Visiting Professor Hew Locke exhibiting in New York and returning to Falmouth

Ahead of his forthcoming lecture at Falmouth, multimedia artist Hew Locke, has a solo exhibition opening at the PPOW Gallery,  New York, 11 October to 10 November. Patriots is the gallery’s first exhibition with Hew; they also showed works by him at their stand at Frieze London this month.

Serpent of the Nile, C-type photo 30” x 40”, from the series How Do You Want Me?

Detail of Golden Horde 2, mixed media sculpture, 273cm high

An alumnus of Fine Art at Falmouth, Hew returns to Falmouth School of Art on 14 November for the final visit of his Visiting Professor tenure. He will deliver his lecture titled ‘Identity and Autobiography’ and will also work with BA(Hons) Fine Art students.

Registration for Hew’s lecture is free, but required: Register here.

Locke’s investigation of the display of power includes areas such as royal and swagger portraiture, coats-of-arms, public statuary, trophies, financial documents, weaponry and costume. Maritime imagery and symbolism has been a constant in his work, along with reflections on his upbringing in Guyana.

Born in Edinburgh, Locke spent his formative years in Georgetown, Guyana, before returning to the UK to study. He received his BA(Hons) Fine Art in 1988 from Falmouth, then an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London in 1994.

Locke has work in the collections including Tate, the British Museum, the V&A, Brooklyn Museum and the Perez Art Museum Miami. He has had solo shows in public galleries in the UK and the USA, and has taken part in Biennials in Hangzhou, China; Kochi, India; Prospect3, Miami; Guangzhou, China; Valencia, Spain and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Overland, by Visiting Professor Graham Rawle – in bookstores now!

Overland, the new book from our rather brilliant Visiting Professor of Illustration Graham Rawle, is now out, published by Chatto & Windus.

We can heartily recommend anything by Graham, so if you’re new to his work, you’re in for a treat – Overland is available online from many sellers, or from your local independent bookstore! Scroll down for more… 

 

 

Welcome to Overland! Where the California sun shines down on synthetic grass and plastic oranges bedeck the trees all year round. Steam billows gently from the chimney tops and the blue tarpaulin lake is open for fishing…

Hollywood set-designer George Godfrey has been called on to do his patriotic duty and he doesn’t believe in half-measures. If he is going to hide an American aircraft plant from the threat of Japanese aerial spies he has an almighty job on his hands. He will need an army of props and actors to make the Lockheed factory vanish behind the semblance of a suburban town. Every day, his “Residents” climb through a trapdoor in the factory roof to shift model cars, shop for imaginary groceries and rotate fake sheep in felt-green meadows.

Overland is a beacon for the young women labouring below it: Queenie, dreaming of movie stardom while welding sheet metal; Kay, who must seek refuge from the order to intern “All Persons of Japanese Ancestry”. Meanwhile, George’s right-hand Resident, Jimmy, knows that High Command aren’t at all happy with the camouflage project…

With George so bewitched by his own illusion, might it risk confusing everybody – not just the enemy?
Overland is a book like no other — to be read in landscape format. Based on true events, it is a novel where characters’ dreams and desires come down to earth with more than a bump, confronting the hardships of life during wartime. As surreal and playful as it is affecting and unsettling, no-one other than Graham Rawle could have created it.

Off to Venice!…

Falmouth School of Art has regularly made the Venice Biennale a study visit destination. This week a group of students from BA(Hons) Fine Art and BA(Hons) Drawing are travelling together to spend four days at the 57th Biennale, staying in the heart of the city…

Folly, by Phyllida Barlow at the British Pavilion, Venice, 2017. Photo: Ruth Clark © British Council. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Falmouth has other connections at this year’s event – our Visiting Professor of Fine Art, Hew Locke and fellow Falmouth alumna Libita Clayton are both exhibiting work at this year’s Diaspora Pavilion.

2017 Falmouth graduate Abbie Hunt, who was supported by Falmouth School of Art and the British Council to undertake a British Council Venice Fellowship, has been in touch with current students to make recommendations to the group, based on her experience of working at the Biennale for a month.

The Venice study visit is one of a number of optional overseas trips offered to undergraduate students of Falmouth School of Art during their studies. BA(Hons) Drawing have also in recent years visited Amsterdam, and BA(Hons) Fine Art have previously visited Berlin.

First look at this autumn’s Guest Speaker programme…

This autumn we welcome five outstanding Guest Speakers to deliver lectures to students of Falmouth School of Art. Speakers include return visits from our two Visiting Professors, and an exciting event in association with the Groundwork project. Places are available at each for members of the public, our arts partners across the region and our alumni.

Places limited, registration required. Click here for more details and links to registration.

FSA Visiting Professor, Hew Locke, exhibiting in Bremen and Miami

Hew Locke, our Visiting Professor of Fine Art, has two new projects; ‘Cui Bono’ in Bremen, and ‘Reversal of Fortune’ in Miami.

Cui Bono installed at Bremen Rathaus. Photo ©Indra Khanna 2017

‘Cui Bono’ is a 4 metre long ship that Hew has created.  The work was commissioned by Kunsthalle Bremen and installed at Rathaus Bremen, Germany, as part of the exhibition ‘The Blind Spot: Bremen and Art in the Colonial Era’.  A video on the installation can be found here.

Detail of Cui Bono ©Hew Locke & DACS

The installation in the Town Hall’s upper gallery is an invitation to grapple with Bremen’s maritime commercial and colonial history.  The exhibition takes place in Bremen Town Hall, Germany, from 5 August to 19 November 2017.  For more information on the project click here.

 

‘Reversal of Fortune’ is a new commission for Fringe Projects Miami, in an empty jewellery store in downtown Miami’s historic Art Deco Moderne DuPont Building.  The exterior of the installation is viewable from SE 2nd Ave, 24 hours a day, from 8 September 2017 to 31 January 2018.

Chinese Imperil Gold Loan 10 ©Hew Locke & Hales Gallery

Since the financial crash of 2008 Hew Locke has been buying original antique share certificates from old companies, and painting directly on them.  In ‘Reversal of Fortune’ fifteen have been selected and printed up to create an installation on the facade, and inside the vault, of an empty store.  He has chosen these defunct shares sometimes for their interesting history, and sometimes for their beauty.  He highlights historical and economic cycles. Commerce has its’ ups and downs, yet it is human nature to be optimistic, to continue to trade.  New-born companies garland their shares with confident typography and classical motifs implying stability and worth.  Figures representative of the local population in the areas in which the companies operated are sometimes seen breaking-through.  These are silent witnesses, those who paid the most to create the wealth without receiving the benefit.  Locke’s series of shares is also a wry acknowledgement of the commodity value of contemporary art.

Falmouth’s Visiting Professor programme brings international speakers of the highest calibre to the university to share their knowledge, insights and experiences with students, staff and wider public.  Visiting Professors are appointed for three years, delivering both public lectures and working with our students during their annual visit.

 

Visiting Professor Graham Rawle to give inaugural lecture at Falmouth

(c) Graham Rawle, from The Wizard of Oz

Author, artist and designer Graham Rawle will give his inaugural lecture as Falmouth School of Art’s Visiting Professor of Illustration on 22 March 2017.

Internationally admired, Rawle is one of the UK’s most interesting and original visual communicators, known by many for his long running ‘Lost Consonants’ strip, which appeared in the Guardian from 1990. A writer and collage artist whose visual work incorporates illustration, design, photography and installation, Rawle has a strong following for his eagerly-awaited published books, which include The Card (shortlisted for the 2013 Writer’s Guild Award), Graham Rawle’s Wonder Book of Fun and Diary of an Amateur Photographer. His collaged novel Woman’s World, created entirely from fragments of found text clipped from vintage women’s magazines won wide critical acclaim, described by The Times as ‘a work of genius…the most wildly original novel produced in this country in the past decade.’ His reinterpretation of The Wizard of Oz won Book of the Year and Best Illustrated Trade Book at the 2009 British Book Design and Production Awards. Alongside these works, Rawle has produced regular series for The Observer, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine and The Times.

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Graham Rawle. Photo credit: Jenny Lewis

Rawle’s flair and passion for education has been recognised through honorary appointments and awards. As a previous contributor to both Falmouth School of Art’s guest speaker programme and its Illustration Forum he already has a strong interest in Illustration here. Of his appointment in 2016, Rawle said, “It’s a great honour for me to have been made Visiting Professor of Illustration at Falmouth University. I have long admired the School of Art’s commitment to nurturing original and individual thinking in art and design. My own research in sequential design and visual narrative spans across illustration, literature and, more recently, film. I’m interested in how the principles of storytelling, particularly three-act structure, can be employed in the development of design strategies across a wide range of disciplines. I look forward to finding ways of making connections with students, staff and researchers at Falmouth”.

Rawle has established himself as a ground-breaking research-led writer, illustrator and designer, evidenced through the range and depth of key scholarly texts that cite and analyse his work. He teaches on the MA Sequential Design/Illustration and MA Arts and Design by Independent Project courses at Brighton and in 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate for Services to Design from Norwich University of the Arts.

Graham Rawle’s lecture at our Falmouth Campus is free, but registration is required, as seats are limited: Click here to register through our Eventbrite page.

Find out more about our BA(Hons) Illustration and MA Illustration: Authorial Practice.

 

Falmouth School of Art Guest Speakers announced for spring 2017

The Falmouth School of Art Guest Speaker Programme resumes in February with a series of events featuring acclaimed artists and illustrators…

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Artist Joey Holder starts the season with a talk on 8 February. Working with scientific and technical experts, Holder makes immersive, multi-media installations that explore the limits of the human and how we experience non-human, natural and technological forms. Mixing elements of biology, nanotechnology and natural history against computer programme interfaces, screen savers and measuring devices, she suggests the impermanence and inter-changeability of these apparently contrasting and oppositional worlds: ‘everything is a mutant and a hybrid’. For a recent exhibition – against the backdrop of the emergent field of computational biology and the Google Genomics project – Holder invented ‘Ophiux’, a speculative pharmaceutical company, imagining its use of genetic sequencing equipment and biological machines to collect data from humans and to sample data from other organisms. She explains: ‘It seems as if everything has become a branch of computer science, even our own bodies probed, imaged, modelled and mapped: re-drawn as digital information’.

On 15 February artist Chantal Joffe will be in conversation with Falmouth School of Art’s Director Dr. Ginny Button. Joffe’s figurative paintings usually depict women or girls, from catwalk models, porn actresses and literary heroines to mothers, children and loved ones. Her paintings question expectations of what a feminist art might be, often pointing to how appearances are constructed – whether in a fashion magazine or the family album – and to the choreography of display. Sometimes shown in groups but recently in iconic portraits, her images of women draw loosely on a range of sources such as photographs, magazines and even reflections in the mirror, using distortion to make her subjects seem more real. Her paintings achieve a psychological and emotional force, prompting reflection on ever-changing human relations and the endless complexity of looking.

1 March sees a return to Falmouth of Illustrator, author and Falmouth Honorary Fellow Posy Simmonds. Simmonds’ work includes many books for adults and children, including Literary Life, Lulu and the Flying Babies and Fred, the film of which was nominated for an Oscar. Working across a range of formats and contexts, Simmonds is probably best-known for her series of weekly cartoon strips commissioned by the Guardian since 1977. Gemma Bovery, her reworking of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary into a satirical tale of English expatriates in France appeared first in the Guardian before publication as a graphic novel in 1999. Acclaimed by the critics for its wit and wickedly sharp observation, it was made into a feature film in 2014. Her prize-winning graphic novel Tamara Drewe also became a very successful film, directed by Stephen Frears.

Falmouth School of Art’s new Visiting Professor of Illustration delivers his inaugural lecture on 22 March. Graham Rawle is an internationally admired writer and collage artist whose visual work incorporates illustration, design, photography and installation. He has produced regular series for The Observer, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine and The Times and among his published books are The Card, The Wonder Book of Fun, Lying Doggo, and Diary of an Amateur Photographer. His collaged novel Woman’s World, created entirely from fragments of found text clipped from vintage women’s magazines won wide critical acclaim, described by The Times as ‘a work of genius…the most wildly original novel produced in this country in the past decade.’ He is perhaps best known to some for his long running ‘Lost Consonants’ strip, which first appeared in the Guardian in 1990.

We finish the 2016-17 Guest Speaker Programme with a TateTalk at Falmouth by Fine Art alumna (2001) Jessica Warboys. Warboys works across painting, performance, film and sculpture. Her talk is in association with Tate St. Ives, which in March will present a major solo show of Warboys’ work. The show will feature films, sculptures, large scale paintings, and Sea Paintings commissioned for the show and created along the Cornish coast. In her Sea Paintings, Warboys explores the connection between painting and performance, submerging damp, folded canvas scattered with coloured pigments into the sea, and allowing the movement of the waves to ‘paint’ the canvas.  Her work is informed by personal or collective memories – hystorical, mythical or fictional. Warboys currently lives and works in Suffolk and Berlin and has enjoyed wide international exhibition success, including solo exhibitions. Her work was recently included in British Art Show 8.

Registration is required for these events, and is open now: http://falmouthschoolofart.eventbrite.co.uk

See all Falmouth University events on our website: www.falmouth.ac.uk/events

Hew Locke in conversation with Alex Schady at the Tate Modern, London

Falmouth alumnus and current Visiting Professor of Fine Art, Hew Locke, will be speaking about his work in conversation with Alex Schady at the Tate Modern, London, at 4pm this Monday 9 January 2017.

Installation shot of Locke’s solo exhibition ‘Beyond the Sea Wall’, Hayles Gallery London, 2014

This talk is part of the Central Saint Martins ‘This is An Art School’ in Tate Exchange.  The public are invited to enrol in the temporary art school and explore what the future of arts education might look like.  The art school is created by students, staff and alumni of Central Saint Martins.  The venue is Switch House, Level 5 in the Tate Modern, and the art school is open from 9 – 15 January 2017 from 12.00pm – 6.00pm each day.

Falmouth’s Visiting Professor of Fine Art, Hew Locke, exhibits in XIII Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador

Exhibited for the first time, Locke’s bill-board-sized print The Canal Interocéanique de Panama will be applied directly to the side of a building at the junction of Vargas Machucha and Calle Larga, Cuenca, Ecuador. This work is part of his on-going series Share, investigating the cycles and histories of international finance and trade, where Locke works directly onto actual antique share certificates.  

Hew Locke joined Falmouth as Visiting Professor of Fine Art in 2016, an appointment that will see Locke work with Falmouth for three years delivering both public lectures and working with students during his annual visits.  Locke’s inaugural visit as Visiting Professor took place earlier this month and we are very much looking forward to the next.

 

Visiting Professor appointments at Falmouth School of Art

Falmouth’s Visiting Professor programme brings international speakers of the highest calibre to the university to share their knowledge, insights and experiences with students, staff and wider public. Visiting Professors are appointed for three years, delivering both public lectures and working with our students during their annual visit. The Falmouth School of Art is delighted to announce new appointments this autumn of the artist Hew Locke as Visiting Professor of Fine Art and illustrator and writer Graham Rawle as Visiting Professor of Illustration.

Hew Locke, 2016, by Charlie Littlewood

Hew Locke is one of Falmouth’s most celebrated alumni and he’s keen to revive his special connection with the university: ‘I am very much looking forward to taking up this appointment, and to travelling down to Falmouth once again. My time at the School of Art was an important part of my career, and experiences I had there still resonate in my work today.  I hope in (my) turn to be able to make my own positive contribution to students’ development over the next three years.’

Born in Edinburgh, Locke spent his formative years in Georgetown, Guyana, before returning to the UK to study. He received his BA(Hons) Fine Art in 1988 from Falmouth, then an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London in 1994. His investigation of the display of power includes royal and swagger portraiture, coats-of-arms, public statuary, trophies, financial documents, weaponry and costume.

The Nameless (2010), Installation view, Hew Locke. Photo courtesy Hales Gallery.

 

Maritime imagery and symbolism have been ongoing preoccupations in his work, along with reflections on his upbringing in Guyana. Locke has work in numerous collections including Tate, the British Museum, the V&A, Brooklyn Museum and the Perez Art Museum Miami. He has had solo shows in public galleries in the UK and the USA, and has taken part in Biennials in Hangzhou, China; Kochi, India; Prospect3, Miami; Guangzhou, China; Valencia, Spain and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Locke’s inaugural Professorial Lecture, for which registration is now open, takes place on Wednesday 16 November, 2016.

Graham Rawle. Photo credit: Jenny Lewis

Internationally admired, Graham Rawle is one of the UK’s most interesting and original visual communicators, perhaps best known for his long running ‘Lost Consonants’ strip, which first appeared in the Guardian in 1990. His flair and passion for education has also been recognised through honorary appointments and awards. As a previous contributor to both Falmouth School of Art’s guest speaker programme and its Illustration Forum he already has a strong interest in Illustration here.

Of his appointment, Rawle says, “It’s a great honour for me to have been made Visiting Professor of Illustration at Falmouth University. I have long admired the School of Art’s commitment to nurturing original and individual thinking in art and design. My own research in sequential design and visual narrative spans across illustration, literature and, more recently, film. I’m interested in how the principles of storytelling, particularly three-act structure, can be employed in the development of design strategies across a wide range of disciplines. I look forward to finding ways of making connections with students, staff and researchers at Falmouth”.

(C) Graham Rawle, Woman’s World, close-up

Rawle is a writer and collage artist whose visual work incorporates illustration, design, photography and installation. He has produced regular series for The Observer, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine and The Times and among his published books are The Card, The Wonder Book of Fun, Lying Doggo, and Diary of an Amateur Photographer. His collaged novel Woman’s World, created entirely from fragments of found text clipped from vintage women’s magazines won wide critical acclaim, described by The Times as ‘a work of genius…the most wildly original novel produced in this country in the past decade.’ His reinterpretation of The Wizard of Oz won the Best Illustrated Trade Book Award as well as 2009 Book of the Year at the British Book Design Awards. The Card, was shortlisted for the 2013 Writers’ Guild Award for fiction.

Rawle has established himself as a ground-breaking research-led writer, illustrator and designer, evidenced through the range and depth of key scholarly texts that cite and analyse his work. He teaches on the MA Sequential Design/Illustration and MA Arts and Design by Independent Project courses at Brighton and in 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate for Services to Design from Norwich University of the Arts. He will give his inaugural Professorial Lecture at Falmouth in March 2017.

Falmouth School of art Guest Speakers announced for autumn 2016

We’re excited to announce the line-up of Guest Speakers for our autumn programme, commencing Wednesday, 28 September. All events are free, but booking is required, as spaces are limited. To register for any of these events, use our Eventbrite page: https://falmouthschoolofart.eventbrite.co.uk

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We start with Alan Kane, on Wednesday 28 September at 5pm, whose installations and photographs often question the distinction between high art and everyday creativity, often bringing commonplace objects into artistic contexts. His most celebrated work is Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK (2000-5), co-curated with Jeremy Deller. The archive brought together drawing, film, performance, costume, decoration, political opinion, humour and objects in a celebration of the diversity and richness of Britain’s folk art. Life Class: Today’s Nude (2009) involved broadcasting a life drawing class nationwide on Channel 4, sharing with daytime TV audiences the esoteric world of the artist’s studio.

On 12 October we’re joined by James Binning, of the Turner Prize-winning collective Assemble. Assemble are based in London and began working together in 2010. Encompassing the fields of art, architecture and design, Assemble’s practice seeks to address disconnection between the public and the process by which places are made. Their working practice is interdependent and collaborative, actively involving the public as participants and collaborators. Assemble’s 2015 Turner Prize winning project in Liverpool involved the refurbishment of a group of houses in Toxteth, Liverpool, worn down by neglect. Some residents had began the process of regeneration – planting gardens and painting murals – and the community land trust that now runs the neighbourhood brought Assemble on board. Binning completed his Foundation in Art and Design at Falmouth in 2006.

In association with CAST and The Cornwall Workshop, Ruth Ewan is our guest on 19 November. Ruth’s work includes events, installation, writing and printed matter. Her practice explores overlooked histories of radical, political and utopian thought, bringing to light specific ideas in order to question how we might live today. Always engaging with others, her projects involve a process of focused research and close collaboration –  recent projects have led her to develop context specific projects within schools, prisons, hospitals, libraries, universities, Parliament and London Underground.

On 2 November, we welcome Tania Kovats. Kovats’ sculptures, large-scale installations and temporal works explore our experience and understanding of landscape. Best known for her large-scale works in the public realm, Kovats produced Tree (2009), a wafer thin longitudinal section of the entire structure of a 200-hundred-year old oak, permanently inserted into the ceiling of the Natural History Museum. For Rivers (2012), she collected water from one hundred rivers around the British Isles. Oceans (2014), explored her preoccupation with the sea. Kovats’ interest in drawing is reflected in works including British Isles and All the Islands of All the Oceans. She is also author of The Drawing Book – a Survey of drawing: the primary means of expression (2007), and Course Director for MA Drawing at Wimbledon College of Art, London.

Finally this term, Falmouth alumnus Hew Locke returns, this time as our Visiting Professor of Fine Art, an appointment that we are delighted he has accepted for the next three years. Locke’s investigation of the display of power includes areas such as royal and swagger portraiture, coats-of-arms, public statuary, trophies, financial documents, weaponry and costume. He states: ‘This …(work is) essentially about power – who had it, who has it and who desires it’.

 

 

Former Visiting Professor Deborah Levy shortlisted for Man Booker Prize

Falmouth School of Art is delighted to congratulate Deborah Levy on being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016, for her novel Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton).

Levy served as Visiting Professor of Writing in Illustration to Falmouth School of Art between 2012 and 2015, delivering a series of well attended and thought-provoking lectures to students and the public.

Levy works across fiction, performance and visual culture. She trained at Dartington College of Arts, leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their “intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination”, including Pax, Clam, Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Macbeth – False Memories, all published in Levy: Plays 1 (Methuen).

Her novels include the 2012 Man Booker Prize shortlisted, Swimming Home, translated into 14 languages, Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, The Unloved (all reissued by Penguin), Billy and Girl (Bloomsbury). Her 2012 short story collection Black Vodka was short listed for The Frank O’Connor Award and the BBC International Short Story Award. Her long form essay, ‘Things I Don’t Want to Know’, a response to George Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Why I Write’ and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is published in hard back by Notting Hill Editions, paperback by Penguin.

Bookmakers William Hill have declared Levy 2/1 favourite to win the prize.

2016 Guardian interview with Deborah Levy

The 2016 Man Booker shortlist:

The Sellout by Paul Beatty (Oneworld)

Hot Milk by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton)

His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Contraband)

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (Vintage)

All That Man Is by David Szalay (Vintage)

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien (Granta)

More about the shortlist

Falmouth School of Art Lectures – Spring 2016 schedule announced

Following  a vibrant, varied, and well attended autumn season of lectures, from Sam Thorne, Simon Fujiwara, Elly Thomas, Hew Locke, Gavin Turk, Krijn de Koning and Conrad Shawcross, The Falmouth School of Art is pleased to present forthcoming events for spring and summer 2016…

Flash in the Metropolitan 2007, 16mm film still, © Nashashibi/Skaer

The series re-starts on 3 February 2016, with Lucy Skaer and Rosalind Nashashibi, who collaborate as Nashashibi/Skaer. The event is a Tate Talk, in association with Tate St. Ives, with whom Nashashibi/Skaer are currently curating an exhibition which will feature a series of collaboratively made short films.

On 10 February Michael Salu will talk about his practice as an award-winning creative director, writer, art editor/critic and occasional artist. Salu is formerly creative director and art editor of Granta Publications.

Graham Gussin continues the series on 17 February; an artist who uses a wide range of media, including texts, drawings, film, video, sound and installation, to explore the perception of time, space and scale as an organic link between the pieces, the viewer and the exhibition space.

Yiadom-Boakye, No Patience for Juju, 2015, Oil on Canvas, 200 x 130 x 3.7cm, 78.7 x 51.2 x 1.5 inches
Courtesy: Corvi-Mora, London, and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

 

We welcome artist Lindsay Seers on 2 March, painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye on 9 March, and filmmaker Ben Rivers on 16 March in association with The Cornwall Workshop and the School of Film and Television at Falmouth. The 2016 series concludes with a lecture on 18 May by Jessica Warboys. Yiadom-Boakye, Rivers and Warboys are all Falmouth alumni, and we look forward to welcoming them back to talk about their work, practice development and successes.

Events are all free, but booking required. Booking for all events is now open, and some tickets for each event are made available to our alumni and members of the public.

To book: http://falmouthschoolofart.eventbrite.com

 

 

ELLA-STRATED: Hew Locke at Falmouth

(C) Ella Kasperowicz

Hew Locke entertained and inspired his Falmouth School of Art audience through his witty remarks and diverse range of work on Wednesday 4th November 2015. Visual take by BA(Hons) Illustration student, Ella Kasperowicz.

Artist Simon Fujiwara leads seminar for Fine Art students

Following his lecture to a packed house the night before, Simon Fujiwara, Falmouth University’s Visiting Professor of Art, led a seminar of a group of second and third year BA(Hons) Fine Art students. Second year students Jo Clarkson and Rachael Coward share their responses to that session.

Simon Fujiwara by Anna Partington (Cartel Photos)

Jo Clarkson, Student, 2^nd year BA(Hons) Fine Art

In the past I have thoroughly enjoyed three of Simon Fujiwara’s talks at Falmouth  and also visited his solo exhibition at St Ives so it was a real pleasure to meet him in person.

It was a unique experience.  Kinda like a cross between an art tutorial, careers guidance and group counselling session – guided by a captivating, yet pointed and penetrating, storyteller, highly skilled in investigating and revealing!  All in 2 hours! It was quite intense.

I left feeling I am my work, I must choose my truth/fiction carefully, find my purpose, investigate further, filter, edit, refine, play and enjoy!

From his comments in his previous talks I also reckon Simon’s Mum would be a very interesting and fun person to meet!

 

 

Rachael Coward, Student, 2^nd year BA(Hons) Fine Art

The discussion began with the physical means of artistic process, and what defines an idea as worthy of further artistic endeavour…

Does the world need this work? And do the processes involved in making the work affect the balance of the world?

We ourselves as artists are starting points. We are flawed in that we cannot examine every aspect of our lives; it would become a full time occupation in itself which could easily become obsolete as technological advances outdate our work. We are, in effect, vessels; information passes through us, and it is up to us to filter and process it; ultimately finding a way to operate in the information-rich world we now inhabit. From this we can conclude that the notion of ‘the self’ becomes an empty idea, as we are in fact agents for work, engaging and encouraging ideas that come from outside sources.

However the interplay of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ affects how our work is received; and it begins with the claim of being an ‘artist’. Without this self-proclamation, the outside world would not react to us, and it is only because of that statement that the outside world acknowledges what we make as ‘art’.

But does this label of ‘artist’ need to be visible? Do we identify as artists through our appearance? In some circumstances the ‘look’ of a person can occupy a space as much as a piece of work; but is this the point, or should we as artists remain invisible? This idea of uniforms or costuming revolves around the idea of ‘belonging’. We as humans understand the safety behind a unified group of individuals, yet we are ‘lost’ in our own sense of visual identity. Outer appearances don’t directly link to beliefs or attitudes anymore; therefore anyone can look like an ‘artist’. But when we consider something ‘lost’, we must also consider them when they are ‘found’ – from this deliberation of two passive states, the conclusion was drawn that even if we are lost, it isn’t a bad thing. Quite often when we are lost is when the most exciting or unexpected things happen.

An artist is a factory. Part of the whole process of making art is coming to conclusions within ourselves, and using means of communication to present these conclusions to an audience.

We can play with the world and also take part in it.

Falmouth Alumni Hew Locke marks sealing of the Magna Carta

Hew Locke, an Alumnus of Falmouth School of Art, has recently opened a permanent artwork on 15 June 2015 commissioned by Surrey County Council and the National Trust at Runnymede, Surrey, UK.

Hew Locke with The Jurors, Photo Tom D Morgan 2015

The Jurors is a permanent piece installed to mark the 800 years since the sealing of the magna carta which took place at Runnymede.  The installation, which visitors are encouraged to sit on and gather, discuss or debate around, consists of 12 bronze chairs, each individually decorated with ‘panels of images and symbols relating to past and ongoing struggles for freedom, rule of law and equal rights’.

To find out more about the artwork a specially created webpage has been set up and can be viewed here: http://artatrunnymede.com/

Cornelia Parker unveils Magna Carta embroidery at the British Library

A 13 metre-long embroidery by British artist Cornelia Parker is now on display at the British Library.

Stitched by over 200 carefully selected individuals, many of whom have a connection to civil liberties and the law including almost 40 prisoners, the artwork depicts the Magna Carta Wikipedia page as it appeared last year on the document’s 799^th birthday.

Cornelia Parker with a fragment of Magna Carta (An Embroidery) in the British Library (credit Tony Antoniou).

Among the contributors, each stitching words or phrases significant to them, are Director of Liberty Shami Chakrabarti (stitching ‘Charter of Liberties’), Baroness Doreen Lawrence (‘justice’, ‘denial’ and ‘delay’), Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (‘user’s manual’), Edward Snowden (‘liberty’) and Jarvis Cocker (‘Common People’).

Jarvis Cocker and Cornelia Parker find his phrase ‘Common People’ on Magna Carter (An Embroidery). Photograph by Joseph Turp

‘I wanted to create a portrait of our age’, says Cornelia Parker. ‘All these people have their own opinions about democracy today and I thought carefully about the words they should stitch. For instance, Baroness Warsi, Eliza Manningham-Buller, Julian Assange and numerous prisoners have all stitched the word ‘freedom’, but all have different relationships to it’.

Cornelia Parker at work on Magna Carta (An Embroidery), Photograph by Joseph Turp

The bulk of the text of the Wikipedia page has been embroidered in various prisons by inmates under the supervision of Fine Cell Work, a social enterprise that trains prisoners in paid, skilled, creative needlework. The detailed pictures, emblems and logos that punctuate the text have been fashioned by highly accomplished members of the Embroiderers’ Guild, a national charity that promotes and encourages the art of embroidery and related crafts, alongside embroiderers from the Royal School of Needlework and the leading embroidery company Hand & Lock.

‘I love the idea of taking something digital and making it into an analogue, hand-crafted thing’, says Cornelia. ‘I wanted the embroidery to raise questions about where we are now with the principles laid down in the Magna Carta, and about the challenges to all kinds of freedoms that we face in the digital age. Like a Wikipedia article, this embroidery is multi-authored and full of many different voices’.

Magna Carta (An Embroidery) was commissioned by the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford in partnership with the British Library and is part of a major programme of events, exhibitions and digital projects at the Library examining Magna Carta in this 800^th anniversary year.  It runs alongside the Library’s largest ever exhibition Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy (open until 1 September).

On 15 June, exactly 800 years after Magna Carta was sealed, Cornelia Parker, Jimmy Wales and Roly Keating, Chief Executive of the British Library will be in conversation at the Library exploring the ideas behind the artwork.

Magna Carta (An Embroidery) is on display from 15 May to 24 July at the British Library.

Cornelia Parker is Visiting Professor of Fine Art to The Falmouth School of Art at Falmouth University.

Deborah Levy – Professorial Lecture

Visiting Professor of Art, Simon Fujiwara, returns.

The Falmouth School of Art is delighted to welcome back Visiting Professor of Art Simon Fujiwara, for a Professorial lecture.

Fujiwara’s previous lectures at Falmouth have proved very popular with students and staff from across the School, as well as members of the public, and he joins us this year from opening his curated section of the History Is Now exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London.

Whilst in Falmouth, Fujiwara will also work with BA(Hons) Fine Art students.

FSA Lectures Spring/Summer line-up announced

A great line-up to look forward to from January through to May 2015…Booking available online exactly two weeks before each event, from the FSA Eventbrite page – bookmark it now!

 

 

Frieze Talks: Falmouth Visiting Professor Simon Fujiwara and Visiting Lecturer Linder

Visiting Professor of Art, Simon Fujiwara

In this talk (click to listen), artists Simon Fujiwara (Falmouth’s Visiting Professor of Art), and  Linder (Visiting Lecturer to Falmouth and currently an Artist in Residence at Tate St. Ives), participate in a panel discussion titled Feeling Used: The Appropriation of Sexuality.

The discussion, chaired by Paul Clinton (Frieze), also featuring writer Jennifer Doyle, focuses on the slew of recent exhibitions and projects that draw upon queer and alternative sexualities.

Frieze Talks is a programme of keynote lectures, panel debates and discussions, curated by the editors of Frieze.

Deborah Levy returns to Falmouth as Visiting Professor

Falmouth School of Art Professorial Lecture – Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy is a writer working across fiction, performance and visual culture. She trained at Dartington College of Arts, leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their “intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination”, including Pax, Clam, Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Macbeth – False Memories, all published in Levy: Plays 1 (Methuen).

Deborah has written five novels: the 2012 Man Booker Prize shortlisted, Swimming Home, translated into 14 languages, Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, The Unloved (all reissued by Penguin), Billy and Girl (Bloomsbury). Her 2012 short story collection Black Vodka was short listed for The Frank O’Connor Award and the BBC International Short Story Award. Her long form essay, ‘Things I Don’t Want to Know’, a response to George Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Why I Write’ and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is published in hard back by Notting Hill Editions, paperback by Penguin.

For BBC Radio 4, Deborah wrote two acclaimed dramatisations of Freud’s most famous case studies, ‘Dora’ and ‘The Wolfman’. Deborah has lectured at The Freud Musuem, Goethe Institute, Serpentine Gallery, Tate Modern, The Henry Moore Foundation, and The Royal Academy School. She was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991 and AHRB Fellow at The Royal College of Art 2006-9 where she worked with animators and illustrators on a research project titled, ‘The Life of Objects – What Objects Tell Us About Our Secret Lives’. A BBC Radio 3 documentary presented some of this research in a programme titled The Glass Princess.

Deborah will be collaborating with Andrzej Klimowski, Professor of Illustration at the RCA, on a graphic novel for publishers Self Made Hero, working from her short story ‘Star Dust Nation’.

Deborah Levy’s early work is being reissued and has recently been reviewed by Alex Clark in The Guardian.

Wednesday 30 April 2014 5-6pm – Falmouth Campus Lecture Theatre

Artist Cornelia Parker – working with Falmouth Fine Art students

Renowned artist and Turner Prize nominee Cornelia Parker made her third visit to Falmouth University on 26 February, her second since becoming Falmouth School of Art’s Visiting Professor of Fine Art.

Cornelia revealed how she’s often played with the idea of ‘truth to materials’ – something of a mantra during her own art school days – influencing how we might read or interpret the most unlikely materials, from the charred remains of churches, to ink made from pornographic tapes.  

Dr. Ginny Button, Director of The Falmouth School of Art, introduced Cornelia to a capacity audience of students, staff and members of the public, and said afterwards “It was great to welcome Cornelia back to Falmouth. She always creates a buzz and gives us plenty to think about.” 

The following day, Cornelia gave a seminar for final year BA(Hons) Fine Art students.

Last summer, Cornelia spent several hours with graduating students in a crit of their exhibition at The Dye House in Peckham, London. Current third year students are sure to be looking forward to their crit with her at their London post graduation show in summer 2014.