A series of ink and watercolour works exploring ideas of belonging, more-then-human empathies and the post-pastoral in the Welsh Marches, included in the April Circular ArtSpace collective exhibition.
Read moreWriting Joyishly: Workshop for the Association for Art History Conference 2024
Collaborative workshop exploring the role of writing in the art school.
Read moreOccupying the “not yet” - Research Presentation Essex University
Research presentation with Dr. Ana Baeza Ruiz at the University of Essex. Entitled 'Occupying the “not yet”: embodiment, hope and time in the neoliberal university'
Read moreIn Conversation with Joanne Hynes at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, 20 July 2023
I’m delighted to be in conversation with Joanne Hynes in Dublin on the 20 July at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. The event will launch Hynes’s new exhibition, What We Carry With Us, produced in collaboration with DP3.0.
Read moreExhibition in Fishponds
Exhibition of my paintings, prints and drawings in north Bristol during June 2023.
Read moreConvening session at On Not Knowing: How Artists Teach
I will co-convening a session at the On Not Knowing conference exploring Writing Practices in the Art School.
Read moreOpen Studio at the Fishponds Arts Trail 29 - 30 April 2023
I will be opening my studio and selling work as part of the 2023 Fishponds Arts Trail
Read moreArticle for the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice
Untrammelled ways: Reflecting on the written text, nourishment and care in online teaching - an article for the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice on hopes for fearlessness, plurality and relationality in online teaching, with the written text as a place of beginning. This is a deliberately open-ended, exploratory, personal and reflective piece of writing, gathered during teaching and research from 2020 to 2022.
Read moreSpeaking at the 22nd Utopian Studies Society Conference 2022
22nd Utopian Studies Society Conference 2022, July 13th – 15th, University of Brighton
Re-imagining the university through hope in pedagogy (online panel)
Dr Rebecca Bell (University of the West of England Bristol, UWE)
Dr Ana Baeza Ruiz (University of Bristol; Loughborough University)
In the current neoliberal model of UK Higher Education, the disciplining effects of the market are notable: the trebling of tuition fees pits institutions against each other, and students are made to operate according to a logic of private consumption (Temple 2016; Nixon 2012: 7). As educational labour is increasingly subject to mechanisms of surveillance, routinization and time-management, the threat of discursive closure will continue to severely impact independence of thought and creative freedom. Among many educators, hopelessness has instituted itself as a modus operandi. Within this context, how can we activate ‘hope’ to imagine other (utopian) futures for university education? How can we carve serenity and quietude to develop creative, ontological approaches? In this paper, we wish to consider ‘hope’ to think, in Spivak’s terms, how ‘the teacher, while operating within the institution, can foster the emergence of a committed collectivity by not making her institutional commitment invisible: outside in the teaching-machine’ (331). We emphasise hope as the locus of possibility, but one that at once needs to be interrogated and critiqued. Hope has been a grounding concept in radical pedagogies (Freire 2017 [1973]; bell hooks 1994, 2003, 2010), but so too does it take neoliberal forms. Our interest lies in the ways in which ‘hope’ has increasingly been taken up to query the university qua institution (Amsler 2016). Hope, seen as this place of epistemological incompleteness (Bloch 1996), might offer creative re-imaginings of pedagogy that are ‘not yet’ as part of a rethinking of the university. Specifically, our focus will be on ontological methods that honour experience and reflection, plurality and relationality (Escobar, 2018) through object-focused and emotion-based approaches.
https://utopian-studies-europe.org/conference/
Member of the Visual Culture Research Group, UWE
As part of my relatively new role at UWE (University of the West England, Bristol), I have joined a collaborative group of researchers. The Visual Culture Research Group (VCRG) is a group of cross-disciplinary art and design practitioners, historians and theorists interested in visuality and visual culture. Its purpose is to generate new knowledge and innovative methodologies by putting practitioners into conversation with writers. Much of our work critically explores the relationship between ‘making’ and ‘thinking’, practice and theory and there is an overarching concern with challenging cultural representations of under-represented groups. Read more: https://vcrg.co.uk/
Painting in Exhibition at Tŷ Tân Art
One of my small watercolour and ink works has been included in an exhibition at Tŷ Tân Art Gallery in Hay-on-Wye. The exhibition is to raise funds for the Red Cross DEC Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal. The painting is one of a series based on the River Frome, depicting two white-throated dippers. The series explores daily encounters with the flora and fauna of this wild space in Fishponds, Bristol, as a means of personal exploration and ontological care - a work-in-progress connecting to a three-year research project concerning pastoral materialities and object-based intimacies.
The exhibition runs from Mar 24 to Apr 23, 2022.
If you would like to find out more about my painting, go to @shecanseethehills on Instagram.
More about the gallery:
Tŷ Tân Art was established in 2019, in Hay-On-Wye’s historic fire station. What is now the gallery’s display window was once the opening that admitted the town’s only fire engine. In the 1960s, the building served as Hay’s famous second-hand book shop, owned by Richard Booth, the renowned ‘King of Hay’.
New role at Bristol UWE: Lecturer Visual Culture
I am delighted to be joining the Visual Culture team at Bristol UWE School of Art and Design from December 2021.
Article for Journal of Modern Craft: Czech Glass Figurines Under Socialism
My research and resulting article on Czech glass figurines, entitled ‘Negotiations of Socialist Modernity: The Czech Glass Figurine (From the Late 1940s-1960s)’, has been published in The Journal of Modern Craft.
Read moreIn Conversation with Lucie Gledhill and Kasia Wozniak for Goldsmiths Fair 2020
I'm in conversation with Lucie Gledhill and Kasia Wozniak about their collaboration SWAP, as part of Goldsmiths Fair. Their work explores how silver can be used as a material in jewellery and as a light sensitive material in photography, celebrating it in both practices.
Read moreEvent: Reimagining the University and Pedagogies of Hope
We invited 8 speakers to address the question of how we might seize this critical moment to imagine a pedagogical space in which teaching happens differently. The panels discussed decolonisation, contemplative methods, environmental education, utopian studies, critical race studies, feminism, and ontological pedagogies.
Read moreSmall Paths for the Hoosac Institute Journal
A personal text published in the Hoosac Institute Journal - ‘Small Paths’ is about woodland, nature, countryside, childhood and miscarriage. Written during May 2020, it is also entangled in Covid19 era isolation.
Read moreThey Hide with their Boots On
My review of menswear exhibition Invisible Men for Artforum magazine.
Read moreEXHIBITION REVIEW: Blue Innovations. Contemporary Tendencies in Traditional Czech Indigo Print
My review for the Central and Eastern European London Review of a recent exhibition of Czech indigo print textiles at Czech Centre London.
Read moreKINOTEKA 2019: Interview with Marlena Łukasiak, Kinoteka’s Artistic Director and Producer
My interview with Marlena Łukasiak, Artistic Director and Producer of Polish Film Festival Kinoteka, as the festival opens for its 17th year in London. The festival spans a time period covering Poland’s accession to the EU and Britain’s current Brexit turmoil. It also marks a period of great change in both the Polish and world-wide film industry.
Read moreExhibition Review: Markéta Luskačová at Tate Britain (Spotlights) – “leaving an important sense of the connectedness of human experience”
The Markéta Luskačová exhibition at Tate Britain, part of the Spotlights programme, invites the visitor into moments between waiting and watching, action and pause…
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