Search

This paper presents an articulation of the activities and research attached to the ongoing research thematic ‘Painting as Technology’, which forms part of the programme of paintingresearch at Wimbledon College of Arts. The value of the research thematic is in its extension outwards from painting into diverse fields via a methodological framework. Incorporating research by staff on the BA Fine Art Painting course as well as invitations to visiting artists and academics, the series offers opportunities for students to connect with these themes in both contextual and practical ways. In this instance the theme emerged via an assumption that painting acts in response tothe mechanical or digital rather being mechanical - and digital in itself. Painting as Technology examines: Painting as a mechanical pursuit engaging the brush/stylus as a prosthetic. Painting as a mode of enhancing the optical and lenticular. In this way, it becomes a form of human extension, driving forms of supra-production or a supra-visual. Painting as a critical envoy from history - its longevity allowing commentary and critical distance on newer media and allowing for their reflection and deflection into supposedly ‘known’ terrain, reimagined. The series launched with a symposium that looked at the concept of techne – the importance of craft practice in art making – as it relates to painting through film, the digital, painting processes and via performative means. This paper examines teaching painting as technology via its own intrinsic engagement with the virtual, the mechanical, the prosthetic and hand-eye relationships.

The title of China Academy of Art’s 2017 international exhibition of emerging artists: the Inter-Youth exhibition was ‘Art. Letter Home’ and it was largely concerned with the sketch, sketchbook, drawing and artist manuscript. The exhibition was held at the Nanshan campus gallery, Hangzhou and featured work by Wimbledon graduates Indianna Farrell (BA Painting) and Laura Wend (MA Drawing). The exhibition included work from emerging artists and students from the UK, China, Germany, Australia and the USA. There is an accompanying catalogue. The show was accompanied by a symposium on the theme of the sketch, sketchbook, drawing and artist manuscript. Geraint Evans presented a paper titled: ‘Imaging the Rustic and the Wilderness: The landscape sketch in nineteenth century Britain and America.’ In this paper Evans considered how drawing and the oil sketch reflected and shaped the shifting socio-political landscape at a time of great change. There were also contributions from Brigit Brandis from University of Fine Arts, Hamburg; Allison Alder and Ruth Waller from the Australian National University, Canberra; Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow from the School of Visual Arts, New York; Sheng Wei from the China Academy of Art. Later, the Belgian curator Joël Benzakin and artists Lionel Esteve, Lucia Bru and Michel Francois spoke about their exhibition ‘Drawing as Art, Art as Drawings’, which runs alongside the Inter-Youth show. This show includes work by Anish Kapoor, Neo Rausch, Daniel Buren. The symposium ended with a panel discussion with me, Brigit Brandis, Ruth Waller, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, Allison Alder and tutors from CAA Cui Xiaojian, Jiao Xiaojian and Li Qing on the subject of the different approaches taken to teaching and learning at our various colleges.

Work included in touring group exhibition: ‘Contemporary Masters from Britain: 80 British Painters of the 21st Century.’ An exhibition and catalogue for a touring show visiting Yantai Art Museum, Yantai, Jiangsu Arts and Crafts Museum, and Jiangsu Art Museum, Nanjing, Peoples Republic of China in 2017, curated by Robert Priseman,with essays by Dr Judith Tucker, Terry Greene and Matthew ,Krishanu. This exhibition draws 80 works of art from the Priseman Seabrook Collection of 21st Century British Painting. This is the only art collection in the United Kingdom dedicated to painting produced in Britain after the year 2000. Exhibiting artists include: Iain Andrews, Amanda Ansell, Louis Appleby, Claudia Böse, Julian Brown, Simon Burton, Marco Cali, Ruth Calland, Simon Carter, Ben Cove, Andrew Crane, Jeffrey Dennis, Sam Douglas, Annabel Dover, Natalie Dowse, Nathan Eastwood, Tracey Emin, Geraint Evans, Lucian Freud, Terry Greene, Alex Hanna, David Hockney, Matthew Krishanu, Andrew Litten, Cathy Lomax, Lee Maelzer, Paul Newman, Mandy Payne, Charley Peters, Robert Priseman, Freya Purdue, James Quin, Greg Rook, Wendy Saunders, Stephen Snoddy, David Sullivan, Judith Tucker, Mary Webb.

A group exhibition curated by Geraint Evans that explores contemporary painterly representations of objects with reference to the still life tradition and with a particular interest in the notion of thingness and abjection. The starting point is Norman Bryson’s description of still life as “…an object world that has dispensed with human attention and in a sense makes human attention and the human subject obsolete.” The exhibition is concerned with the ways in which paint’s materiality resonates with meaning and articulates the relationship between subject and object, the observer and the observed. Artists include: Sophie Birch, G L Brierley, Simon Callery, Mark Fairnington, Ana Genovés, John Greenwood, Paul Housley, Damien Meade and Donal Moloney. Panel discussion: was held on Thursday 12 May 4.30-6.30pm in the lecture theatre at Wimbledon College of Arts to discuss and debate the issues raised by the exhibition. Participants included curator Geraint Evans, Course Leader for MA Painting at Wimbledon; Mark Fairnington, participating artist and Reader in Painting CCW; Frances Woodley, artist, academic and curator of exhibitions ‘All Coherence Gone? Historical currents in contemporary still life’ 2014 and ‘Still Life: Ambiguous Practices’ 2015; Dr Fiona Candlin, Senior Lecturer in Museum Studies at Birkbeck University of London and co-author of ‘The Object Reader’ and painter Damien Meade, recent exhibitor in the London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London 2015.

Inclusion in group exhibition curated by Alex Veness. Artists include: Nelson Diplexcito; Geraint Evans; Vineta Kaulaca; Zoë Mendelson; Howard Rogers; Mike Silva; Iain Sinclair; Neal Tait; Alex Veness. Failed Utopias defines a fundamental question about the present: looking back over a remarkable century, in which advanced technology and dynamic new social models failed in their grand promises, how do we understand and experience this catastrophe? Failed Utopias presents contemporary artists posing aspects of this enduring failure, and possibilities for salvation within it. Paintings are predominant in the exhibition, while works in other forms are welcome. Some of the artists in Failed Utopias reflect on past revolutionary ideals and imaginary futures e.g. the impact of punk subculture; the false promise of space travel for all, life in Europe’s eastern bloc between the 1950s and the collapse of Soviet state communism in the 1990s. Others interpret ways by which our understanding of everyday experience in the global west failed to be transformed by modernism, once so positively geared towards radically new perspectives on consciousness and innovative social models. Today, these questions are commonplace in academic publications, news articles and mass media documentaries, yet they are rarely presented as works drawn from personal experience by visual artists. Bringing together artists with a specific interest in expressing their own responses to this predominant issue, Failed Utopias presents new perspectives to existing accounts of our common situation.

Group exhibition curated by Geraint Evans. Artists include: Paul Housley, Jake Clark, Laura White, Martin Newth and Michael Samuels. This exhibition considers the material culture of suburbia. The suburbs are an indisputable site of consumption driven by an ever more pervasive shopping economy. Flat pack furniture, collections of porcelain ornaments, Chamois leather, tidy gardens and garden sheds describe a form of aspiration and perceived conformity. And yet there is creativity within suburbia, as Roger Silverstone writes: “The shared products of contemporary material and symbolic culture are chosen or discarded, arranged and rearranged according to desire, itself structured by class or ethnicity. Suburban streets are complex and subtle signifiers, offering, for those who can read the signs, delicate statements of style and status.” (Silverstone, 1997 p. 6/7) Michael Samuels’ practice can be characterised as a form of contemporary bricolage, which utlises industrially produced Modernist furniture. Elements such as cabinets, tables and sideboards are liberated from their traditional role, cut up and reconfigured into structures that no longer have a utilitarian purpose. Laura White is interested in our relationship and negotiation with the 'stuff' of the world, from the first-hand encounters with objects and matter to the mediated experience of images, such as those found in books, on posters and the internet. Martin Newth’s work tracks the historical roots of the photographic process and raises questions about the aesthetics of the medium. For ‘Shed’ a typical garden shed was converted into a camera obscura by inserting a simple uncut spectacle lens into the door. Paul Housley works and reworks his paintings, referencing art history whilst seeking to reinvent it. Urgent, immediate depictions of domestic ornaments, broken prams, piles of skulls and a plethora of other images emerge from the layers, traces, lumps and marks of restless making. Jake Clark’s paintings d

Inclusion in group exhibition at Museum of X’ian Academy of Fine Arts, China. Artists include: Geraint Evans, Alan Magee, James Brooks, David Hockney, Cathy Lomax, Jo Stockham, Lucian Freud, Matthew Burrows, Rose Wylie amongst others. Show was curated by Xing Zhang and Marco Cali. Full colour catalogue published by X’ian Academy of Fine Arts. Xing Zhang: "While Western contemporary art in general is now quite frequently shown in China, this is the first show devoted specifically to contemporary drawing from Britain and represents a very interesting area for fresh investigation. Traditional European drawing has been a foundation of Chinese academic study from the Renaissance through to Impressionism and up to Soviet Social Realism. In contrast, the study of developments in Western drawing since the beginning of the 20th century, especially after the second world war has been left almost blank. Therefore this show will provide a rare opportunity for the Chinese public to discover the diversity and depth of Western drawing today. The definition of drawing in the West has become more dynamic and conceptualised than ever. The aim of this exhibition is that it might encourage a wider discussion and an exciting dialogue on the subject of drawing between China and the West."

Solo exhibition. This exhibition included paintings, animations and drawings and was part of a long-term enquiry into the ways in the largely Western and urban-based population perceive and encounter the natural world. This show focused on the ornamental hermit, a curious invention of the English Landscape Garden tradition. These were not real hermits, but were employed to live within large estates to provide human subjects for their picturesque grounds, for the amusement of the owner and guests alike. The hermits in this exhibition have been redeployed to the contemporary British suburbs asking the viewer to think anew about our relationship with nature in these ‘hybridised spaces’ whilst considering ideas about the wilderness, retreat and solitude.

DNA polymerases maintain genomic integrity by copying DNA with high fidelity. A conformational change important for fidelity is the motion of the polymerase fingers subdomain from an open to a closed conformation upon binding of a complementary nucleotide. We previously employed intraprotein single-molecule FRET on diffusing molecules to observe fingers conformations in polymerase-DNA complexes. Here, we used the same FRET ruler on surface-immobilized complexes to observe fingers-opening and closing of individual polymerase molecules in real time. Our results revealed the presence of intrinsic dynamics in the binary complex, characterized by slow fingers-closing and fast fingers-opening. When binary complexes were incubated with increasing concentrations of complementary nucleotide, the fingers-closing rate increased, strongly supporting an induced-fit model for nucleotide recognition. Meanwhile, the opening rate in ternary complexes with complementary nucleotide was 6 s-1, much slower than either fingers closing or the rate-limiting step in the forward direction; this rate balance ensures that, after nucleotide binding and fingers-closing, nucleotide incorporation is overwhelmingly likely to occur. Our results for ternary complexes with a non-complementary dNTP confirmed the presence of a state corresponding to partially closed fingers and suggested a radically different rate balance regarding fingers transitions, which allows polymerase to achieve high fidelity.

This was a CCW Graduate School public event, consisting of a walking tour and BarCamp. Recently the interest in psychogeography has crossed from popular literature into the fine art domain. Bestselling authors focusing on the landscape from a personal and itinerant perspective include George Monbiot, Rebecca Solnit, Paul Kingsnorth, and Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts. They discuss how we are engaging with landscape as culture – specifically where the “wild” and the “cultivated” environments overlap. This resonated with us, so we used encounter, experience and enchantment as the starting point for an interactive walking tour of little known areas of Wimbledon exploring the ‘unexamined places that thrive on disregard’*, which straddle the city and the countryside. We asked, how proactive should we be in regards to both the landscape and the city? *Farley and Roberts, Edgelands, Random House, 2012.