Biographical
Notes on Participants
There are two prongs to Felicity Callard's
current research: 1. The various 'shapes' that anxiety takes, particularly
in relation to the city. She has addressed this by researching the history
of agoraphobia from the 1870s onwards, in terms of the intersection of
urban, psychiatric, psychoanalytic and architectural narratives that describe
fears about entering, traversing and inhabiting public space. This research
has been particularly interested in uncovering male agoraphobic narratives
- a fairly invisible body of work because of the common associations between
femininity and agoraphobia in current medical and lay understandings of
the disorder. 2.The relation between bodies and machines, in particular
fin-de-sicle conceptualisations of the body-machine nexus - particularly
in the pathologies produced by bodies' interactions with machines. More
broadly, she is interested in how current, 'post-modern' visions of this
nexus often return to visions of body-machine interactions most characteristic
of the late nineteenth century, and what is at stake in this often nostalgic
replaying of what is deemed to be so central to our understandings of
the industrialised individual.
Much of Juan Cruz's work has been
concerned with the relationship that places have to the narratives that
might unfold in and around them. Importantly, these narratives include
the act - or performance - of Cruz engaging with these places as an artist:
an identity which he describes himself as 'assuming' when he sets out
to make the work. Cruz has worked with a variety of media including video,
photography, sculpture and installation, but it is the activity of writing
that has most frequently underpinned his practice. Recent solo projects
and exhibitions include: Portrait of a Sculptor, Matt's Gallery
London; Application for Planning Permit, Melbourne Festival. He
has also exhibited at Witte de With, Rotterdam and Serralves Foundation,
Porto. Cruz has been a recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for
Artists 1999/2001 and was Kettle's Yard/Girton College Artist Fellow,
Cambridge 1999/2000. Juan Curz lives in London, is currently a lecturer
at Goldsmiths College, London and is represented by Matt's Gallery, London
and Galeria Elba Benitez, Madrid.
Phil Crang's research addresses questions
of cultural difference and consumer cultures in Britain. This has focused
especially on cultural import of the popularity of so-called 'ethnic'
cuisines, and how they get packaged and presented for the market. Most
recently, this has involved in a project looking at foods and clothing
stylised as South Asian for British markets. Part of this project has
looked at the 'Indian restaurant' as a cultural form in London and in
Bombay / Mumbai. In more abstract terms, he is interested in the 'cultural
geographies' of everyday products or 'commodities': how they come to represent
the differences between peoples and places (constructing visible exhibitions
of 'multiculturalism' and 'exotica'); how these things take on different
meanings in different times and places - both intimate and domestic space
and very big - as things connect together the lives of people (consumers,
designers, producers) distant in both time and space; and what any of
us know about the geographies of everyday objects and products.
Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion have worked in collaboration
since 1993, and during that time have produced a significant body of work
that has been shown widely in the UK and abroad. Their work centres on
the complex relationship that contemporary mankind now has with the 'natural'
world. Dalziel & Scullion have previously exhibited projects at the CCA,
Glasgow, The Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, The Ikon Gallery Birmingham and
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, as well as the
Venice Biennale, Young British Artists in Rome, ACCA, Melbourne and The
Meguro Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Dalziel & Scullion live and work
in Dundee and are represented by Holdsworth Fine Art, London.
Jeremy Deller works with different
communities as a way of exploring and participating in various current
'folk' and popular culture phenomena. This has ranged from the commissioning
of a brass band to play acid house music, and working with elderly people
to produce their own music. He has exhibited widely in the UK and Europe.
Recent exhibitions include Intelligence: New British Art 2000 at
Tate Britain. He has also curated a number of exhibitions including Unconvention
at Centre for Visual Arts, Cardiff (1999). An ongoing project is his collection
of contemporary British folk arts (see folkarchive.co.uk). In 2001 he
produced the performance Battle of Orgreave (commissioned by Artangel),
a 1000 person re-enactment of a clash between police and pickets during
the 1984-5 miners strike. During 2001-2002 he was Capp Street Resident
Artist at the CCAC Wattis Institute of Art in Oakland California. Jeremy
Deller currently lives in London.
Vandana Desai is Senior Lecturer in
the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway. Her research interests are
in slum housing, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), gender, social
capital and community participation in India. She has worked on NGOs in
Bombay exploring the meaning and scope of community participation, the
potential benefits for the actors involved, practical obstacles, shared
responsibilities and related questions. Her recent research addresses
and evaluates the social and economic impact of economic liberalisation
and globalisation on the urban poor women in India. The main focus of
this work is the changing role of women and the subtle strategies they
adopt to cope in this changing environment, the changing dynamics of the
household relations and the informal networks and organisations that have
been formed encouraging the participation of women in both informal and
formal politics. This work is being piloted through the British Council
Higher Education Link Scheme with Mother Teresa Women's University, Kodaikanal,
India.
Felix Driver is Professor of Human
Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of
Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Blackwell,
2001). He is particularly interested in tracing the histories of geographical
knowledge through the sites and spaces in which it is produced and consumed.
He has written on cultures of fieldwork, visualisation, geographical education
and empire. He is currently working with Luciana Martins on an AHRB research
project on views and visions of the tropical world, drawing on a wide
range of materials from log books and journals to finished works of art.
David Gilbert's current research and
teaching concerns the modern city, and particularly the development of
London in the twentieth century. His work on London has a number of dimensions:
the diverse influence of London's 'imperial city' status as capital of
the British Empire on its physical, social and cultural landscapes; the
ways in which the city is understood and commodified for the 'tourist
gaze', particularly through its guidebooks (this work also considered
the emerging tourist landscapes of New York City in the early part of
the twentieth century); the intersections between fashion and the city;
and the changing status of suburbia in modern London. Most of his work
is archival, but the physical presence and his personal experience of
the city is also an important source of ideas and inspiration.
Jacqueline Jeffries is an artist and also designs gardens.
A central concern of her art practice is to question how analytical any
visual study can be. Working almost exclusively in graphite in recent
years, Jeffries' primary subjects for investigation are rock and soil
as represented in print through photography and etching. Her interest
in gardening has resulted in a number of contracts for private gardens
in London, and in 2001 she was commissioned to design a garden for Frimley
Hospital, Hampshire. She has exhibited in the UK and Europe and currently
lives in London.
Rob Kemp's research interests centre
on the properties and features of soils from different parts of the world
(e.g. Europe, China, South America). In particular, he concentrates on
the ways that these properties and features may provide a record of changing
climatic conditions over the past thousands, or even hundreds of thousands
of years. A key technique involves the viewing under a microscope of very
thin (0.03 mm) blocks of soil attached to glass slides (thin sections).
The different images and patterns frequently observed may be interpreted
to provide information on soil processes and associated climatic controls.
He is Professor of Physical Geography and Head of the Geography Department
at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Often taking the form of plans or studies, Janice
Kerbel's work is generated out of the rigorous application
and interrogation of existing systems and logics in order to explore the
relationship between the real, the ideal and the illusory. Recent exhibitions
include: Touristic Gazes, Kunstverien Wolfsburg; Art at the
Edge of the Law, Aldrich Museum, Connecticut; Really!, Artists'
Space NY; and BANG, Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris. Her book 15
Lombard Street was published by Bookworks, London 2000. She is currently
developing a new series of Home Climate Gardens. Janice Kerbel
lives and works in London.
Luciana Martins worked as an architect in Brazil
before doing a Masters and a PhD in Geography at the Federal University
of Rio de Janeiro. Her interests in the design and representation of landscapes
as an architect was reflected in her choice of PhD topic - images of the
landscape of Rio de Janeiro made by British travellers (principally by
naval surveyors, naturalists and artists) in the early nineteenth century.
The PhD brought her to England and resulted in several articles (on art,
science and cartography) and a book. Her work on image-making and the
experience of travel through the tropics has resulted in a collaborative
research project with Felix Driver (funded by AHRB) on Visions of the
Tropical World, 1750-1850, which is concerned with the role of views
and visions in the making of knowledge about tropical regions. In this
work, the sailor's log and the artist's sketchbook are of as much interest
as the published chart or finished painting.
Catherine Nash lectures in cultural geography at Royal Holloway,
University of London. Much of her research has focused on the creative
construction of different versions of national identity and senses of
cultural location in Ireland through ideas of gender, place, nature and
the body. This has involved addressing the postcolonial geographies of
cartography, placenames and the visual arts in Ireland. She curated Irish
Geographies: 6 Contemporary Artists in 1997, (Djanogly Art Gallery,
Nottingham). More recently she has been addressing popular engagements
with place, identity and belonging in the local history movement in Northern
Ireland and in the diasporic genealogies through which descendants of
Irish migrants trace their 'Irish roots'. This work on ideas of Irish
ancestry has led to her new area of research exploring ideas of origins,
ethnicity, inheritance and descent within popular genealogy and population
genetics.
Nils Norman's work usually exists
as scale models or computer generated diagrams, and occasionally as functioning
objects or structures. His work is informed by local urban politics and
ideas on alternative economic and ecological systems that work within
the city, merging urbanist utopic alternatives with a humorous critique
of the history and role of public art. His work often takes the form of
fictive proposals that critically highlight what city design and public
sculpture mean in terms of their participation in the process of gentrification
of city space and its exclusionary nature. Norman's recent exhibitions
include Debut of the Gerrard Winstanley Radical Gardening Space Reclamation
Mobile Field Centre and Weather Station, Lneberg, (2000); The
Cruel Dialectic New York, (1999); and Why Don't You: Proposal 11,
for Cubitt Artists and Gallery, London (1999). Nils Norman lives in London
and is represented by American Fine Arts, New York.
As a laboratory assistant, Adrian Palmer
works with a variety of sediments and sediment analysis procedures. These
involve the preparation of sediment samples through washing, sieving,
treating and the cutting of thin sections for analysis using petralogical
microscopes (specialised for the analysis of soil) and digital image analysis
to examine and describe sediment structures, composition and particle
size. The departmental laboratories also contain equipment and facilities
for work on pollen, fossilised microscopic life forms and bones and has
access to a scanning electron microscope. The results of these processes
are visualised as geomorphological maps, slides, tables and diagrams.
Kathy Prendergast works with the notion of place and identity.
In her recent investigation of emotional placenames, she has reworked
existing maps. This work has come out of a longer interest in cartography
and other ways of representing landscape which has included her on-going
series of City Drawings and her earlier works which considered the relationship
between landscape, mapping and the body. In September 2003 she will complete
her three year Research Fellowship funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Board Award. Based in London, Prendergast is represented by the Kerlin
Gallery, Dublin.
Gillian Rose is Senior Lecturer in the Geography at the
Open University. Her current research involves a critical engagement with
the notion of visual culture. She is interested in the ways in which social
subjectivities are pictured or made invisible, and how those processes
are embedded in power relations. She has a long-standing interest in feminist
film theory and Foucauldian and feminist accounts of photography and is
particularly concerned to ground these theoretical approaches by undertaking
specific empirical studies and has written about methodologies for interpreting
visual images. She is especially interested in the intersecting spatialities
of images, audience subjectivities and the specific social practices entailed
in viewing particular sorts of images in particular sorts of places. At
the moment she is addressing these concerns by talking to adult men and
women with children about how they produce images of themselves and their
kids, how they store those images and how they display them.
Jean-Luc Schwenninger is a scientist who looks at the past
to interpret the present. He has a special interest in palaeoenvironments
and his research draws its source material from disciplines as diverse
as archaeology, biology, climatology, ecology and geology. His studies
are focused on the Quaternary, the most recent geological period of the
earth's history, roughly spanning the last two million years. He is particularly
interested in dating past climatic events, reconstructing spatial and
temporal variations in Quaternary landscapes and studying the causes and
consequences of environmental change. With its emphasis on variations
in natural and cultural processes across space and through time, Geography
is particularly well suited to such a synthesizing venture.
Ingrid Swenson is a freelance curator
who, since 1998, has been Director of Peer, an independent commissioning
and initiating organisation that has worked with visual artists, filmmakers,
musicians, composers, writers and philosophers. Recent projects include
Lars Arrhenius' A-Z (an exhibition and an artist's book) and Mike
Nelson's The Deliverance and The Patience commissioned for the
Venice Biennale (2001). Last year Peer also produced the book Art for
All? Their Policies and our Culture (guest edited by Mark Wallinger
and Mary Warnock). She has worked with many international contemporary
artists in a number of galleries and museums in London since the late
80s, including the ICA, Serpentine, Camden Arts Centre and last year as
the curator of the Raymond Pettibon exhibition at the Whitechapel Art
Gallery.
Richard Wentworth works mainly with photography and sculpture
and has exhibited widely both in the UK, and internationally for more
than 20 years. Wentworth's subject matter is the man-made, usually the
urban environment. He is particularly attracted by the slipperiness of
objects and language that exist within it. This is perhaps best demonstrated
in his long term investigative photo-essay of the Caledonian Road (the
area where he lives in London). Wentworth is also an avid collector of
things which may be incorporated into his own work, or will be 'curated'
together into larger projects such as his Arts Council National Touring
Exhibition Thinking Aloud. In Autumn 2002, An Area of Outstanding
Unnatural Beauty (commissioned by Artangel), a large-scale installation
that took place in a disused plumbing supply outlet in King's Cross. In
April 2002 Wentworth was appointed Master of The Ruskin School of Fine
Art at the University of Oxford. He is represented in the UK by Lisson
Gallery, London.
"The texts themselves are very, very dry in terms
of who the individuals could possibly be. Yet the discussions we've had
here have been so illuminating; they've been so creative. I think that
it would be a real shame if you continue to be pigeon-holed by those sets
of words and those descriptions when what you actually are doing is something
fascinating. It is nothing I would have ever dreamt of reading through
some of the -without being rude - little bits of dry text about what all
the different scientists do. And I think that, if anything, what should
happen is that the scientists should be made to be more juicy and colourful
and interesting. Because I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about
what an artist is, what a scientist is, what a mathematician is, and potentially
it's all so exciting. It is developing and changing and it's this beast
that you don't quite know. And the text is just 'it'. It is like a full
stop and it just doesn't let you in at all'
Jaqueline Jeffries Workshop 3, 9 May 2002
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