Design
Research Staff
Asa Andersson
Ĺsa Andersson works across images, site-related installations, and prose-poetic text projects, exploring how the ambiguous relationships between intimacy and spatiality, might be visually, textually and poetically manifested. She holds a PhD in Fine art and Philosophy: Intimations of Intimacy; Phenomenological Encounters Between Contemporary Art & Philosophy, Staffordshire University, 1999. Research interests also include expanded photographic and print-related practices, fragile constructions, modernist/contemporary architecture and traditional Japanese aesthetics.
Kiff Bamford
Kiff Bamford has a long term interest in the work of French Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and the potential of his writings in relation to issues of art and design practice, in particular performance art. This includes an interest in modes of writing which might be termed performative and the role of documentation as an active means of experiencing an event.
Dave Beckitt
David Beckitt is a graphic designer with over a decade of industry experience. He has worked both independently, and as a freelance designer with agencies large and small.
With his time divided as university tutor and independent designer, David chooses to work predominantly (but not exclusively) in print using the more familiar aspects of graphic design, namely typography, illustration, and photography, but is also keen to explore areas not normally associated with the role of the graphic designer, areas that could be considered peripheral, such as writing, moving image & audio, interior, furniture & product design.
There is a recurrent theme in some of David’s more personal work, a realisation of his preoccupation with our rich maritime heritage, due in part to his upbringing and deep rooted passion for, and continued connection with, the sea. This is an ongoing investigation.
Chris Bloor
Chris Bloor has worked with drawing and print-based processes exploring language and writing methods inspired by interests in 20th century structural experimentation and the Beat movement of the 1950's. Chris is interested in the place of painting in the midst of conceptualism, and how contemporary practice views and uses polarities (good/bad; naďve/informed; object-making/social interaction). This embraces an interest in the role of video and photography in how work can now reflex between the material and the immaterial.
More recently he has shown at the ICA and is looking at sites across the universe for future exhibition locations.
Alyson Brien
Alyson Brien explores touch and sight, producing drawings, collages, photographs, small paintings and sculptures which visualise cognition, combining aspects of cognitive science, landscape architecture and archaeology. She is fascinated by proprioception. Sculptural works in various materials are syntheses, combining colour associations with complex form. She values the relevance of intuition in creative thinking, visual saccades and image juxtaposition. New video developments explore inter-cut documentary environments
Clare Charnley
For some time Charnley has been investigating the problematics of intercultural dialogue through a series of international collaborations. Currently she is working with Patricia Azevedo (Brazil). Their joint practice involves observations and negotiations to do with language, territory and power relationships and attempts to give material form to a series of encounters, games and stories to do with the act of communication itself. Often this involves working with the public. www.clarecharnley.com
James Chinneck
James Chinneck is concerned with a consideration of travel, tourism and place, engaging in serious explorations that often result in the humorous and unexpected. Challenging assumptions as to the conventions of sculpture, he works with combinations of carefully crafted objects and haphazard assemblage.
Also he is interested in the fundamental structures of physical realities.
http://www.millionth.org/
Jen Conway
Jen Conway is a graphic designer based in Leeds working in collaboration with Jessie Young under the name Conway and Young. Conway and Young are interested in the intersection between design and other disciplines and are motivated by an interest in the social, political and environmental conditions of where they live. Conway and Young’s work combines education, art and community engagement. They choose to work within local areas, engaging with creativity and art in many forms and contexts.
Alan Dunn
Alan Dunn explores the legacy of punk's DIY ethos, developing home-made internet TV projects (tenantspin), one-off artists billboards and limited edition audio CDs. The CDs bring together students' works alongside existing artists and archival material and are freely distributed, often using captured audience hotspots (eg tunnel tollbooths). He also writes on the sociability of public art and the relationship between urban living, background noise and creative spaces.
http://www.alandunn67.co.uk
Andy Edwards
I'm interested in what visual material means, how it is understood, enjoyed, ignored. I collect ephemera across a wide range of categories and time periods, be it meat wrappers or discarded shopping lists. I feel they celebrate the regional, the vernacular, the less-than-perfect; an unwitting opposition to globalised slick, the generic, the blogstandard. I'm also interested in type histories and letterform as an expression of national distinctions. Outside University, I'm an independent practicing graphic designer increasingly working on projects in the public realm; this has led to working beyond more traditional media associated with graphics – like paper or screen – and beyond the client-supplier relationship of commercial design.
For example, I've designed a large scale perforated aluminium wall for a gateway underpass in Leeds, and a series of permanent typographic installations in Kilburn, London. I collaborate with writers, architects and photographers on publishing projects, have also worked closely with clinical teams in a hospital using environmental design in a dementia ward context, and have run a workshop to disuade planners, architects and head teachers not to use Comic Sans for signage in Hull schools.
Clive Egginton
Clive Egginton’s current research aims to assess if we can influence the way photographs are made, stored and used within a given environment, in this case the city of Sheffield, to provide a more active and coherent archive for future generations. It will look at providing a template for both individuals and communities to work with by assessing methodologies not generally considered by an individual photographer. The initial work can be seen at www.archive-sheffield.org and I am working closely with the main Sheffield Archive assessing gaps in the collection.
I am a photographer. I am a documenter and would describe my work as fitting into the tradition of photojournalism. However, these terms have become woefully inadequate, problematic almost, to describe a “concerned” photographer interested in the human condition. To this end my research is concerned with how we collect, use and store photographic imagery. At the heart of its aims is a desire to develop a template for a cultural archive, one that is inclusive and pro-active.
Marion Harrison
Marion Harrison’s recent work is an investigation into the behavioral nature and role of curating with particular reference to the development and production of a series of radio broadcasts/transmissions.
She uses radio broadcast/transmissions as an experimental curated platform to explore the non-physical, non-visual space of radio as mode of exhibition and dialogue. Recent broadcasts on Resonance FM, London and AIR, New York include http://www.shortfuse2010.co.uk.
Jo Hassall
I am exploring process-led working methods to illustrate the potential of uncertainty within art and design education. This process includes collage, drawing, painting, photography, film, performance and the written narrative.
I am producing work for the following titles ‘Scavenger of Crisis’, ‘The Mock Epic: Low Life in a High Style’, ‘The Ink Repels the Pencil’, ‘Turning Your Back to the Audience’, ‘Reading Incompletely’.
Sometimes I work alone, sometimes with others.
Graham Hibbert
Graham Hibbert is a designer, developer and artist whose photographic and moving-image based work seeks to explore the role of the abstract within contemporary digital media practice. Originally from Belfast, he currently lives and works in Lancaster, and lectures in Contemporary Art Practices at Leeds Metropolitan University.
His most recent work investigates the role of technology within art education.
Greig Johnson
Greig Johnson is an Associate Senior Lecturer in Graphic Arts & Design at Leeds Met, studying for a PhD in narrative Moving Image, and has been directing shorts and music videos since 2001, when his debut film, Owl Soup, was nominated for Best UK Short at Leeds International Film Festival. In 2010, his adaptation of William Burroughs’ MR BRADLEY MR MARTIN HEAR US THROUGH THE HOLE IN THIN AIR was nominated for Best Yorkshire Short again at both Leeds and Hull, as well as screening at Raindance, the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, the Fantasia genre festival in Montreal and Odense International Film Festival.
http://www.eclecticschlock.com
Peter Lewis
I have been an internationally active curator and artist since 1970s. At Goldsmiths 2000-2003 as Assistant Director MA Curating; Chief Curator of the Sharjah Biennale 6th edition, in 2003. I direct Redux Projects in London; was Independent Curator at Kunstverien Bregenz, Austria from 1998 -2007, currently Editor of /seconds, online journal of contemporary art research, and Course Leader MA Art and Design.
Mick Marston
Mick Marston is an award winning illustrator, working for a diverse range of clients in publishing, advertising & education. His practice aspires to be humorous, elegant & simple but often ends up dumb, clumsy & complicated.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thefutilevignette/
http://www.thefutilevignette.com/
http://www.centralillustration.com/artistswork.asp
Brian McCallion
Brian McCallion is concerned with drawing, etching and painting, primarily in contexts that connect in various ways with landscape.
Jo McGonigal
My paintings consider the act of painting as equal to what is being represented, the action being as valid as, and in harmony with, the result. Recent work uses the construction of a painting to create a photograph, interfering with the painting’s status as singular. Current research looks at French conceptual painter Niele Toroni for a touring exhibition in 2012. Jo is co-founder of Corridor8, an annual publication that platforms art & writing.
Nathaniel Mellors
The central theme in Nathaniel Mellors’ work is the manipulation of language. He is interested in the politics of language; exploring its ‘use value’ in different ways through his own invented scenarios and narratives. Mellors writes his own texts and explores different approaches to the performance of these texts in a variety media. Mellors sets up theatrical frameworks to test the line between meaningful content and incomprehensibility. At the core of his practice lies a fascination with the relationship between word and effect.
http://www.cataloguemagazine.com/contemporary-art/magazine/article/nathaniel-mellors/
Kevin O'Brien
Kevin O'Brien works with painting, engagings with the traditions and limitations of that medium in complex and adventurous ways.
Harold Offeh
Harold Offeh was born in Ghana in 1977. He lives and works in London and Leeds. He studied at Brighton University and the Royal College of Art, London. Offeh works in a range of media including performance, video, Photography and interactive and digital media, employing humour as a means to confront the viewer with an assessment of contemporary popular culture. Recently Offeh has approached the themes of futurism and hair through collective live engagements with other artists, performers and community participation.
Elisa Oliver
My research is concerned with the teenage experience of the 1970s/80s and its re-examination in the work of key British Artists from the 1990s. I am concerned with this moment as a fundamental shift in identity that parallels the loss of labour in the transition from the manufacturing the service industries, evident in the regions that these artists lived, and the subsequent effect on traditional constructions of masculinity and the family unit. Memory and ideas of repetition and return are key areas of interest as are notions class, masculinity and labour in the 1970s and their legacy for contemporary practice
Research is part of a PhD being undertaken at Central St Martins, University of the Arts London
Casey Orr
My work focuses on our relationship to nature, the land we inhabit and what both nature and land mean to our families, communities and selves. My work makes enquiries about the forgotten connections and hidden histories found in our communities through the innumerable untold stories found everywhere. . Originally from Delaware, USA, I now live in England where I work as a photographer, researcher and Senior Lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University where I hold a Ph.D in photography. My work is supported by Arts Council England and has been shown most recently at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the University of The Arts, Philadelphia, Jen Bekman Gallery, New York, The Brighton Photo Biennale Fringe Festival, Millspace, Leeds where I was artist in residence in 2010 and on the walls of HM Prison Leeds, the first time the walls of a prison have been used as a space for art.
My recently published works include: Comings & Goings 2010 Bonefire 2010
Martyn Rainford
A Graphic Designer
My work examines the possibilities for constructing multi-disciplinary experiments in conceptual art, exploring the relationship between Art, Design and Technology to explore following the issues.
A. Conceptual or traditional aesthetics; A new set of tools within graphic design.
B. The role of the Designer / Artist to create special kinds of material objects.
C. Systems: Theory and Practice
D. Dissemination: Examining the economic and social dimensions within production and the distribution of information.
Rachel Reupke
Rachel Reupke’s recent videos focus on some universal concerns; happiness, health and social status are examined through the language of commercial image production, where these personal yet highly marketable obsessions are uncovered and exploited with differing degrees of visibility. Reupke’s work has been shown internationally in exhibitions and screenings including Picture This, Bristol, Tate Modern, London and Pompidou Centre, Paris. Her work is distributed by LUX
Simon Ringe
My work explores notions of the individual to preserve their autonomy and the individuality of existence through narrative frameworks that employ industrial methodologies and references. The work articulates ideas of the individual at odds with larger constraining forces and is often realised in varying sculptural formats but also encompasses film and photography.
Corinne Silva
Artist Corinne Silva works with photography and moving image to investigate aspects of the politics of frontier spaces, diaspora and mobility. Her current practice investigates how landscape photography can be used to explore geographies of difference and the politics of architecture on the New Political Equator, which intersects the contested desert territories of the Mexico USA border, southern Spain and northern Morocco and Israel Palestine. Recent exhibitions and commissions include Imported Landscapes, a site-specific installation for Manifesta 8, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art (2010); photographic series Badlands, Noorderlicht Photofestival (2010); and moving image installation Wandering Abroad, from Leeds Art Gallery, UK (2009). Corinne has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards and is one of the winners of the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward Awards 2010 and 2011. She is currently showing Imported Landscapes at the Hereford Photography Festival and the Magenta Foundation, Toronto, and screening Wandering Abroad at the National Media Museum as part of the Ways of Looking Festival, Bradford.
Jenny Tennant-Jackson
Jenny Tennant Jackson’s current research interest is transdisciplinary; within the interface of art and science, and is concerned with how the apparently different disciplinary areas are not entirely separate but share some common imaginative structures especially the areas of art making, continental philosophy and quantum physics. She has publications in arts and in sciences, and is a member of various complexity networks and societies, where she has spoken on ‘Art and Complexity’, and at various colloquia and conferences on Emergence and Complexity. As Senior Lecturer in Historical and Critical Studies, School of Contemporary Art and Graphic Design, Leeds Metropolitan University she works with a number of highly intelligent and creative students, developing a ‘complexity network’ co- extensive with professional contemporary art practice. She was also Visiting Research Fellow at AHRC Transdisciplinary Centre for Cultural Analyses, Histories and Theories, CentreCATH, University of Leeds, which has recently completed the project.
As a co-investigator in an interdisciplinary project based at University of West of England, Bristol Robotics laboratory, her contribution to The Emergence of Artificial Culture in Robot Societies, the project funded by EPSRC, will be to focus on possibilities of recognising, interpreting, describing, conceptualising and visualising robot-to-robot emergent interaction through both rigorous investigation and creativity.
Ian Truelove
Ian Truelove leads on technology related research projects within the School of Art, Architecture and Design, and works closely with Graham Hibbert on the development of the award winning cagd ePortfolio and social networking tool (http://cagd.leedsmet.ac.uk). Recent projects include the JISC funded Open Habitat project (http://magazine.openhabitat.org/), a collaboration between Leeds Metropolitan, the University of Oxford and King's College London, which investigated the potential for learning in virtual worlds. His current research interests include 3D painting, rapid prototyping and bioinformatics.
Andrew Wilson Lambeth
Andrew Wilson Lambeth is a typographer. His practice has evolved from the conventional praxis of the typographer to more authorial, poetic territory, specifically in the creation of typographically-conceived texts, exploring complexities of reading through rebuses and other forms of embedded textual and diagrammatic material. He is also a type designer and occasional artist's book maker. He has taught both fine art and graphic art for the last twenty years in Leeds.
Aidan Winterburn
I am at the moment making a series of short film-essays, for want of a better word, using a mixture of found, archival footage, animation and typographic forms. I'm interested in the margins of documentary practice, making films that I hope are subjective, funny, satirical and at the same time somehow truthful by conflating the fictional and the documentary, the reconstructed and the found, the accidental and the designed, the word and the image. Over the past couple of years, I have also made a number of typographic projections for specific buildings in Leeds - indeed, I am particularly fascinated by architecture.
I am also as ever involved in writing about graphic design for a number of periodicals and a series of self-published pamphlets.
Jessie Young
Jessie Young is a graphic designer based in Leeds working in collaboration with Jen Conway under the name Conway and Young. Conway and Young are interested in the intersection between design and other disciplines and are motivated by an interest in the social, political and environmental conditions of where they live. Conway and Young’s work combines education, art and community engagement. They choose to work within local areas, engaging with creativity and art in many forms and contexts.