Session 2B : Bourdon Lecture Theatre
Friday June 9th, 2023 : 14:00 – 16:30
Overview
Focus is conventionally considered a pedagogic ideal, however this session considers the creative potential of distraction. In contrast to privileging certainty, coherence and singularity, distraction allows for scattered, messy, adaptive and associative thought processes. Informed by the sensibilities of practice generated pedagogies and in response to the neurodiversity of art school communities, it considers the empathetic and responsive aspects of distraction and attentional dispersal, connecting to multi sensory and cognitively divergent aspects of not knowing.
If we activate distraction, can we shift negative descriptions of boredom, indecision or lack of focus in learning environments into the positive attributes of a creative practitioner?
Speakers
Marsha Bradfield
Incidental Unit (IU) is the third iteration of Artist Placement Group, which was co-founded by Barbara Steveni, John Latham and others in 1966. Before her death in 2020, Steveni also helped to establish IU (2016 - ongoing) as a subsequent iteration of APG. To honour Steveni’s legacy, IU connects placement-based practitioners working with art in extra-artistic contexts (industry, government, health care and beyond). This burgeoning network is reprising Steveni’s preoccupation with ‘not knowing’ and Latham’s use of the term ‘incidental’ to enrich debates around the role and work of the artist and art’s critical and creative agency.
JJ Chan
JJ Chan is an artist working across sculpture, moving image, and writing. Their work draws from lived experience and stories stolen from eavesdropped conversations, to explore the edges of our everyday realities and the ways in which we construct our identities. Through storytelling and world-building, their work (re)searches for an alternative space beyond aggressively progressive capitalist time, seeking new worlds from the ashes of the present. Chan’s work is presented across a variety of platforms which include galleries, film festivals, nightclubs, house parties, and academic publications. They are Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Kingston University London.
Moyra Derby
Moyra Derby is an artist and researcher working with pictorial structures that engage with the cognitive aspects of painting’s participatory potential. Completing a practice based PhD at the University of Kent in 2022 that reimagined attentional capacities for painting, this signals a research interest in the multi modalities, fluctuations and temporality of attentional processes. Moyra is currently Senior Lecturer in Painting at the University for the Creative Arts. Recent writing includes The Productive Inadequacy of Image for Contemporary Painting, Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts 2021 and Models of Attention, Journal of Contemporary Painting 2019
Jenny Dunseath
Jenny Dunseath is an artist, researcher and educator. She is a Reader and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Bath Spa University, where she is currently working on Accelerate; a research project exploring accessible immersive learning for art & design with UAL, and partners in Dublin, Ukraine and Poland. She has led learning events at Tate Modern and Spike Island. Exhibitions include OUTPOST, Korean Cultural Centre London, Gana Gallery CICA Museum Seoul, Flat Time House, Royal Academy of Art London, Barbican, Cornerhouse Manchester.
Alice Gale-Feeny
Alice Gale-Feeny is an artist who makes performance, via dance, sculpture, video, writing and facilitation. She uses scripts, objects and sites as ‘containers’ for live and improvised processes and considers how language, material forms and bodies (re)construct realities and build fictions. Alice has presented work nationally and internationally, including Performance Exchange, curated by Rose LeJeune at Seventeen, London (2021). During her MFA in Creative Practice: Dance Professional Practice she was awarded a Gill Clarke Bursary and Leverhulme Arts scholarship. Alice is a Lecturer in BA Fine Art at Kingston University. She is part of the inter-institutional collaboration A Particular Reality.
Flora Parrott
Flora Parrott is an artist and post-doctoral researcher on the European Research Council funded project Think Deep based in the Geography Department at Royal Holloway University London. Parrott works in sculpture and textiles, she trained in Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art and The Royal College of Art. The work explores subterranean spaces, deep darkness and everyday geologies.
Timothy Smith
Timothy J. Smith, Ph.D, MFA, is an artist, educator, and University Researcher at The University of Arts Helsinki. His research engages critical disability studies approaches to higher arts education. His artistic practice explores ‘crip time’ as his lived experience of disability that informs his teaching and research practices.
Kate Squires
Kate Squires is an artist, researcher and Lecturer on BA Fine Art Mixed Media at Westminster University, working towards a practice-based PhD: The Ambiguous Object at UCA. She was founding Director of artist project space, Centrum, Berlin. She has worked as Head of Education at Camden Arts Centre and has produced resources and learning events for Tate Learning at Tate Modern. Exhibitions include Projektraum Bethanien, Berlin, CICA Museum, South Korea, Herbert Read, Canterbury, Tintype and 6second Gallery, London.
Andrea Stokes
Andrea Stokes is an artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Kingston University, London, UK. Stokes’ adopts collaborative and process-based techniques to interrogate locations and objects that have personal and political significance. Recent work ‘Lacuna’ (2022) used remote collaboration to critique the construction of an airport on the small island of Upernavik in Greenland. A missing mountain top, removed to make a runway, became a conceptual space for collective thinking and making from the multi-disciplinary and international perspectives of four women. www.andreastokes.com
Polly Wright
Incidental Unit (IU) is the third iteration of Artist Placement Group, which was co-founded by Barbara Steveni, John Latham and others in 1966. Before her death in 2020, Steveni also helped to establish IU (2016 - ongoing) as a subsequent iteration of APG. To honour Steveni’s legacy, IU connects placement-based practitioners working with art in extra-artistic contexts (industry, government, health care and beyond). This burgeoning network is reprising Steveni’s preoccupation with ‘not knowing’ and Latham’s use of the term ‘incidental’ to enrich debates around the role and work of the artist and art’s critical and creative agency.