Screenshot of KMTV interview with mural by SMFA BA Fine Art student Lalita Bailey in the background – the mural is a community collaboration with young people in Medway.
School of Music and Fine Art students Olu Taiwo (MA Fine Art) and Lynn Smith (BA Fine Art) were interviewed live on KMTV to talk about their 2018 degree shows. They spoke movingly about the value of art in today’s society. To see the interview click here: https://bit.ly/2IHUAJ3
Lynn Smith’s work explores nature and the spirit of place, investigating the landscape through sculpture, and using traditional craft within fine art.
Olu Taiwo’s work is concerned with memory – how we access and discard memories – experienced through his immersive art.
Stephen Connolly, an artist filmmaker, Lecturer in Film Production, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham and Fine Art PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the School of Music and Fine Art (also a Kent 50 Scholar), has won a British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) Award for 2018, in the Moving Image category under Best Practice Research Portfolio for Machine Space.
BAFTSS encourage best teaching and research practice, promoting the training of postgraduate students in research and giving researchers and practitioners the opportunity to attend and present a paper at the annual BAFTSS conference.
Says Stephen: “The PhD has been such an amazing experience and deeply helpful for my practice, encouraging me to push forward towards publication. The process of academic research has allowed me to place the work in context and in conversation with other disciplines and artists. I aim to contribute to the further development of practice as research as a process of making moving image work in the arts.”
Connolly’s Machine Space is an essay film exploring a city as a machine; a place of movement and circulation. Using a kinetic approach, issues of space, race and finance frame the city of Machine Space. Residents in voiceover testify how the city as a spatial and financial machine shapes their experience. The city is Detroit, a place that has changed from producing the means of movement to producing space itself. The film uses formal representational devices to explore this content, and addresses issues of complicity of audiences in the state of affairs in the city. It is a visualization of the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, philosopher of space and urban life.
Stephen Connolly’s work investigates cinema and representation through place, politics and history. His award winning single screen work which explores the interface between spectatorship, material culture and subjectivity, has been widely shown internationally since 2002. A FLAMIN award recipient, he has had solo screenings at the ICA and BFI Southbank in London, and was a juror at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Michigan, USA) in 2011.
On Monday 21 May at 1pm, the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent, Medway is excited to present a special lunchtime recital to celebrate the work of our BMus, year 2 composition students. Having spent the term working alongside one of the UK’s leading contemporary music ensembles, we are delighted to have three musicians from Octandre – Audrey Milheres (Flute), Sam Cave (Guitar) and Corentin Chassard (Cello) – to showcase selected submissions. Octandre are developing an international reputation for their work with a recent commission receiving a BASCA composition award, multiple broadcast recordings for BBC Radio 3 and several high profile performances at venues including LSO St Lukes and St John Smith’s Square. With Sir Harrison Birtwistle as their patron and a consistently thriving programme they are well and truly at the forefront of our nation’s music scene.
In May 2017, SMFA Lecturer in Fine Art, and Partner College Liaison Officer, Tim Meacham, facilitated an innovative public event in the Historic Dockyard Chatham Rope Walk with LTHT, a University of the Arts London community of practice group engaged in low-tech and high-tech action, traversing sound, space, interaction and textiles. The result – Ropery Songs – is now available on You Tube.
The event, which took place on Monday 29th May 2017, was a collaboration between staff and students from SMFA Fine Art and UAL Textiles, Interior Spatial Design and Sound Studies. The project sought to activate the ropery by transforming the whole structure into a musical instrument through improvised “playing” of the space. Ropery Songs offered a valuable opportunity for staff and students from different universities and disciplines to come together for one day to create a new shared space of sound and performance through the re-reading of this historic building.
Kerri Layton. Photo by Rooftop – Hive Studio C, 2018.
2011 BA (Hons) Event and Experience Design graduate, Kerri Layton, has started her own Creative Event Consultancy, Kerri Kreates. Clients and previous partners include Alexandra Palace, A Different World Productions LTD, The BBC, Fuse Festival Medway, Lancaster BID, Kent County Council, The Arts Council, Body and Mind Festivals, Glade Festival, Glastonbury Festival, Eventspiration and The Hospital Club.
Whilst at Kent studying in the School of Music and Fine Art, Kerri won two awards from the Kent Enterprise Hub & Round One, forming a performance group and social enterprise arts company ‘FAF Arts’ touring the UK in the Summer Terms with her company and theatre productions. Always very active performing and organizing events, she then went on to host session’s at Employability Week for the University of Kent, on ‘Making it Happen’ whilst working for her clients around the UK.
Kerri comments: “It was a practical degree that taught me the logistics of event management but fundamentally placed the importance on the creation and theatre of the event, of it’s core narrative. I made explorations into audience’s journeys using experience as a means of ritual and celebration. Communicating core themes and ideas via the medium of 3D, sensory and participatory experiences, later specializing in outdoor theatre. I enjoyed every second of this degree and it continues to inspire & inform me to this day.”
After graduating, the dynamic Kerri performed with the Banner Theatre Company as a guitarist and singer, she then went on to launch her solo music show, Lady Layton, which toured internationally, including Glastonbury, and was a headline act at many UK events and festivals.
She now performs with her live band as a solo artist Miss Kerri Layton has her EP Songs For A Rainy Day out in March and heads up independent record label Dixiebird Records, http://dixiebirdrecords.bigcartel.com/products which runs live music events all across the capital, featuring some of London’s finest musicians.
The School of Music and Fine Art is proud to present no less than 4 concerts during the month of March – all FREE to attend – on a unique campus at the Historic Dockyard Chatham. Details below:
Thursday 15th March, 7.30pm-9pm SMFA Music Ensembles Showcase
SMFA Easter Concert Wednesday 28th March at 7.30pm, Royal Dockyard Church
A celebration of music featuring the World Percussion Ensemble, the University Chamber Orchestra, Chamber Forum, Choir and Band. The event will include a wide range of music from classical pieces (Vivaldi, Mendelssohn) to Iive improvisation and a selection from Queen’s iconic album A Night at the Opera. FREE but booking via Eventbrite. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/school-of-music-and-fine-art-easter-concert-tickets-42421538965
Stephen Connolly, an artist filmmaker, Lecturer in Film Production, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham and Fine Art PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the School of Music and Fine Art (also a Kent 50 Scholar), has been shortlisted for a British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) Award for 2018, in the Moving Image category under Best Practice Research Portfolio for Machine Space. The results will be announced in April.
BAFTSS encourage best teaching and research practice, promoting the training of postgraduate students in research and giving researchers and practitioners the opportunity to attend and present a paper at the annual BAFTSS conference.
Connolly’s Machine Space is an essay film exploring a city as a machine; a place of movement and circulation. Using a kinetic approach, issues of space, race and finance frame the city of Machine Space. Residents in voiceover testify how the city as a spatial and financial machine shapes their experience. The city is Detroit, a place that has changed from producing the means of movement to producing space itself. The film uses formal representational devices to explore this content, and addresses issues of complicity of audiences in the state of affairs in the city. It is a visualization of the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, philosopher of space and urban life.
Stephen Connolly’s work investigates cinema and representation through place, politics and history. His award winning single screen work which explores the interface between spectatorship, material culture and subjectivity, has been widely shown internationally since 2002. A FLAMIN award recipient, he has had solo screenings at the ICA and BFI Southbank in London, and was a juror at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Michigan, USA) in 2011.
Second year BA (Hons) Fine Art student Carol Rosalind Smith is a contributor to a recently published new poetry anthology Please Hear What I’m Not Saying. All proceeds from the anthology sales go to MIND. Carol’s work was selected from over 600 international poetry submissions, whittled down to 115, with all poets enthused by a common goal to raise funds for the mental health charity MIND. With poetry focusing on a wide range of experiences, the book aims to continue the worldwide conversation about mental health. Released on 8 February, the anthology is available from Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats. To buy the book go to http://amzn.to/2nTGmbO
A regularly published fiction writer, Carol had her first short story published in an anthology in April 2017, followed in December 2017 by inclusion in a flash fiction anthology entitled Flash, I Love You. (Paper Swans Press) https://paperswans.co.uk/product/flash-i-love/
She has recently signed contracts for a further two anthologies, one in America, due for publication in 2018. For more writing and artwork go to https://crsmith2016.wordpress.com/
Currently undertaking a practice based PhD in Fine Art at SMFA on the cognitive conditions of pictorial attention (with the support of a University of Kent Vice Chancellors Scholarship), artist Moyra Derby is featured in a new exhibition which opens on Thursday 1st March at 6.30pm, running until 31 March. Interval [ ] still : now is a collaboration between five artists – Moyra Derby, Nicky Hamlyn, Conor Kelly, Joan Key, and Jost Münster – which reflects on the momentary encounter, caught within or cut by the limit of rectangular support, viewfinder, picture space, window space or film reel.
Their approach is unified by framing as a shared convention between film and painting. The interruptions that occur through cross cuts, edits, overlays and spacings between works becomes a defining consideration. The architectural and durational containment of work through exhibition is a further form of framing that the Interval project foregrounds.
Tintype opened in 2010 and currently represents twelve artists from the UK, Germany, Romania, Hong Kong and Canada. At Tintype, a large window frames the space from the street and provides a dual aspect for work – pictorialized from outside, offering an overview and invitation – fragmented and spatially shifting inside. The cut in time and structured spacing implied by the term interval highlights this change of view and perspective between the street and the gallery. Within Tintype, there is a third aspect – because the window is so large and the street outside so busy – it is hard not to be aware of the constantly changing streetscape.
Working collaboratively since 2016, the five artists developed Interval [ ] Stop Gap in 2017 at the Herbert Read Gallery, UCA Canterbury, and Interval [ ] in 2016 as part of the Whitstable Biennale.
A publication accompanies the exhibition.
A Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Founding Trustee of Crate Studio & Project Space in Margate, Moyra studied at University of Ulster at Belfast and Cheltenham School of Art. She received an MA Painting from the Royal College of Art. 1996, where she received the Basil H Alkazzi Travel Scholarship to New York, La Cité Internationale des Arts Paris Studio Award and The British Institution Fund Painting Award. She is Senior Lecturer in Painting on the BA Fine Art course at UCA Canterbury. More here https://www.kent.ac.uk/smfa/staff/staff-profiles/phdstudents/Derby1.html
SMFA Fine Art students are part of the new artists’ collective Muster Station, created in response to the University of Kent’s planned closure of the School of Music and Fine Art. As Muster Station, they have been invited by Whitstable Biennale, to take part in the 2018 Tate Modern Exchange projects, with a theme “Production”. It will involve current Fine Art BA and MA students (as well as recent Fine Art BA and MA alumni), is open to the public throughout, and free to attend. Through a programme of workshops, talks, interactions and interventions Muster Station will explore the means by which artists produce in response to constantly shifting conditions of space, time, audience and the ebb and flow of economic and political support.
The venue is Tate Exchange, Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG in the Blavatnik Building, Level 5.
Taking place intermittently throughout the weekend:
A data conservator will interpret the code of the Tate website through a translation
of digital coding into musical notation. The Gov.UK art-collection will also be dissected
and performed in sung and spoken live-burst performances.
Beyond Art Lectures, a ‘cultural telemarketing’ project with artists from Latin America that promotes the idea of outsourcing art lectures by taking advantage of unfair labour conditions.
Join in a Muster Drill, mixing yoga and semaphore signals for an invisible audience on the Thames, exploring care and communion.
A live action role play accompanied by musicians performing their interpretations of symbol-based graphic scores made in response to artworks in the permanent collection.
To close the day on Saturday, a one-off performance of Shears For Tears:’unrestrained screamers’, mixed into an audioscape, orchestrated by a video-chromatic score.
