Lesions in the Landscape, 2015. Shona Illingworth, installation view, FACT, Liverpool. Photo by Jon Barraclough.
The School of Music and Fine Art’s Director of Graduate Studies and Reader in Fine Art Shona Illingworth, has been interviewed by presenter Claudia Hammond for BBC Radio 4’s All In The Mind, which will feature Shona’s exhibition Lesions in the Landscape, a powerful multi-screen installation, exploring the impact of amnesia and the erasure of individual and cultural memory.
Lesions in the Landscape, 2015. Shona Illingworth, installation view, FACT, Liverpool. Photo by Jon Barraclough.
A two day symposium exploring interactions between art and clinical practices, critical thinking and neuroscience takes place on Saturday 29th and Sunday 30th October, 11.30am-6pm, at the Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 7QX.
Invisible Architectures: Lesions in the Landscape, organised by SMFA Director of Graduate Studies and Reader in Fine Art Shona Illingworth, with Jill Bennett, will focus on the idea of embodied experience across diverse individual, social, political, cultural and digital landscapes. The event brings together a range of speakers – from artists and writers to scientists, cultural theorists, historians and social psychologists – and is part of Lesions in the Landscape, a project exploring the impact of amnesia and the erasure of individual and cultural memory, and the wider implications of memory loss on identity, space and imagining the future.
Sessions will focus on case studies deploying creative methods to investigate amnesia; understanding the experience of memory loss; processes and consequences of cultural erasure; haunting in computational culture; aesthetics of control in technological mediation; latency; materiality and consciousness.
Invisible Architectures: Lesions in the Landscape is supported by the Wellcome Trust and the Sound, Image Space Research Centre, School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent.
Linked to the symposium is Shona Illingworth’s exhibition which runs until 27 November at The Gallery, Dilston Grove, London SE16 2UA – for opening times go to http://cgplondon.org/lesions-in-the-landscape/
Simon Ling, ‘Untitled’ 2012, oil on canvas. Photo by Marcus Leith. Courtesy of Greengrassi, London
The School of Music and Fine Art is delighted to announce the first event in the Autumn term Visiting Artist Talk series, welcoming painter Simon Ling on Tuesday 11 October at 6.15pm in the Royal Dockyard Church.
Born in 1968, British artist Simon Ling studied at Chelsea College of Art & Design and then at the Slade School of Art in London. His practice in involved in a deep engagement with painting and his subjects can often appear banal street scenes, still lifes, rocks, stones or patches of scrubland – but through a process of sustained and rigorous looking, his works transcend the ordinariness of their initial appearance, taking on a strange and at times unsettling quality.
Looking and seeing are of profound importance in Ling’s work. This might seem an obvious statement with regard to an artist, particularly a painter, but for Ling the operations and effects of perception are of particular centrality. Looking is always an extraordinary act rather than simply a process of passive observation – an active and deliberate thing that not only produces the world, but alters and disrupts it.
Many of Ling’s works are made ‘en-plein air’: painted in the streets around his London studio, in more rural locations in the British countryside, as well as in parks and wasteland. However, he also works in the studio, sometimes from models (which he constructs himself); sometimes from sketches or memory. In this way, his paintings take on a composite quality, accumulating and collapsing together different kinds of experience, perception and time.
Across all of Ling’s paintings we see an intense engagement with objects (in their broadest sense) – their relations, realities, and our mutable experience of them. Each canvas might be read as a kind of ‘event’: between the artist and the world, as it appears in that moment, as well as through the vagueries and distortion of recollection and reverie. Ling’s paintings might be seen to exemplify this unstable, contingent quality of the visible, the withdrawn and flickering thingly-ness of things, the way objects seep and pulse with the mute but exuberant fact of their own materiality.
After a screening at Shambala Festival in August, acclaimed award-wining contemporary visual artist and School of Music and Fine Art Lecturer Adam Chodzko’s Deep Above will continue its tour at Manchester Science Festivalon October 22ndat Texture in Manchester’s Northern Quarter.
The work uses moving image and sound to explore, short-circuit and abstract our slippery self-deceptions regarding climate change. Exploring the zones between the rational and irrational, and mind and body, whilst adopting the languages of meditation, hypnosis and ‘self help’ he addresses the behavioural psychology analysed in George Marshall’s book Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change.
Deep Above is commissioned by Invisible Dust, advised by Adam Harris, experimental psychologist University College London and Paul Wilkinson, Environmental Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It has been part of Bristol European Green Capital and is produced in association with Watershed and Shambala Festival and is funded by an Arts Award from the Wellcome Trust.
Exhibiting internationally since 1991, Adam Chozko works across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, with a practice that is situated both within the gallery and the wider public realm. http://www.adamchodzko.com
Manchester Science Festival is running from Thursday 20th October to Sunday 30th October. For more info go to http://invisibledust.com/
Hannah Lees “Tablets” (2016) part of “Overlay” curated by Jeremy Millar at White Rainbow, London. Photo Credit: Noah de Costa
Widely exhibited artist, Hannah Lees, is now teaching on the Fine Art programme in the School of Music and Fine Art.
Turner Contemporary and the British Museum (National Programmes) commissioned Lees to create a new mural in response to the British Museum’s collection of Roman Samian Ware pottery found along the coast near Whitstable. Inspired by ritual and religion and influenced by her interest in history and heritage connected to her home-town of Canterbury, Hannah Lees explores cycles of decay and regeneration often using natural materials and is particularly interested in rituals surrounding consumption.
She is exhibiting in Harvest, curated by Peter Foolen at Kunstraumlangenlois, Langenlois (Private View: 10 – 7pm, Sunday 2 October 2016). Info at http://www.norbertfleischmann.at/
For her first Milan show, The Oldest Thing You Can Hold In Your Hand, Lees uses two of the city’s most important historical artworks as a starting point to explore ideas around display, feasting, ritual and participation, core topics in her practice. Curated by Pietro Di Lecce, with text by Attilia Fattori Franchini, the show runs until 23 October 2016. For more details go to http://www.theworkbench.it/ and http://atpdiary.com/artist-run-spaces-workbench-lees-skiba/
Acclaimed award-wining contemporary visual artist and School of Music and Fine Art Lecturer, Adam Chodzko, is one of the exhibiting artists in Points of Departure (part of Estuary 2016) with a new commission as part of an ongoing project which will result in a video and sculpture installation in Tilbury Cruise Terminal. Estuary is a biennial arts festival celebrating the Thames Estuary from 17th September – 2nd October 2016. The artworks presented reflect themes of arrival, departure, migration, trade, connection and nationhood via the estuary out to the wider world.
His work Ghostis described thus: A kayak; a sculpture as vessel, coffin, bed, costume and camera rig. It is designed to ferry people to the ‘island of the dead’, with a rower at the back, and the passenger lying down low and flat in the front, like a body in a coffin with their head slightly raised, travelling along the interface between water and sky. A camera, mounted on Ghost’s deck, records each unique voyage, the passengers’ point of view, from across its bows.
The video archives from multiple journeys along four previous Ghost passages (The rivers Swale, Tamar, Tyne and Thames) here joins new video footage made this summer from the Essex Ghost voyages made by a group of estuarine insomniacs, to be shown alongside Ghost itself, held suspended in the Tilbury Cruise Terminal. Read the interview with Adam here.
Chodzko’s art explores the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour. Exhibiting internationally since 1991, he works across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, with a practice that is situated both within the gallery and the wider public realm. http://www.adamchodzko.com
Points of Departure runs from 17 – 30 September – 11am – 4pm daily (closed Sat 24 September) at the following venues:
Tilbury Cruise Terminal, Ferry Road, Tilbury RM18 7NG
LV21, Town Pier Pontoon, Gravesend DA11 0BJ
Gravesend High Street DA11 0BJ
Coalhouse Fort, Princess Margaret Road, Tilbury RM18 8PB
School of Music and Fine Art “Class of 2016”. Photo by Stacey Cooper.
On the hottest day of the year, talented students from the School of Music and Fine Art from the University of Kent enjoyed their graduation award ceremony in the stunning Rochester Cathedral followed by celebrations in the sun with the spectacular backdrop of Rochester Castle.
Duncan MacLeod, Director of Recruitment & Lecturer in Music commented: “This year’s graduation ceremony was a huge success, offering the opportunity for staff, alongside family and friends, to come together in celebrating our students’ achievement, and recognition of their hard work over the past three years. We wish all of our 2016 graduates every success in the future and look forward to hearing about their future achievements!”
Artist Shona Illingworth, Fine Art Reader and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Music and Fine Art, currently has work in the exhibition States of Mind: Tracing the Edges of Consciousness at the Wellcome Collection, Euston Road, London. Running until October 16th, the exhibition features a series of installations that include Shona Illingworth’s Time Present, which considers the impact of amnesia and the erasure of individual and cultural memory.
Time Present, 2016. Image by Shona Illingworth
Recently shortlisted for the prestigious 2016 Jarman Award, the widely exhibited Illingworth works across sound, film, video, photography, drawing and painting. Major works using moving image and/or sound, take the form of gallery based and site specific installation. Her work combines interdisciplinary research (particularly with emerging neuropsychological models of memory and critical approaches to memory studies) with publicly engaged practice.
Time Present, 2016. Image by Shona Illingworth
Illingworth recently chaired and presented a seminar with Jill Bennett at ICOM (International Conference on Memory) in Budapest. Perspectives on Amnesia was an interdisciplinary investigation of memory loss, combining perspectives from arts and cognitive neuropsychology and the value of creative approaches in understanding the day-to-day experience of memory loss.
Claire was 44 years old when she awoke from a coma to find that she could no longer remember much of her past, form new memories or recognise faces (not even her own). She returned to a house she could not remember as home, where she no longer knew what anything was for or how to use the objects that surrounded her. She could not recognise her children, her husband or close friends and family. Claire describes the past as “a space you can’t enter or feel – the future a space you can’t imagine”.
Time Presentexplores the very different shape of Claire’s world, and the maps and lists that Claire creates in order to structure her thinking and to ground her in time and space.
This new work developed on from Illingworth’s project Lesions in the Landscape, builds on over four years of working with Claire, alongside cognitive psychologist Martin Conway and neuropsychologist Catherine Loveday. This collaboration has led to some unique phenomenological and neurobiological insights into amnesia. Illingworth explores Claire’s personal experience of amnesia alongside the cultural amnesia surrounding the depopulated Scottish island of St Kilda, located 40 miles west of the Outer Hebrides in the North Atlantic. The last communities of St Kilda were evacuated at their own request in August 1930, ending 4000 years of habitation. A powerful analogy for the neurological experience of amnesia, this sudden interruption in human occupation of the island embodies the sense of lost connection with the past. St Kilda embodies a sense of isolation. The wild weather fronts that make access difficult ultimately precipitated the decision to depopulate. Similarly Claire lives with the perpetual isolation that comes with the loss of memory. Intelligent, warm and social, she works constantly to blend into situations that most of us take for granted, rarely able to draw on the comfort of knowing where she is, how she fits in, who and where her friends are.
The two screen installation explores the dynamic role memory plays in enabling us to move through time and space. It reveals the daily feat of creativity, determination and commitment that Claire undertakes against the odds, in order to give meaning and shape to her world and to maintain connections to her past, her future, her identity and to those that are important in her life.
Turner Contemporary in Margate will be opening the 2016 Platform exhibition showcasing the work of six BA Fine Art graduates from Kent Universities with a special preview on Thursday 4 August from 5-7pm. Part of the Platform Graduate Award, the exhibition runs from Thursday 4 August – Sunday 25 September 2016.
The School of Music and Fine Art is delighted that Sariya Suwannakarnand Daniel Owusu, two of our BA (Hons) Fine Art graduating students have been selected for these prestigious awards that new talent.
Platform is a partnership between five galleries: Aspex Gallery, De La Warr Pavilion, M K Gallery, Modern Art Oxford and Turner Contemporary, devised in collaboration with CVAN South East. The aim of the programme is to support graduate professional development.
Information about the award and the selected artists from all participating galleries in the Platform programme will be available at: frameandreference.com.
The shortlisted graduates are:
Sariya Suwannakarn University of Kent Daniel Owusu University of Kent Jessica Grønlund Canterbury Christ Church University Mas Weeb Canterbury Christ Church University Kayleigh Baker University for the Creative Arts George Morl University for the Creative Arts
The Platform Graduate Award winner 2016 will be announced at a special event at Turner Contemporary on Saturday 4 November 2016.
Milo Meacham on the explosion site at Uplees”Listening”. Photo by Tim Meacham
An exhibition in Faversham about artists’ responses to artefacts, objects and events from the first World War will feature work by Tim Meacham, Lecturer in Fine Art and Partner College Liaison Officer from the School of Music and Fine Art – and he will be discussing his work with artist Sara Trillo at 2.30pm on Saturday 20 August.
Taking place at the Fleur de Lis Heritage Centre, Localism and Legacy, curated by Christine Gist for The Faversham Society, also features work by John Dargan, Colin Priest, Sara Trillo and Charles Williams. The exhibition will be open from Saturday 6 – Sunday 28 August 2016, and is supported by Swale Borough Council, School of Music and Fine Art, Ernest Cook Trust, Heritage Lottery Fund, and the National Lottery.
Tim Meacham’s piece, titled “ It was dust…” 1916-2016 , explores the explosions at the Cotton Powder Company works at Uplees near Faversham in April 1916. The resulting sound work is an impression of what would have been heard and felt in the town on Sunday the 2nd April 1916 from 1.30 pm onwards. The work is informed through research into archival material from a number of sources including elements held by the Fleur de Lis museum.
Tim explains: “The work explores the notion of trauma remaining in landscape after violent events and the possibility of an “acoustic memory” allowing one to “hear the past” in the present through the sounds of surviving material and artefacts. The piece is constructed from sounds gathered in the present at the Uplees site, both natural; grass, trees etc.. and human through touching or “playing” the remains of surfaces and structures. It also includes recordings made in Faversham town on 2nd April 2016
These collected sound fragments were then digitally layered and mixed to reconstruct the sound of the 1916 explosions including the deep echoing rumble which followed the initial blasts, which were heard as far away as Norwich. The reported effects of an acoustic shadow are also referenced which in the case of the Uplees blast was the result of a prevailing wind from the East, allowing the blasts to be heard many miles away.
“The easterly wind took the shock of the concussion away from Faversham and swept it over the marshes. It struck Sittingbourne, 7 miles away, with terrific force. It was felt at Chatham, 17 miles away where it blew open the doors of the Naval Barracks.” Digest of Daily Chronicle April 2nd 1916.
The people of Faversham were no strangers to explosions; the manufacture of gunpowder in the area dated back hundreds of years. However, the force and devastation of the Uplees event caused by high explosive as opposed to gunpowder, was certainly outside the experience of most civilians and many military personnel. Like the First World War itself, the event marked a move towards new technologies, previously unimaginable forces and ultimately the embracing of modernity and the world we live in today.
The images of the Uplees site, censored at the time, are as if part of the western front and the imminent horror of the Somme had been transferred to the East Kent marshes.”
Exhibition Venue: Fleur de Lis Heritage Centre, 10-13 Preston Street, Faversham, Kent ME13 8NS
Opening hours: Monday – Saturday 10.00-16.00 and Sunday 10.00-13.00.
Opening reception: Friday 5 August from 18.30-20.00
