Wednesday 6 November, 5.15pm, Fine Art seminar room, King Edward VII Building
Dr. Giulia Smith (The Ruskin School of Art), Ancestral Rewilding in the Transnational Caribbean
This talk builds on research carried out for the catalogue of Antonius Roberts: Art, Ecology and Sacred Space (2023), an exhibition curated by Professor Krista Thompson at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas. Taking the work of Bahamian artist Antonius Roberts as a central case study, it offers a model for looking at a wider array of artistic practices that similarly take up trees, plants and gardens as privileged sites of ecological and political repair for Afro-diasporic communities living in the Caribbean in the wake of British colonization. In the early 1990s, Roberts started using reclaimed coppice from local building sites devoted to the construction of large hotels catering to foreign holidaymakers. What started as a commentary on the entanglement of sovereignty and sustainability in the Bahamian Archipelago gradually evolved into a practice that is cardinally concerned with climate change, as Roberts increasingly uses the remains of trees stricken by inclement weather to make his sculptures. Focusing partly on his 2005 installation Sacred Space (a memorial garden dedicated to the enslaved and carved out of wind-battered Casuarina trees), this presentation will draw on Mimi Sheller’s concept of ‘arboreal resistance’ to examine how Roberts and other artists, such as Annalee Davis in Barbados and Deborah Anzinger in Jamaica, have enlisted Afro-botanical epistemologies and material cultures in the fight against colonial and neo-colonial landscaping practices that continue to shape not only the transnational Caribbean, but the planet at large
The Newcastle leg of ‘With & Without You’ opens with a ‘soft’ launch in the XL Gallery next to Ray’s shop at 4pm today, Tuesday 5th November – please come along to welcome one of the participating artists, Lyn Kanda from Kyoto, Japan who will talk about her work and studying art in Japan.
‘With & Without You’ is an exhibition exchange between 14 art students from Kyoto, Japan and 40 students and graduates from Fine Art here at Newcastle, and . A partner exhibition opens in Kyoto next week with students from our department exhibiting next week – and through to December – at Art Spot Korin – an independent gallery interested in international exchange and dialogue.
If you cannot come along at 4pm today, do make sure to catch the show in the XL at some point this week or next.
This workshop will talk about how to promote your artwork, create a brand and continue to make meaningful connections beyond university.
Tara Alisandratos is a fine art photographer, parent carer and advocate based in the North East of England. A graduate of Napier and Sunderland Universities, she has been teaching photography workshops in Newcastle and Sunderland for over 15 years. Her work is autobiographical and highly personal, investigating themes of memory, trauma and, most recently, mothering a disabled child and navigating the ableist system that is meant to support them.
Melissa Burntown
I Think We’ve Been Here Before…
This workshop will centre around an artwork in the form of a semi-fictional script that will be read aloud together, followed by an open group conversation inviting participants to collaboratively reflect on experiences of precarity, joy, frustration and solidarity. By employing a creative arts-based methodology, the session aims to draw out meaningful conversations around shared difficulties, to hopefully offer useful experiences and creative outcomes with and for artists. (Note: The workshop will involve reading aloud from a printed script. The script will be provided in English, in black 12 point type, but can be provided in other formats on advance request.
Melissa Burntown is an artist, art worker and researcher based in Leeds (see also here). They are currently undertaking a practice-based Fine Art PhD at Newcastle University in collaboration with Yorkshire and Humber Visual Arts Network, supported by AHRC Northern Bridge Consortium Their research involves developing new creative methodologies to explore artists lived-experience of precarity, and how these methods can be entwined within a performative and sculptural art practice. Melissa is also one of the co-founders of serf; an artist studios and project space in Leeds city centre, and has over a decade of experience working in the arts sector across multiple roles including as an art technician and as the former curator of The Tetley art gallery.
Jed Buttress
Defence against the Fine Arts
This workshop will provide you with skills, tips and methods to survive in the ‘Fine Art world’ – as an independent creator and as part of an organisation. Find opportunities, find work, and find creative communities that you thrive in.
The CRASH ARS course. How to set-up artist studios.
The workshop will be led by ARS (Albion Road Studios) studio founders Hannah Christy, Sabina Sallis, Maya Wallis. This will be a condensed, interactive, playful and informative exploration of the basic facts and skills for setting up artist studios.
Hannah Christy is an artist and curator interested in spaces and contexts which facilitate shared experience, be that conceptual, social or bodily. Her work uses photography, installation and text to communicate sensation and feeling. Alongside running ARS, she is the Assistant Curator at the Farrell Centre, developing the public programme.
Sabina Sallis is an artist, researcher and educator with an expanded practice that unfolds in an improvised manner as propositions and a creative methodology built upon a reciprocity between land practice and art practice. This maps worlds and spaces of possibilities, and can take the form of performances, workshops, retreats, foraging walks, videos, drawings, gardens, meals, objects and installations. Co-creating the Albion Row Studios is yet another way to exercise and practice this unfolding,
Maya Wallis is a practising artist and arts worker. She works as the Bookshop and Reading Room Coordinator at The NewBridge Project where she focuses her programming on knowledge sharing, art writing and collaborative reading practices. At ARS she looks after the finances as well as contributing to wider collaborative tasks.
Joanne Coates
Beyond the Frame: Art, Class, and the Rural. A workshop around socially engaged practice working with communities.
Can the arts serve as a powerful tool for social change, empowerment, and community building? This workshop delves into socially engaged arts practice, focusing on collaborative, inclusive approaches to working with marginalised communities. Through participatory exercises, case studies, and discussions, participants will explore methods for co-creating. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll explore how socially engaged art can illuminate often-overlooked narratives. Participants will think about ethical engagement, ways to incorporate local knowledge, and techniques for fostering trust and shared authorship in art projects. Join us to consider how artistic practice can bridge divides, disrupt stereotypes, and reveal the richness of rural and working-class experiences. In this workshop groups will work together to respond to a imaginary brief.
Joanne Coates is a working class visual artist using the medium of photography. She lives and works across the North East of England. Her work explores rurality, hidden histories, and inequalities relating to low income through photography, installations, and audio. She uses photography to question stories around power, identity, wealth, and poverty. She was first educated in working-class communities, and then at London College of Communication (BA Hons Photography). Participation and working with communities are an important aspect of her work. Coates is a farm labourer practicing active nature friendly methods, this forms an intersect with her art. She is deeply attached to places, the memories they hold and the people who inhabit them. Her work is often made from a lived experience perspective touching on class, disability and gender. Joanne Coates is the UK House of Commons Election Artist for 2024 , known for her compelling explorations of rural life, class, and environmental issues. In 2023, she was honoured with the Baltic Vasseur Arts Award, where she created a body of work, The Middle of Somewhere, addressing housing, climate, and the countryside. The work was long-listed for the Deutsche Borse prize. In 2021 she was awarded The Jerwood / Photoworks award.
Carly Frame: Exploring teaching art in the Classroom and Beyond
Carly Frame is an alumnus of Newcastle University’s Fine Art programme and is now Art Coordinator at Ponteland Primary School. She is passionate about giving all children access to the arts and developing their skills to express themselves as artists as well as using art therapy to support vulnerable students. She pioneered ‘FLOW’ a year long project across six schools using the creative arts to explore the story of the River Tyne culminating in a multi disciplinary public exhibition. She supports art students with and interest in education through coordinating placements in schools across the Pele Trust.
Dan Goodman is running two workshops:
1. Exhibiting Beyond the University:In this workshop, you’ll have the chance to ask questions and receive personalized advice on exhibiting your work outside the university as a student or soon-to-be graduate. This could cover strategies, opportunities, and practical tips.
2. Artist Statement Writing: In this workshop, we’ll use practical writing exercises to help you quickly draft a clear, authentic artist statement suitable for applications, exhibitions, and your website. Bring something to write with and on.
Dan Goodman is an artist-curator and researcher whose practice explores the social world of art and what it means to be part of it. This is centred around their lived experience of running a Newcastle-based artist-run gallery, System. They use System as a test site to explore different ways of being and working together through performance, karaoke, storytelling, and exhibition-making. Goodman is interested in the overlap between ideas of emotional value, the social, and the spatial within artist communities. Their ongoing practice-based PhD explores how reactivity and informality can be prime drivers in fostering identity-making and community building.
Jos Harrison
CVs for artists
Whether you want to use your CV for creative careers or not, this interactive session will be looking at the key principles of writing an effective CV and how to add your Fine Art experiences to this. We will look at how you can tailor your CV to each opportunity and understand what an employer will be looking for. PLEASE BRING ALONG A COPY OF YOUR CV TO USE WITHIN THE SESSION EITHER A PAPER COPY OR ON YOUR LAPTOP.
Jos Harrison is a Careers Consultant based at King’s Gate.
An introduction to self-employment. What it means, how to do it, understanding the terminology and paying your taxes!
Rebecca Innes is a Start-up Adviser at Newcastle University and also runs Beth’s Cat Rescue, a small cat rescue charity local to Northumberland and North Tyneside. Since graduating with an MA in Creative Writing and BA (Hons) in Media Production from Northumbria University, she has always held a portfolio career. She has 14 years’ experience as a freelance multi-disciplinary creative (from screenwriting and copywriting to graphic design and illustration) alongside various employed roles, primarily within Marketing and Education. As part of her career, she has been an Associate Lecturer at Northumbria University and part of the Senior Leadership team of a start-up/scale-up. As Start-up Adviser, she coaches students and graduates with new business ideas and designs and delivers workshops to stimulate entrepreneurial intent across learning and teaching programmes.
Olivia Turner
Exploring interdisciplinary arts practice and how to work collaboratively with different subject areas and stakeholders.
Dr Olivia Turner (@oliv.turner) is an artist and researcher based at the University of Edinburgh. Her practice moves between sculpture, performance and moving image to explore themes of illness, wildness, feminism and bodily agency. Her recent artworks perform interventions in the Shefton Collection of Greek Art and Archaeology. She has worked with organisations such as National Trust, Wellcome Trust, AHRC, Tyne & Wear Museums, British Medical Journal, Wellcome Centre for Mitochondrial Research, BINKS Hub, Scottish Ballet, Music in Hospitals and Care, and Edinburgh Centre for Research on the Experience of Dementia.
Lynn Welsh
Northumbria Teaching Course (NATP)
Lynn Welsh is Programme Lead of NATP and a NASBTT consultant – Secondary Art and Design, Ex Senior Leader, Head of Department and current teacher in the North East
Are you interested in finding out about teacher training? Fancy a starting salary of £30,000 and 13 weeks paid holiday a year? Then look no further than this workshop. The Northumbria Art and Technology Partnership is the region’s largest and most popular initial teacher training course. We only train Art and Technology teachers and this sets us aside from all other providers and ensures your training is bespoke to the practical subjects.
Join me, Lynn Welsh – Programme Lead of NATP to find out more about the PGCE course, what it involves, how it works and the potential career opportunities that await.
Andrew Wilson
What is an Art? (or, a creative practitioner not searching for immediate ‘success’)
‘Ten years, give yourself ten years’ art critic John Slice told a half full, half asleep Fine Art lecture theatre back in 2005, ‘if after 10 years you are not successful, whatever that means for you, then try something else’. By relaying examples his personal experience and encouraging dialogue Andrew Wilson will expand on this snippet from the above lecture to provoke possibilities of what ‘an art’ is or could be.
Andrew Wilson (b.1982) is an artist who works independently and in collaboration with many other individuals, groups, and organisations. He is a studio holder at The NewBridge Project, a steward for the community co-operative Dwellbeing Shieldfield, and is an active member of West End Housing Co-op. Andrew’s work tends to result in slow, invested, and thoughtful projects with a specific interest in peer-led models of support and education, alternate social, political and economic possibilities, and the collective experience of joy! Outcomes often include workshops, publications, film, public forum, drawings, recordings, and more recently, a collectively owned community archive. Andrew graduated from Newcastle University BA Hons Fine Art in June 2008.
Jeremy Deller has generously given us authorisation to screen his excellent film
Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992s currently on show at 180 the Strand as part of the The Vinyl Factory: Reverb exhibition.
Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 is not a film about climate change, but it is a film about lateral ways of thinking about modes of resistance: It can also be understood as it is a great introduction to the entanglement of capitalist structures at the root of the cliamte emergency and cultural production.
The film dives into the world of music; examining the socio-political history of the 1980 rave culture and positioning it as a form of resistance to dominant powerstrucures and the miner’s strikes. This work is a film of a lecture Deller delivered to a class of A-level Politics students, it combines rare archive footage with an oral history tracing house music from its Chicago and Detroit origins to its political presence in post-Miners’ strike Britain.
First Animation Forum workshop/advice session of the term!
24 OCT (THURSDAY) 10am – 1pm in the Media Suite (upstairs near printmaking)
Want to learn some new skills? Troubleshoot an ongoing project? Figure out how to make your moving image dreams come true? Want to make a game/VN? Interested in video but don’t know where to start?
Next up on the Animation Forum agenda is a loosely structured workshop/coworking session in the Media Suite, where you can come to learn new skills and/or develop existing work and receive feedback + help. There’s also drawing tablets to use. Bring your own tablet/laptop if applicable!
Come scan in IRL work to digitize it and try and make it move; come edit videos; come to learn about and experiment with AfterEffects; come draw some animation; come to talk and think about anime/games you enjoy and moving image at large; anything is possible.
Everyone is welcome, no experience needed. Bring your ideas and your enthusiasm.
Please sign up on the noticeboard bc space is limited, but you can come along anyway, and we shall try and make it work. The sign-up sheet will be up from today (Tuesday) late afternoon onwards.
If you’re curious about what the Animation Forum is all about generally, you can read stuff on the blog (link in my email signature below).
Wednesday 23 October, 5.15pm, Fine Art seminar room, KEVII Building
Giuliana Borea (Newcastle University), The Power of Plants: Viruses, Healing and Amazonian Indigenous Art
Drawing on the work of Amazonian indigenous artist Harry Pinedo-Inin Metsa, “Our Plants, Our Oxygen. Lung Healing” and other works by Pinedo and Santiago Yahuarcani featured in the exhibition Ite/Neno/Aquí: Respuestas al Covid 19, this talk explores the role that plants played in helping to defeat, and cure, Covid-19 in the Amazon.
Focusing on the pandemic, I show how networks of help and knowledge between people, plants, animals and other beings, in what is understood as an extended humanity, occurred through dreams, “mareaciones” and various forms of mobility; and I explain the role of art in this set of exchanges, synaesthesia, and translations and what I call “agents of interface”. I argue that just as scientific visualization techniques offered an image of COVID-19, indigenous art offered a visualization of COVID-19 in the Amazon, and of its forms and agents of healing and care.
While this presentation concerns the power of plants, it distances itself from recent exhibitions on ayahuasca art in Europe and the UK which I argue re-fuel the exoticism and “primitivist” consumption of the Amazon for a European audience, particularly at a time of global interest in indigenous art.
Please join us for the first Painting Forum 2024/25
18 October 2024, 2-4 PM, Long Gallery In the first session we will discuss some paintings in the studios and speak about general ideas related to painting practice.
(Please let me know, via e-mail, if you are interested in discussing your work.) I will also discuss the programme for the next sessions.
Painting + Forum is a place for regular studio discussions about painting, an exchange of ideas and texts dealing with the everyday task of painting. It started in autumn 2019 with a series of informal discussions on painting with Newcastle University Fine Art students from all years (Undergraduate and Postgraduate).
This year we will have a series of conversations with painters, practical painting workshops and reading group meetings, discussing texts dealing with the idea of painting.
This is your belated invitation to the first iteration of the ANIMATION FORUM this year, which will be a special SCREENING EVENT on Friday 11 October, 3-5pm in the Fine Art Lecture Theatre.
We have a very special double bill of the early works of Shinkai Makoto, the short film ‘Voices of a distant star’ (2002) & the short-ish film ‘5 Centimetres Per Second’ (2007). The combined length of the films in 1 hr 20 min, and the rest of the time afterwards will be taken up with an informal discussion. Poster attached.
No particular trigger warnings apply to any of the films. The first one is sci-fi, while the second one is more rooted in real life – both are solid cornerstones for the sekai-kei genre, and deal with themes of disconnect.
Those who dabble in Japanese animation may be familiar with Shinkai’s name through his massive success works in recent years such as Your Name and Suzume. This is a great opportunity to watch his early stuff on a relatively large projection!
The goal of the Animation Forum (in no particular order) is to enjoy animation, think about animation and artists’ moving image in a very expanded sense and critically, and to spread technical skills that let you incorporate animated/video elements into your artistic practice.
This screening session + discussion is a good opportunity to think about how pop culture and “high art” may feed into and interact with eachother, and where we can go from there as artists.
