Fine Art Senior Lecturer Neil Chapman – recent practice.

Dr Neil Chapman, Senior Lecturer in BA(Hons) Fine Art at Falmouth School of Art, was recently among contributors to a Speculative Art School event.

The Speculative Art School is a public programme of free talks, walks, discussions, workshops, study sessions and sonic explorations that explore provisional territories in past, present, and future thinking. It was curated by Sarah Bowden who runs the Hardwick Gallery in Cheltenham.

Neil contributed a written piece specifically for The Speculative Space; the event provided a public opportunity to browse a  compilation of speculations and proposals submitted by some of The Hardwick Gallery’s favourite thinkers in a form of independent group study.

Dr Neil Chapman is an artist, writer and researcher. His current work explores material textual practices, artists publishing, art/philosophy interdisciplinarity, questions concerning visuality, collaborative method, the evolution and politics of art-research.

 

FOMO – Introducing Falmouth’s first Art Publishing Fair

F O M O – the first ever Falmouth Art Publishing Fair – opens at 4pm on Friday 29 September for a weekend of talks, workshops, screenings, artists’ book works, performances, zines and comics and readings.   

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Organised by Falmouth School of Art’s Senior Lecturers Neil Chapman, Gillian Wylde and Carolyn Shapiro and Associate Lecturer Maria Christoforidou, F O M O will take place at Falmouth Art Gallery and the Library of the Municipal Buildings, The Moor, Falmouth, and brings together Falmouth School of Art staff and students with local participating institutions including: Falmouth Art Gallery, Falmouth Library, Tate St Ives, Stranger Collective, Urbanomic, Atlantic Press, Burning House Books, BLNT Collective, Keiken and Krowji. 

F O M O will include contributions from academic and research colleagues from: Royal  Holloway University, Cambridge University, West Dean College, Aarhus University, Plymouth University, Goldsmiths University of London, Research Center for Material Culture Netherlands and from across Departments at Falmouth University.

Generously supported by Falmouth Art Gallery, the event has grown out of discussion between colleagues across different departments at Falmouth University. From meetings as a Research Forum, finding common ground between their varied interests, the group started to consider joint research and how best to team up for that work. One of the organisers, Neil Chapman, reflects on the development of the event, and what we can look forward to over the weekend…

‘As a research group, we share a commitment to collective work. That’s both a pragmatic interest and a critical position too. Most often, when people work together it’s so that a workload can be shared. But collective work is unpredictable and inefficient too and these are values that might tend to be lost in the current climate. There is a lot of emphasis in the contemporary workplace on individuals’ success and the competition that results can be destructive. Our title for the event – Fear of Missing Out – is on some level an ironic allusion to these issues.

We are all of us, in different ways, committed to discursive work, to the climate of ideas that surrounds ‘making’ in our different disciplines. And that’s a foundation for the publication fair too, reflected in the many talks, screenings, readings and performances scheduled over the weekend. F O M O provides an opportunity for us to invite our colleagues and friends to Cornwall. It’s good for the cultures of creative practice here in Falmouth. F O M O will bring lots of people into contact who might not have met otherwise. We’re excited to imagine the new partnerships and the new work that might result.

The aim has been to inaugurate the kind of event that we would want to go to ourselves, also the kind of event that students would be excited about. Henrietta Boex, Director of Falmouth Art Gallery, has been extremely supportive. We’ve made all kinds of demands on her and she seems never to say no to anything; the Gallery’s Glyn Winchester has also been a great support. The independence of the project is a way of underscoring our own priorities, which are evident in all kinds of ways through the framing of the event: the name, the graphics, the publicity, the choice of which artists, writers and publishers to invite. There are many Art Publishing Fairs in the UK and abroad and we have had an eye on some of those. But in another sense this Fair has been invented from scratch. And for that reason it will work well as a foundation for bigger and more varied research initiatives to come. We’re talking about a future peer-reviewed journal, discursive gatherings – dream dinner date/fantasy football team type things with exciting living people—maybe some dead folk too, ghosts. No zombies. Digital Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida . . .

It’s particularly good to be working with current students and recent Falmouth University graduates. As part of FOMO, Graham Taylor who studied Fine Art and who graduated in 2015 is curating an exhibition entitled Practically Outside, involving a dozen or more Falmouth alumni. His contribution makes a direct engagement with the FOMO ethos, looking critically at what it means to be an ‘emerging artist’, engaging in the most thoughtful way with different platforms of exhibition and print publication.’

F O M O also includes contributions from writers, artists, poets, publishers, activists, hackers, Falmouth University alumni and musicians both national and international.

F O M O is an inaugural event, bringing a new art research collective into being, which, over forthcoming months will stage events in different forms and at different locations, connecting diverse networks.

https://falmouthartpublishingfair.wordpress.com/

Writing as art practice; drawing pedagogy; illustrators and communities in crisis…

Senior Lecturers from Falmouth School of Art have been helping shape national debates and dialogues surrounding writing as art practice, drawing pedagogy and reportage illustration, through recent conferences presentations around the UK.

 

Dr Neil Chapman, Senior Lecturer on BA(Hons) Fine Art was invited to present a paper and lead a workshop at the ‘Words of Art’ conference at Wimbledon College of Arts.

The conference formed part of a wider Words of Art project, seeking ‘to explore writing as art practice by considering tactile materiality, live spoken word or performative activity, site-specific writing practices and temporality’. Participants investigated ‘bridging gaps between the written form and object-oriented art practices, shifting the focus of writing from the computer screen to the studio, breaking down perceptions of barriers between writing on the one hand and art-making on the other’.

The conference gathered together invited practitioners who use written forms within their own practices and/or are involved in curating and publishing artists’ writing.

 

Neil said, ‘It was good to be part of an event at which some students as well as staff had the opportunity to show their work. The conference was preceded by a week of writing workshops — an effective way of galvanising interest in the themes among students in the lead up to the conference.

The usual conventions of a conference were disrupted in a number of ways, with diverse forms of presentation including performance readings, sound-art and audiovisual presentation, live drawing of diagrams and presentations assembling fictional elements with historical research. The event made evident the diverse approaches to writing being practiced widely in art education and art research, adding weight to the argument that artists have something new and important to contribute to research culture in the humanities and beyond.

In forthcoming work, staff of Falmouth School of Art will develop the network of those concerned with the politics and practice of writing in art, working with colleagues at Linnaeus University in Sweden and with staff and students at UAL to develop new work and research on questions of writing and the image’.

 

Dr Joe Graham, who this year joined the BA(Hons) Drawing team at Falmouth as Lecturer, delivered a paper at the 2016 iJADE (International Journal of Art & Design Education) conference, this year themed ‘Drawing’ and held at the University of Chester. The iJADE journal is published by NSEAD (National Society for Education in Art & Design), and the conference was entirely geared around pedagogical discussion of drawing used by communities within Art & Design Education. Among the keynote speakers was Simon Betts, External Examiner to Falmouth.

Papers spanned a wide variety of topics, demonstrating the value of Drawing to a range of disciplines far beyond art and design. Joe’s paper, titled Autonomic Drawing: Postphenomenological Drawing Research discussed his latest research from a pedagogical standpoint, describing the (phenomenological) method of variational practice as it is used within his work.

Joe demonstrated the application of the practice with the aid of nine A3 graph paper drawings, produced specifically to test this method, and explains, ‘The method of variational practice is used to seek invariant (essential) forms of understanding from within a variety of work presented for display. When used in combination with observational drawing, it renders the drawings sensible as ‘data’ i.e. results. This means the more fluid question of what drawing ‘records’ (re-presents) can be decided on an empirical basis. This outcome has useful pedagogical implications’.

 

Dr Catrin Morgan, Senior Lecturer on MA Illustration: Authorial Practice, delivered a paper at the International Illustration Symposium at Edinburgh College of Art. The conference was titled ‘Shaping the View: Understanding Landscape Through Illustration’.

Shaping the View: Understanding Landscape through Illustration

Catrin’s paper, The Myth of Reportage Illustration, explored ideas of authenticity and mark making in reportage illustration. Her paper was grouped within the panel, ‘Landscape as metaphor’, and examined the way in which Illustrators are increasingly being hired to report on and represent communities in crisis (communities in Syria, people living in refugee camps and endangered or destabilised communities for example).

Catrin explains, ‘I am concerned with the ethical implications of aesthetic choice made by these illustrators and what it means as a creative practitioner to report back on the lives of other communities. What voice do we use to do this? How might we choose to foreground our own presence in the situation we are depicting? Are there a set of aesthetic conventions that are establishing themselves as the language of authenticity?

Being critical of and asking questions about how artists address challenges faced by communities is vital to ensuring that the role that illustrators (as creative practitioners) play in society is truly valuable and useful. I am concerned that all areas of illustrative practice are interrogated critically, particularly those that have the social and political relevance to vulnerable communities’.

Among examples Catrin discussed were Anna Cattermole, who works with communities in Cornwall, Gill Gibbon who draws at arms fairs and Olivier Kuglar and George Butler who have reported on various communities internationally.

Plague of Diagrams at The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

Falmouth School of Art Senior Lecturer Neil Chapman and Course Coordinator Gillian Wylde were among contributors to Plague of Diagrams at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The exhibition and programme of performances, talks and discussions concerned the relationships between diagrammatic practices and thought in different disciplines. In particular, the event explored the function and use of diagrams in art as expanded diagrammatic practice beyond the graphic presentation of information.

Contributors: David Burrows, Rachel Cattle & Jenna Collins, Neil Chapman & Gillian Wylde, Ami Clarke, Richard Cochrane, Andrew Conio, John Cussans, Benedict Drew, English Heretic, Nikolaus Gansterer, Joey Holder, Dean Kenning, Christoph Lueder, Stine Ljungdalh, Adelheid Mers, Mike Nelson, Paul O’Kane, David Osbaldeston, Plastique Fantastique, Patricia Reed, John Russell, Erica Scourti, Andy Sharp, Kamini Vellodi, Martin Westwood and Carey Young.

Watch now on YouTube: Click here

Observations – drawings by Falmouth School of Art Staff

Observations – an exhibition of drawings by staff of Falmouth School of Art

Reflecting the ways in which observational drawing, often combined with memory, imagination and invention, informs a range of practice.

Selected from an open submission by staff of Falmouth School of Art’s courses, staff exhibiting are: Gemma Anderson, Claire Armitage, Simon Averill, Neil Chapman, Jane Chetwynd, Mark Foreman, Glad Fryer, Becky Haughton, Ashley Hold, Phil Naylor, Isolde Pullum, Jesse Leroy Smith, Mark Surridge, Roger Towndrow, Virginia Verran, Lucy Willow and Gillian Wylde.

  

02-12 February, Monday to Friday 10am – 4pm, the Project Space, Falmouth Campus – open to the public

CAFÉ MORTE presents: Lost For Words, Exhibition 6-10 January

CAFÉ MORTE presents: Lost For Words

FALMOUTH UNIVERSITY PROJECT SPACE (Falmouth Campus)

6-10 January 10am-4pm (Private View 6 January 16-9pm)

Lost for Words is a culmination of the work of Café Morte to engage in and encourage discussion around the subject of death with a wider community of artists, curators and healthcare professionals.  It has been curated with the intention of creating a thoughtful and contemplative space for both artists and audience to reflect on their own personal interpretations of death and how it is represented in art and literature. The works are varied, expressed through a variety of different media and address through physical means the often unthinkable concept of absence and loss.

Exhibiting artists: Bram Arnold, Ed Ashby-Hater, Nicola Bealing, Regan Boyce, Neil Chapman, Esther Cooper-Gittens, Kerry Foster, Glad Fryer, Tanith Gould, Joanna Hulin, Sasha Knezevic, Angela Lloyd, Polly Maxwell, Neil McLeod, Janet McEwan, Lucille Moore, Eloise Pilbeam, Viola Qian, Andrew Ross, Edward Rowe, Jessica Russell, Carolyn Shapiro, Chris Slesser, Kate Southworth, Tabitha Tohill-Reid & Joshua Green, Virginia Verran, Belinda Whiting, Lucy Willow, Sandi Williams, Gillian Wylde.

CAFE MORTE is a pop up research group established at Falmouth University in 2014.  Inspired by the recent surge of death cafes across Europe, our aim is to identify themes and ideas relating to death and dying, mourning, transience, ritual and how these translate into contemporary art practice.

Café Morte’s Lost for Words exhibition is a collaborative project with MOTH, a research group which, through the discipline of Graphic Design, explores visual language associated with death and end-of-life experiences – creating visual ‘toolkits’ (analogue and digital) as devices for change in attitudes, conventions and context surrounding death issues.

You may also be interested in:

MOTH Talks: In the face of death – 8 January 2016 | Falmouth Campus, Fox 4 Lecture Theatre, 1.30pm-5pm

Guest Speakers:

Stephen Cave |Writer, critic and philosopher, Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization (2013, Biteback)

Prof. Tony Walter | Head of the CDAS, (Centre for Death and Society at Bath University) Sociologist

Joseph Macleod | Designer, Closure Experiences

 

Fine Art Lecturers published in E.R.O.S.

BA(Hons) Fine Art Lecturers Neil Chapman and Gillian Wylde have had work published in E.R.O.S. Issue 7, ‘The Interior’.

E.R.O.S. is the journal of Eros Press. It is published biannually and is dedicated to the subject of desire. It covers a wide range of fields, drawing together often disparate disciplines under the auspices of each issue’s theme.

http://erosjournal.co.uk

Image: Richard Wentworth

Unsettled

Unsettled, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, words and actions by 11 artists and writers. All are artists and writers are all lecturers in BA(Hons) Fine Art at Falmouth University – Simon Averill, Neil Chapman, Glad Fryer, Mercedes Kemp, Neil McLeod, Kate Southworth, Mark Surridge, Roger Towndrow, Lucy Willow, Lisa Wright, and Gillian Wylde.

September 5 – September 18, Enys House & Gardens, St Gluvias, TR10 9LB Penryn, Cornwall

https://www.facebook.com/UnsettledArtEnys