Lives and works in Newcastle
Artist, critical art writer and independent curator
Within my artmaking I work across fields of painting, photography, film and construction with approaches rooted in materials, language, archives, event structures, and curatorial approaches of distributed and multi-form exhibition-making. I work with frameworks of geomateriality, deep-time, ecology, environment (space, site, situation, architectural forms), digital technologies and post-industrial-use sites. Works take forms as apparatus, social architectures, open archives, installations, exhibitions and events. Artworks are often bulky, multi-form and materially distributed. Selected recent exhibitions include Polymorphic Carbon Library, The Common Room, Newcastle (2021), Incidental Breather, Clore Studio, South London Gallery (2019), Limelight, Cardiff Contemporary (2016) with artist Rob Smith. Group and solo exhibitiosn and commissions including Fully Awake 3:5, Dyson Gallery, London (2018), Occasional Geometries, Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2017), Cut Mirror Site Architectures, Lomdon Festival of Architecture (2008), and exhibitions with NEUSCHLOSS including Cleaved Into, LU Arts, Loughborough University (2022) and Das Trãumen, Baltic (2015).
Through writing I am examining the inter-sensory and multi-sensory dynamics within the dematerialising spaces of contemporary painting practice. I am particularly interested in the expansions of digital and immersive digital technologies and their entwining into the spaces of evolving painting practice through production, discourse and output forms. This evaluation is also situated within the emergence of experimental film practices from painting practices through the expanded cinema of the 1960s/70s, and the wider emergence of new generational experiential moving image practices, connective to expanded cinema, in the mid 2000s. It builds on the chapter Interspecies Cyborgs: Edges of Contemporary Painting (2022) being published in the forthcoming Routledge edited collection Sensorial Modernities (2023).
Further critical art writing centres on monograph and exhibition catalogue essays, exhibition reviews and artist profiles and commentaries. I have written for art magazines including Frieze, Flash Art, Untitled, Contemporary and Art-Review, and cultural publications including I-D Magazine and Wonderland.
My curatorial work centres on permeable and distributed exhibition-making approaches, most readily through group contexts. I am interested in pluralising, parallel, and multi-form encounters. Situations of artworks and audiences. Work examines this through relational, collective, and temporary alignments (sited, off-sited and multi-sited) of artworks and audiences and extended output and experiential forms through channels of broadcast, events programming and printed matter. Curatorial works in this space include, Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash, IMT Gallery & Slade Research Centre, London (2011), Animated Environments, Siobhan Davies Studios, Elephant & Castle, South London Gallery (2011-12) and Grand National - Art From Britain, Vestfossen, Kunstlabortaorium, Norway (2010). I am particularly interested in questions that prioritise and problematise relationships between artworks and audiences and the temporary and transitional environments in which they meet.
Education
2000-2002 Slade School of Fine Art. University College London. MFA
1997-2000 Kingston University. Joint BA Honours Degree in Fine Art and Art Theory.
1996-1997 Norwich School of Art and Design. BTEC Foundation
Academic
Assistant Professor in Fine Art, Northumbria University 2022-present
Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Northumbria University, 2012-22
Invited Lecturer at Academy of Fine Art, Helsinki, Finland Advisory 2014
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Richmond University, The American University 2011-12
Teaching Fellow in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, London 2010-11
Lecturer in Fine Art at Loughborough University School of Art and Design 2007-10
Visiting Lecturing including at Bath Spa, Slade School of Fine Art, Wimbledon, University East London, Manchester MET, 2004-12
Research Groups
Collaborative and Curatorial Practice Research Group, Northumbria University
NEUSCHLOSS, a collective of artists, curators and writers exploring intersections of arts pedagogy, arts institutions and public artworks
Boards
Board of Tyne-And-Wear Heritage Forum (TWHF) 2017-19
Board of NABROAD (Norwegian Artists Abroad) 2011-14
Curatorial Posts
Invited Curator at the Siobhan Davies Studios, London 2007-12
Curator at Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway 2009-10
Editorial Posts
Editor, Tanks Programme Notes – 15 Weeks of Art in Action, Tate 2012
Assistant Editor, Tate Seasonal Guide, Tate 2009-10
Assistant Editor, Miser & Now Magazine 2006-8