To all in the Fine Art community, staff & students alike , who use bicycles to commute to and from the department I’m offering to help out with some bike maintenance – so if you’re having some problems with your bike at the moment then please take a look below:
There are 10 bike maintenance slots available on Tuesday 10th Dec mostly for students but some for staff :
9:30 am
9:50 am
10:10 am
10:30 am
10:50 am
11:10 am
11:30 am
11:50 am
12:10 am
12:30 am
Please email me back if you are interested with the time slot that suits you best. I am not a certified bike mechanic but will aim to help out where I can with the tools that I have available – however ultimately I may recommend you take your bike to a repair shop.
Please see the reading (please read before next week) for the meeting with Mali Morris here
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.
Upcoming is another Animation Forum workshoppe/advice session! For those of you who wrote down “AfterEffects” on the “what kind of workshops do you want?” posters, this is your chance.
‘Animation’ as a word may sound very specific, but we take it in the broadest sense possible, including all sorts of video and experimental moving image. Not sure if you fit? Come along and I’ll tell you how your work is actually animation.
WORKSHOP DETAILS
21 Nov (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 is already up.
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).
Sergio Ricaño Gutiérrez is Director of the National Art School in Mexico City(Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda”). He holds a degree in Visual Arts from the National School of Plastic Arts at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Mexico and abroad. His work belongs to national and international collections, such as the Museo José Guadalupe Posada; the Museo Nacional de la Estampa; the special collections of Ibero-American art of the universities of Stanford and Berkeley; the Museo Iconográfico de Guanajuato; the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez, Oaxaca; the Facultad de Bellas Artes de San Carlos, in Valencia, Spain, and the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, among others. In 2012 he received the Takeda Biennial Prize, Oaxaca, and an Honourable Mention at the Zalce Biennial in Morelia, Michoacán, whose acquisition prize he won in 2014. Since 2008 he founded and directs TACO, Talleres de Arte Contemporáneo, a space for education, dissemination, exhibition and production for the visual arts.
Wednesday 20 November, 5.15pm, Fine Art seminar room, King Edward VII Building
Dr Edwin Coomasaru, ‘Queer Ecologies and Anti-Colonial Abundance in Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon’
Published posthumously in 1950, queer Sri Lankan photographer Lionel Wendt’s photobook Ceylon crafted an aesthetic of queer environmental abundance. Taken between 1933 and 1944, his surrealist and documentary-style photographs were shaped by and contributed to rising tides of national consciousness and anti-colonial movements ahead of the island’s independence. British rule (1796-1948) had destroyed common land and outlawed homosexuality for being ‘against the order of nature’, organising Sri Lanka around an extractive plantation economy – managing sexual politics to produce a colonial workforce and manufacturing resource scarcity to extract wealth to the UK. Ideas of environmental abundance from the island’s folklore carried a very different conception of the land: one enchanted with spiritual knowledge and used sustainably. In the context of such belief systems, Wendt challenged British control over both ecology and sexuality, imagining alternative possibilities. Drawing on a queer ecological methodology and decolonial theory, this lecture will argue that Ceylon celebrated a queer environmental abundance.
Dr Edwin Coomasaru is a historian of modern and contemporary British, Irish, and Sri Lankan art; as well as being an editor of the journal Visual Culture in Britain. He has been awarded Postdoctoral and Research Fellowships at the University of Edinburgh, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and The Courtauld Institute of Art. Coomasaru previously worked as a Research Assistant on the Association of Art History’s anti-racist and decolonial resource portal. Formerly a Contributing Editor at British Art Studies, he has also co-edited a book on Imagining the Apocalypse: Art and the End Times (Courtauld Books Online, 2022). Coomasaru has written articles and reviews for Art History, Third Text, The Irish Review, Irish Studies Review, Oxford Art Journal; as well as art criticism for The Irish Times, ArtReview Asia, Art Monthly, Photoworks Annual, Burlington Contemporary, Architectural Review, Frieze; alongside exhibition essays for The Barbican Centre, Autograph, The Photographers’ Gallery, Belfast Exposed, Townhall Cavan, Jhaveri Contemporary, Saskia Fernando Gallery.
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.
