Category Archives: fine art

Alumni, fine art, news, research

SMFA Fine Art PhD student Stephen Connolly wins prestigious 2018 BAFTSS Award

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.

The film was shown at London Film Festival and Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University.  https://wexarts.org/film-video/stephen-connolly-machine-space

You can read the LFF Review (in which it is described as “brilliant”) on MUBI https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/spatial-stories

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.

 

More info about the BAFTSS Awards here  http://baftss.org/awards-2018/   and  http://baftss.org/special-interest-groups/practice-research/

Machine Space newsprint giveaway http://bubblefilm.net/texts/pdf_texts/Machine_Space_Newsprint.pdf

Alumni, fine art, news

Ropery Songs now on You Tube

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.

Ropery Songs film documentation can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0MWP1yIlus

creative events, fine art, news

SMFA MA student Steve Kilmartin organises Through The Lens – Festival of Photography, 31st August to 8th September

School of Music and Fine Art MA student Steve Kilmartin has organised an exhibition called Through The Lens –  Festival of Photography, running from 31st August to 8th September.  Held at St Mary In The Castle, Hastings, East Sussex,  this magical festival is for any photographer, photo-enthusiast, keen amateur or anyone who wants to see the world through a different lens. Offering a mix of world-class guest speakers, with new emerging photographic talent exhibiting alongside well-established photographers,  viewers can see contemporary photography and reportage all under one roof. There is also an opportunity to submit photographic work – closing date for submissions is 1st July.

 

More info: http://ttlfest.co.uk/

creative events, fine art, news

Strange Umbrellas: SMFA’s Dr Blanca Regina, Associate Lecturer in Event and Experience Design, performing in London on Tuesday 20th March

 

Strange Umbrellas, a platform for free improvised music and visual art, was started in 2012 by Dr Blanca Regina with musician Steve Beresford.

An artist, teacher and curator who is currently involved in creating mixed media performances, installations and film, Dr Regina is a visiting research fellow at University of the Arts London. Her research and practice encompass expanded cinema, free improvisation, moving image, photography and audiovisual performance.  In 2010, she received a doctorate in Humanities from University Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, with the thesis The VJ and audiovisual performance: towards a radical aesthetic of postmodernism.

She is curator at the London-based Music Hackspace, Live Cinema Foundation and Strange Umbrellas. With Matthias Kispert she founded the Material Studies Group, developing a series of workshops and performances around the production of sound with everyday objects.

Dr Blanca Regina, 2018.

 

You can hear Dr Regina here: https://britishmusiccollection.org.uk/article/conversation-blanca-regina?mc_cid=114a477664&mc_eid=65dfeeb7e0 as part of Unpredictable: Conversations with Improvisers – a collection of videos that have grown out of deep research into the nature of Free Improvisation, its history in the UK and its international connections. Research and filming began in 2011 and it was directed and produced by artist, curator and educator Blanca Regina in collaboration with Steve Beresford and Pierre Bouvier Patron.  The series was commissioned by Sound and Music for the 50th anniversary of the British Music Collection.

Strange Umbrellas Number 19 will be on 20th March, in collaboration with CAFE OTO at 18-22 Ashwin St, London, Dalston E8 3DL.  Doors at 7.30 pm, performances at 8 pm. Tickets £8 £6 ADVANCE £4 MEMBERS.

 

More info go to https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/strange-umbrellas-19/

Alumni, fine art, news, research

SMFA Fine Art PhD student Stephen Connolly shortlisted for a 2018 BAFTSS Award

Stephen Connolly

 

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.

The film was shown at London Film Festival and Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University.  https://wexarts.org/film-video/stephen-connolly-machine-space

You can read the LFF Review (in which it is described as “brilliant”) on MUBI https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/spatial-stories

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.

 

More info about the BAFTSS Awards here:  http://baftss.org/awards-2018/ and http://baftss.org/special-interest-groups/practice-research/

Machine Space newsprint giveaway http://bubblefilm.net/texts/pdf_texts/Machine_Space_Newsprint.pdf

fine art, news, research

Sarah Turner, SMFA’s Reader in Fine Art & Deputy Director of Research is published in The New Soundtrack journal

Sarah Turner

 

Sarah Turner, SMFA’s Reader in Fine Art & Deputy Director of Research is published in The New Soundtrack journal, with The Sound of Memory in Public House appearing in Volume 7 Issue 2. Click here: http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/sound.2017.0103 and https://www.schoolofsound.co.uk/sos/blog/

The New Soundtrack brings together leading edge academic and professional perspectives on the complex relationship between sound and moving images, providing a new platform for discourse on how aural elements combine with moving images, and encourages writing on more current developments, such as sound installations, computer-based delivery, and the psychology of the interaction of image and sound.

Sarah Turner is an artist who writes and makes films. Her work spans single screen gallery pieces (rooted in the formal preoccupations of the avant-garde from which she emerged) to feature length projects that explore the interplay between abstraction and narration.

Alumni, fine art, news

SMFA Fine Art student Carol Rosalind Smith is contributor to new poetry anthology for MIND

 

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/

Alumni, fine art, news

SMFA Fine Art PhD student Moyra Derby features in collaborative exhibition at Tintype in March

Installation view, Interval [ ], Whitstable Biennale, 2016

 

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

 

Venue details: Tintype, 107 Essex Road, London, N1 2SL,  Tel 0207 354 4360

Wed – Saturday: 12 – 6pm  www.tintypegallery.com

creative events, fine art, news, research

SMFA and Archaeology project produces 3D printed replicas of ancient musical instruments

Replica of Ancient Roman and Egyptian artefacts. Photo by George Morris

 

A 2 year AHRC-funded project to study Roman and Late Antique Artefacts from Egypt – a collaborative effort between the University of Kent, Manchester Metropolitan University, and the UCL Petrie Museum, Bloomsbury, London – has resulted in the production of replica ancient musical instruments using 3D print technology. Using laser scanning data and further research to enable the identical reconstruction, School of Music and Fine Art technicians, Georgia Wright and George Morris made a set of reed panpipes, 3 different ceramic rattles, a pair of wooden clappers and two sets of double-flutes.

Lloyd Bosworth, archaeology technician in SECL, 3-D had scanned the objects at the museum and then created virtual 3-D models from the scans (Lloyd has just won a University research prize for his research support). The virtual 3-D models were sent to Georgia Wright, who printed them out to use as a basis for the replica objects in the original materials, and with George Morris then produced the instruments.

Replica of Egyptian Reed Panpipes. Photo by George Morris

 

On the Project Team, Dr Ellen Swift, Reader in Archaeology at the University of Kent, commented: “It was very exciting going over to Chatham to pick up the instruments and I was really pleased with how Fine Art Technicians, Georgia and George, were able to achieve a close match with the size and appearance of the original artefacts thanks to new 3-D scanning technology. On my first visit, I picked up the 3D print-out of the panpipes and it was a real eureka moment to find out that they played a musical scale known from written documents to have existed in the Roman period. Making the instruments did pose a challenge as in some cases there were parts missing and some additional research and creativity was needed to fill in the gaps.”

The replica artefacts are a key part of the project and will be used for research and also for an exhibition at the UCL Petrie Museum at the end of the project in 2019. When all the instruments are ready, sound recordings will be made at SMFA to be used at the subsequent exhibition.

This research project – the first in-depth study of Roman and Late Antique Egypt that uses everyday artefacts as its principal source of evidence – aims to transform our understanding of social experience, social relations, and cultural interactions, among the populations of Egypt in this period.

 

For more info go to http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/egypt-artefacts/2018/02/02/3d-printed-panpipes/

fine art, news, research

SMFA’s Adam Chodzko adjudicating ARTiculation Prize South East Regional Finals

 

SMFA’s Adam Chodzko, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, is adjudicating The ARTiculation Prize South East Regional Finals at Quarterhouse, Folkestone on 31 January.

The ARTiculation Prize is a nationally acclaimed annual event designed to promote the appreciation and discussion of art and encourages students aged between 16 -19 in full-time further education, to express their opinions and thoughts via a ten minute presentation to an interested audience about a work of art, artefact or architecture of their choice. Adjudicators are asked to assess each presentation as a whole, looking at content, structure, delivery and the speaker’s original approach and unique potential. In 2018 nine Regional Finals will be held across the country.

Adjudicators will select a first, second and third prize winner in each Regional Final, who will each receive book prizes sponsored by Laurence King Publishers. The first prize speaker from each Regional Final will go on to give their talk at the ARTiculation Grand Final on Friday 9 March 2018 at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Winning 2018 Finalists will be awarded 1st Prize £300, 2nd Prize £200, 3rd Prize £100. All ARTiculation Finalists will receive one year’s free membership to The Art Fund to include an Art Pass and a year’s membership to the Friends of The Roche Court Educational Trust.

 

More info here http://rochecourteducationaltrust.co.uk/articulation-prize/?platform=hootsuite