Monthly Archives: October 2013

news

Turner Contemporary Platform Graduate Award finalists announced.

We are delighted to announce that Charlotte Smith, School of Music and Fine Art graduate has been selected as one out of two graduates shortlisted for the Turner Contemporary’s Platform Graduate Award.

Charlotte has been selected alongside one other finalist, Hannah Allison-Finucane of Canterbury Christchurch University up for the Award and the winner will be announced November 7th. Turner Contemporary Curator, Lauren Wright told our graduate artists “this was a very difficult decision for the team as you’ve all made very strong work and we’ve so enjoyed working with you”. The Turner Contemporary are very keen to continue working with and supporting our graduates through their developing careers in the next few months.

Turner Contemporary invites you to celebrate the announcement of the Platform Graduate Award winner 2013, and for a discussion about the opportunities and challenges facing emerging artists.

Panel Discussion and Winner Announcement:
Thursday 7 November 2013, 3 – 6pm, Turner Contemporary

3pm – Panel discussion and Q&A
What are the challenges and opportunities artists face when embarking upon a career? What support can they expect from galleries, dealers and other artists? How do they make sure they keep up their momentum after graduation? We will be delving into these and other questions from the audience at this special event, part of the Platform programme of support for graduates and artists, with our panel of experts:
Adam Chodzko,artist 
Jonathan Viner, Director, Jonathan Viner Gallery, London and Margate
Matthew de Pulford, Limbo studios and project space, Margate 
Lauren Wright, Curator, Turner Contemporary
Joella Wheatley, Platform Award winner 2012 

4.15pm – Exhibition viewing 
5pm – Winner announced by artist Adam Chodzko, followed by drinks and networking opportunities.

If you would like to attend, please contact the Turner Contemporary as numbers are limited Email: rsvp@turnercontemporary.org

Everyone at the School would like to wish Charlotte good luck and fingers crossed!

IMAG0243

Charlotte’s work, called Ephemeral Rays, consists of hundreds of light bulbs, dust and fishing line. It seeks to reflect the way in which light rests within a space, settling like dust even if just momentarily. Adapted for the Turner specifically, the installation evolves into a new form drawing on the stunning expanse of sea and sky, with the

 

Ephemeral Rays TC c

 

infinite horizon line as the focal point of the composition.
“The relationship between place and space is of huge interest. I enjoy the ephemeral characteristic of site-specific working, the work becomes more experiential, similar to the wonder of light and the art lives on in the memories of those who experienced it” explains Smith about Ephemeral Rays.

 
About the Platform Graduate Award

Devised through the CVAN South East network and now in its second year, the Platform programme aims to support graduate professional development and nurture new talent, and is supported by a coalition of visual arts organisations in the South East: Aspex, Portsmouth; Modern Art Oxford; MK Gallery, Milton Keynes and Turner Contemporary, Margate.

Turner Contemporary is delighted to showcase the work of seven BA Fine Art graduates from universities in Kent who have been selected to participate in the Platform Graduate Award, on display at the gallery until Sunday 10 November. 

Hannah Allison-Finucane Canterbury Christ Church University (shortlisted for award)Charlotte Smith University of Kent (shortlisted for award)

Daniella Turbin University of Kent
Rachel Johnston Canterbury Christ Church University
Louisa Love University for the Creative Arts
Linda Simon University for the Creative Arts
Harry Tompkins University for the Creative Arts

Read more: Turner Contemporary Platform Graduate Award

creative events, fine art, music, news

Tate Modern commissioned Sonic Trail ‘From Surface to Surface’ launches this month

New Tate Modern commissioned work launches this month.

Duncan Macleod Surface to Surface
The School of Music and Fine Art would like to congratulate music lecturer, Duncan Macleod on his work responding to the artwork ‘From Surface to Surface’ by Susumu Koshimizu.

‘The Sonic Trail; From Surface to Surface’ commissioned by Tate, was launched this month as part of Tate Modern’s Sonic Trails collection. This represents an exciting contribution to the School’s research culture and is now available to listen to online.

The electronic work, written for headphones, features 14 miniature audio tracks which correspond to individual pieces of the artwork.

Gallery visitors can either download or stream and listen to the work on an mp3 player – visit https://soundcloud.com/sonictrails/  or, on some listening devices that can be signed-out from the Tate Modern Clore Centre. There will also be some activities for younger audiences.

View more on the Tate website

news

Treaty Canoe comes to the Dockyard

Treaty Canoe Transcription Event at School of Music and Fine Art

Treaty Canoe.3

On Wednesday 16th October Artist Alex McKay and Dr David Stirrup Senior Lecturer in American Literature visited the School of Music and Fine Art at the Dockyard campus, as part of Alex’s residency with the School of American studies making a UK edition of a work of his titled ‘Treaty Canoe’.

David came to Bridge Wardens College and set up a small desk for the afternoon in the foyer area of where volunteers were invited to contribute to the project, through making short transcriptions.

‘To say that Chatham made a contribution to Empire would be to make a massive understatement’ says McKay.

Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which established the nature of treaty relations in British North America from that point, Alex has come to Kent to make a second edition of Treaty Canoe. We invited volunteers, many of them students, to assist in the artwork by reading, reflecting on, and transcribing a portion of one of the traditional treaties. With ‘Indigenous Rights’ being a prominent aspect of the work of the UN in the last 15 or so years, and with recent Indigenous activism movements in Canada and the USA, Treaty Canoe is timely and significant.

We hope that by engaging with the project, participants will not only have the opportunity to contribute to the artwork, but will also come away with a better understanding of Indigenous issues in North America.

The construction of the canoe itself will have a performative dimension – not least because Alex is going to set up camp in the Keynes building atrium at the Canterbury campus- and it is hoped that students and members of the public will feel free to approach him to learn more.
Do pop along and find out more.

Treaty Canoe.1 
Treaty Canoe.2

Useful links
www.treatycanoe.ca
www.alexmckay.ca

music, news

Northern Loop – a CD and iTunes release from Paul Fretwell and Ambrose Field

Senior lecturer, Dr Paul Fretwell concludes his  five-year collaborative project with  Dr Ambrose Field. Their CD, ‘Northern Loop’ is now available.

Northern Loop

Northern Loop is the final product of Paul Fretwell and Ambrose Field’s collaborative composition project, spanning five years of live performances at venues ranging from King’s Place in London, to churches in downtown New Orleans.

Field and Fretwell first started collaborating in 2004. ‘Jack Chorale’, their first piece together, is an electroacoustic work that plays with genre and expectation, bringing in regular beats, fragmented rhythms, spectral sound transformations, harmony and noise. This piece triggered a long period of exploration where they began to focus on the very small details within sounds.

Northern Loop plays out over a continuous 80 minutes, working tiny loops of audio material into a spectral tapestry where small details are brought to the fore, revealing different facets of the evolving sound textures. The work has seven movements, although these flow into one another. The component sounds were generated from studio recordings of source materials using techniques of time stretching, convolution and mutation. These processes typically result in long, continuously evolving sounds. The composers then extracted short clips from these longer files to create their loops, finding interesting timbres and melodic fragments from within the larger whole. This magnification of small spectral details forms the central technique of Northern Loop, which charts a journey from darkness to light over a carefully-planned harmonic structure.

Fretwell and Field’s describe their motivation: “We decided to pick a single structural constraint – one that is common to a variety of genres and well known – the loop. The loop, historically, has been a tool for innovation, particularly in its use by pioneering minimal composers as Steve Reich in the 1960s. The ubiquity of the loop today however is unquestionable, but we feel that its widespread use in popular culture is often unchallenged. We would like to rescue the loop from entertainment-level apps, musical “textural backgrounds” and “library background pads”, and provide, through use of that structure, a listening experience of subtlety and delicacy. The result is a kind of “self-similar”, thoroughly stripped-down minimal music, but importantly our type of structure is not algorithmically generated: this is intuitive music, assembled through aural judgment and collaborative discussion.”

Fretwell and Field’s CD Northern Loop can be heard and purchased on the Sargasso website.
Also available for download on iTunes.

Northern Loop Track List:

1. Dark Water​ ​14:41
2. ​Labyrinth​ ​06:48
3.​ ​​Plants and Pistons 05:00
4.​ ​​Tidal Life​ 14:39
5.​ ​​Expectation 09:47
6.​ ​​Renaissance Pulse 09:03
7.​ Glass Machine ​19:23

 

 

creative events, fine art, music, news

School of Music and Fine Art’s Barbara Morris Teaching Prize Success

Barbara Morris Prize benefits students in ‘Skills Enhancement Week’ – Learning Support 2013.

2013 Barbara Morris winners

 

 

 

 

 
Congratulations go to Dr Paul Fretwell, Director of Learning and Teaching and Employability and Events Coordinator, Ann Howe, the School’s  joint winners of the Barbara Morris Prize for Learning Support 2013, along with the Student Support Team at the School of Arts at Canterbury, for their dedication and input into the ‘Skills Enhancement Week’ in February, 2013.

Thirteen Kent academics were recognised for their teaching excellence at a ceremony at the University’s Canterbury campus on 3 October presented by Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow, University Vice-Chancellor. ‘Teaching excellence is vitally important for all students. These annual awards recognise this. I congratulate all those who have received awards this year. The projects are first rate.’

The School of Music and Fine Art’s Skills Enhancement Week took place between Monday 18th and Friday 22nd February, which replaced ‘Reading Week’, provided an invigorated forum and a focussed few days of informative and inspirational events for students to be able to enhance their skills leading to improved employability. Students were able to earn University ‘Employability Points’ by attending these events and prizes were on offer to the student who attended the most sessions and the event went on to lead to a number of student placements and internships with organisations such as Microsoft Computer Games, Zealous, Earcom Ltd and other work experience opportunities.

The team were dedicated to securing an array of industry-recognised guest speakers who provided lively talks, along with a week’s schedule of mixed study skills and employability-related workshops.  Activities such as workshops on self-employment, entrepreneurship, developing partnerships and networking spanned the five days and there were personal and professional development workshops too, where students could learn about how to build and develop their online presence and how to ‘market’ themselves, hone their CV writing skills and learn about the Year Abroad possibilities.

The judging panel were impressed with the team’s employment-focussed student support, as the Skills Enhancement Week clearly enriched the student’s experiences and provided a model which could be emulated across other the other Schools. It was also deemed an excellent example of external engagement, benefiting both students and the University through collaboration.

‘The week proved to be a great success and was even opened up to other University students to attend’ said prize winner Ann Howe. ‘It provided a great opportunity for career networking for students with external industry employers and gave students a chance to think holistically about their education, develop an awareness of skills needed for future employment and to actively build their own employability’

For full details on all the 2013 University of Kent Teaching Prize Award winners and see for more images: http://www.kent.ac.uk/teaching/news.html?view=568

 

Image caption:
Winners of the Barbara Morris Prize for Learning Support 2013 (SMFA’s  Paul Fretwell 2nd right, Ann Howe 3rd right)

fine art, music, news

Sound Art Workshop at Tate Britain

Series of workshops ‘From Landscape to Soundscape’ 

claudia_molitor_Landscape to Soundscape

School of Music and Fine Art lecturer and composer, Dr Claudia Molitor, is leading a series of workshops at the Tate Britain, Manton Studio entitled ‘From Landscape to Soundscape’ throughout November, exploring contemporary thinking around looking, listening and interpreting sound.

Workshop participants learn a variety of techniques for collecting and recording sound and use these to explore the view across the river from the historic site of Tate Britain. With professional singing tutor Natalie Raybould participants learn how to vocalise these sounds to others and contribute to the creation of a new sound piece:  A Sonic View that translates what can be seen from Tate Britain into a unique soundscape.

This course is for people with an interest in sound art, music and performance though no prior experience is necessary. Singing ability is not required, only an openness to using your voice and working collaboratively to develop and perform a new sound piece. Workshop participants will take away new listening and vocal skills, and a recording of A Sonic View performance.

For more information, view the Tate Britain courses and workshops page.

From Landscape to Soundscape
Tate Britain, Manton Studio


2–3 November
16–17 November
23 November

14.00–18.00

Read more or book a place.

music, news

Sound and Vision Expert Philip Auslander presenting in Medway

Model Release-YES

As part of his one week engagement with staff and students during Week 3, University of Kents’ ‘visiting expert’, Philip Auslander will be presenting ‘Sound and Vision: The Audio-Visual Economy of Musical Performance’ Research Seminar.

Auslander is Professor at the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Tech, Atlanta and internationally acclaimed for his writings on gender and theatricality in popular music as well as ‘liveness’ and performance in a mediatized culture. The talk is followed by a brief live music performance at the Galvanising Shop, School of Music and Fine Arts.

Christina Lagao and David Roesner will translate some iconic pop songs into a more intimate acoustic setting under the heading “Divas Unplugged”. This will act as an interlude to a drinks reception which will offer the opportunity for more dialogue and discussion.

Date:                     14-18 October (Week3)
Location:              Galvanising Shop, Chatham Historic Dockyard, Medway
Time:                     17.00-18.30

creative events, music, news

School of Music and Fine Art exhibiting at UCAS ‘Compose Your Future’ Exhibition

compose your future

The School of Music and Fine Art staff will be exhibiting at the UCAS ‘Compose Your Future’ Exhibition at the Central Convention Complex, Manchester on Monday 7th October 2013.
All are welcome to attend, from 10.00-15.00.

Come and meet us on Stand 8 and learn more about University of Kent and our courses in Music, Popular Music, Creative Events and Music Technology. 

With over 65 exhibitors, the 9th annual event of Compose your Future exhibition focuses on performing arts and related subjects and features live performances from current students, master classes and workshops for students interested in studying music, dance, drama and other performing arts related courses at university or college.  Watch live performances, take part in workshops and demonstrations

The event is set be attended by hundreds of sixth former pupils considering Higher Education.

Entry is free, but booking is required.

Attendees can also sign up to attend a Taster Day Session at our Chatham Historic Dockyard studios on 26th October 2013.

Further information on the exhibition: