Body and Text: An Investigation Through Painting and Darkroom Processes' (completed in 2003). After this Deborah took a new direction in her work and began a series of work in which she collaborated with scientists. In 2004 she was awarded a residency with Egenis, a genome research cluster based at Exeter University: www.genomicsnetwork.ac.uk/egenis/people/artistinresidence/. Initially, the work made explored relationships between text and image, more recently she has used a pinhole camera to track what she thinks of as an 'underside' of science. These are cameras without lenses which are placed in labs and left for very long exposure times, producing images that capture traces of human activity in increasingly technical/robotized environments.  Steve Thorpe Steve has a background in printmaking. The way landscape has been depicted by different cultures, and the deep-rooted meaning it has for people around the word is an ongoing interest. His own work is concerned with the ways we inhabit the landscape, and materials and ideas are derived from the first hand experiences of being in it. Visits to the French Alps, Italian Dolomites, The Pyrenees and other mountain ranges reflect a passion for the mountain environment and have been influential. A year teaching and working in Los Angeles was very stimulating, giving the chance to exhibit work, absorb a lot of new art, and to visit landscapes entirely outside the European experience. The recent series, 'Rock Works' use pigment ground from rocks collected from coastal sites. The rocks of the southwest peninsular yield a large range of varied and beautiful colours and raise interesting issues about the value of locality and territory. In this work the aesthetics of the work are determined by geographical location, using maps. In 2007 the work took on an unlikely direction through collaboration with colleague and sound artist, Paul Ramsay. While Steve derived colour from ground up rocks, Paul made a sound piece using sounds emanating from the same stones. This work was exhibited at Art Terracina Gallery in Exeter, under the title of 'Works of Friction'. |
University of Plymouth
© 2009