CFAR membership is open to Professors, Readers, Research Fellows and other research-active staff within CSAD's Fine Art department.
Professor Andre Stitt
Chair, CFAR
Born in Belfast, N. Ireland, Stitt is considered one of Europe's foremost performance and interdisciplinary artists. He has worked as an experimental artist since 1976 creating hundreds of unique works at major galleries, festivals, alternative venues and sites specific throughout the world including the Venice Biennale, 2005; Baltic Contemporary Art Centre, Gateshead, 2005; The Drawing Centre, New York, 2006; and Artspace, Sydney 2007.
In 2004 he became a professor of the University of Wales.
He is Visiting Professor at several institutions in Europe, USA, Canada, Australia and Northern Ireland.
In 2000 he opened trace: Installaction Artspace in Cardiff initiating a robust programme of international time-based work.
In 2005 he was honoured with the key to the City of Manila. Further awards include the Ivor Davies Award at the National Eisteddfod in 2006 and the Creative Wales Award 2008.
There are several books published about his life and work.
Andre Stitt is represented by curcioprojects New York.
Personal website: www.andrestitt.com |
Dr Chris Short
Deputy-Chair, CFAR
There are two strands to my current research.
The first focuses on the work of Wassily Kandinsky. I’m completing a book entitled ‘The Art Theory of Wassily Kandinsky, 1909 - 1928: The Quest for Synthesis’, to be published in 2009 by Peter Lang, and for which I have received a British Academy Grant and the Fellowship of the Société Kandinsky; co-editing ‘Der Blaue Reiter, Volume II’ ( www.der-blaue-reiter.org ); co-organising a conference on Der Blaue Reiter for 2011 at Tate Modern; and co-organising a production of Kandinsky’s stage play ‘The Yellow Sound’ the be performed at Tate Modern in 2011.
The second strand relates to the sea and surf culture. I’ve surfed, photographed and filmed the coastline of South Wales for over a decade. Some of the photographs I have done are at www.chris-short.net; a selection are being exhibited at Old Hall Gallery, Cowbridge in ‘Chris Short: Land and Sea’ in March 2009; and I’m working on a book entitled ‘Surf, Art and Philosophy’ with a view to publishing it in 2010.
Contact Details:
Telephone 02920 416666
Email cshort@uwic.ac.uk |
Robert Pepperell
CFAR Committee Member
There are three main areas to my current work.
First, I am making a series of art works, including paintings and objects, that reflect various aspects of the problem of how the mind relates to the world. These are paintings that induce a sense of 'visual indeterminacy', in which objects seem to be present but cannot be recognised, and more figurative works that look to the long tradition in western art of self-portraiture, self-reflection and self-representation.
Second, I am writing on the subject of art and the mind-world relationship, looking at the way art and artists have contributed to our understanding of mind, perception and reality.
Third, I am engaged in collaborative scientific experiments with neuroscientists in the University of Zurich, researching the perception of objects in cubist paintings.
Tel: 02920 416669
email: rpepperell@uwic.ac.uk
Personal website: www.robertpepperell.com |
Simon Pope
CFAR Committee Member
Reader in Fine Art and MA Fine Art Programme Director
Pope's recent work is characterised by:
* Its use of dialogue as a method (talking);
* Its perambulatory method (walking);
* Its use of 'recall from memory' as a method to re-construct or re-enact the 'walk' and/or 'talk';
* Its location in the hills or mountains and its representation of these landscapes.
A recent commission saw Pope walking in the Südtirol and Brenta Dolomites before working with a watercolour painter to reconstruct memories of mountain scenes. In The Memorial Walks (2007/9) writers were invited to cast paintings of trees into memory, walking and recalling them in the flat fenland landscape of East Anglia.
These themes are further developed in Negotiating Picu Cuturruñau (2008/9) in which Pope walked with a Spanish-speaking shepherd into the Asturian mountains. Sharing the negotiation of the route between them, they enter into a dialogue between themselves and with the mountains, deciding upon the ways forward and the moments of rest and of return. At the end of the walk, they reconvene with a translator to describe moments of decision-making along the route. An audio recording is played within the gallery, filling the space with the spoken word, describing in two languages the mountain landscape.
Tel: 02920 416653
email: spope@uwic.ac.uk
Personal website: www.ambulantscience.org |
Dr Clive Cazeaux
CFAR Committee Member
Reader in Aesthetics and Graduate Studies Coordinator
My research falls into three areas of interest:
- metaphor in aesthetics and the theory of knowledge
- the relation between art and knowledge, and between art and science
- the aesthetics of sound and radio drama.
Underlying all three is a preoccupation with knowledge and perception as perspectival or transformational processes. On this understanding, the human subject does not passively receive the world but actively organizes it into a meaningful realm. This view was introduced by Kant two centuries ago, but its implications are extensive and are still being worked out.
One consequence is that the concept of boundary is made problematic; for example, the boundary between human faculties and the world, and the division between the conceptual and the sensory. These traditional philosophical dualisms, I maintain, can be recast in more textured, relational terms by exploring the cognitive and world-constructing properties of metaphor, with the result that new ways of understanding human-world interaction are created.
My work on art and knowledge is an extension of this. I focus on the inadequate or disruptive relation which written language allegedly has with art and aesthetics, and show that a transformational theory of experience reconfigures these inadequacies as occasions for insight and new knowledge. |
David Ferry
CFAR Committee Member
Subject Leader: BA Printmaking
David Ferry ARE, studied at the Blackpool, Camberwell and Slade Schools of art. He has an international exhibition and award record in the field of printmaking ,photomontage and artists books. Recent solo exhibitions have been in Berlin, London, New York, Poznan, and Seoul. David gained a major Pollock-Krasner award from New York in 2002 and was awarded the Bronze Medal at the First International Book Arts Fair in Seoul ,Korea in 2005.He has represented the Uk in the Krakov and Tallinn International Print Triennials He is a well known figure in the world of artists books and is represented in many associated publications about the genre, his work has been reviewed in leading publications including the New York Times. His own writings about collage and British humour have also been published.
David was appointed associate professor in Fine Art media from the Long Island University in New York where he worked between 1999 and 2002.David is currently Head of Printmaking at the Cardiff School of Art and Design and a visiting lecturer at the Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork, Ireland.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts he was made an ARE ( Royal Society of Painter/Printmakers )in 2005 and is a committee member for the society. |
Stewart Geddes
CFAR Committee Member
Subject Leader: BA Painting
Stewart Geddes is a painter and photographer, who recently completed a practice-led research project at the RCA in the summer of 2007. He has work held in both public and private collections in Britain and abroad, including the House of Commons, the Royal College of Art and Royal West of England Academy of Art.
His work deploys additive processes of appropriation and paint application, and explores the meanings engendered through tearing from surfaces. More recently he has periodically relinquished an interventionist, autographic approach altogether, in order to present entirely appropriated material as
'found paintings'. It is this activity that became the core of his research inquiry.
Entitled 'The Unstable Sign', the dissertation proposed an application of structural linguistic theory in relation to Cubist Collage toward Decollage, and explored the ability of signs to shift signification.
Between 1998 and 2005 Stewart Geddes was a trustee and member of the exhibitions committee of the Royal West of England Academy.
Tel: 02920 416658
email: sgeddes@uwic.ac.uk
personal website: http://www.stewartgeddes.com |
Cecile Johnson Soliz
CFAR Committee Member
Subject Leader: BA Sculpture
In a complex, homogenised and highly technological society, Cecile Johnson Soliz's work, with a focus on the hand-made, offers a new framework for reflecting on the interrelationships between people and their cultures. Her work makes us question how we think about the material world we live in, how we order ourselves in it, and how we communicate and relate to one another. Her work is contemplative, thought provoking and often functional. Her work often questions the boundaries between fine art, design and craft and she locates her practice in the studio, urban and rural locations and the factories where some of her works are made.
Since 1999 she has worked in numerous factories on projects with workers in Italy and England (Warm, Castellamonte; Cocoa Sets, Bournville; Skyline, Measham Leicestershire) and considers the project-based works as an important part of her practice. More recently she transformed a large garage and designed and made furniture for ‘Sculpture Studio’, an off-site project with Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff (2008-2009), where she commissioned artists to consider ‘what sculpture can be today’ by using the studio space for residencies. ‘Sculpture Studio’ was a flexible space that had workshops, seminars, films and other activities focusing on Sculpture today.
Johnson Soliz has exhibited in group shows such as Objects for the Ideal Home, Serpentine Gallery, London (curator Marco Livingstone; 1991), Affinita, Castello di Rivara, Italy (curators Franz Paludetto and Carolin Lindig; 1996), In the Midst of Things, Bournville (curators Gavin Wade and Nigel Prince; 1999), Private View, Barnard Castle (curators Penelope Curtis and Veit Gorner; 1996) and has shown in Still Life, Roche Court (image attached; curator Helen Waters; 2006/07). Johnson Soliz has exhibited in one-person shows at the National Museum and Gallery of Wales (1999, 2007), the Castello di Rivara (2000, 2004) and Arte Contemporanea in Turin (2004) amongst others.
Tel: 02920 416602
email: cjohnson@uwic.ac.uk |
Dr Jonathan Clarkson
CFAR Member
My research interests centre on the investigation of the relation between viewer and artwork, but they spread out over a wide area. I wrote my PhD on the relation between fantasy and the visual imagination in the English School of Psychoanalysis, concentrating on the work of four psychoanalysts: Freud, Klein, Bion and Winnicott; the art critic Adrian Stokes and the philosopher Richard Wollheim.
I retain an interest in psychoanalysis, but I am also interested in landscape art, particularly that of John Constable. I co-edited Constable and Wivenhoe Park: Reality and Vision (University of Essex, 2000) and wrote an essay on Constable’s painting Wivenhoe Park, comparing the experiences of the viewer of the painting and the visitor to the park. More recently, I have written a major monograph on the painter to be published by Phaidon in 2009.
I have also published several catalogue essays and reviews of contemporary painting, sculpture and photography, and co-edited Sense in Place (Cardiff, 2006) the cataloguing a year-long programme of artistic exchange and exhibition of site-specific work in 6 countries.
I am currently researching and writing a book that explores some of the many ways in which human subjectivity gets caught up in the making and viewing of art. The project grows out of my teaching and develops a theme that I have discussed with students over a number of years. |
Motion Drawing 1 - a seven day Atlantic voyage - 2009
Dr Rona Lee
CFAR Member
Rona Lee is a fine artist whose work encompasses a range of media; photography, video, sculpture, performance and digital media, alongside other forms of engagement and intervention. Operating between gallery and other settings it is research led and determined by the context, geographic, technological or epistemological, to which it is a response.
As well as studio based activity I frequently employ techniques taken from other fields, such as archival research, learning to dive, use an electron scanning microscope or construct a fishing net, as means of gathering material and enabling exchange and debate. Process and interaction are central to my practice. Conceptually and thematically I am especially interested in that which resists our capacity to 'order' and contain it, the fluid, uncertain and indeterminate.
I am currently undertaking a year long residency, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, exploring methods of surveying and mapping the deep seabed. The project will explore the play of myth, imagination and objectivity, involved in envisaging environments that cannot be directly experienced.
Exhibitions and commissions include Beaconsfield, The Ikon Gallery, Tate Modern, Firstsite, Newlyn Art Gal lery and abroad: Henie Onstad Museum, Oslo, La Chambre Blanche, Quebec City, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
E mail rlee@uwic.ac.uk
http://www.ronalee.org/ |
Luke Mintowt-Czyz
CFAR Member
Luke Mintowt-Czyz studied at Cardiff School of Art and Design (2001-2004) and is a lecturer in the Painting department on the Fine Art BA(Hons) course. He is a painter whose practice and research is concerned with the boundaries between Painting and Sculpture. He is interested in the relationship between structure and surface and between image and material. In particular, he is curious about the connection these concerns potentially have to Medieval wooden polychrome sculpture, Autochrome photography and the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ theory of ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’.
Since July 2009, Luke has been a member of New British Art, The Cardiff Group. The group is made up of early career and more established Fine Art practitioners working across a range of disciplines and has grown from an informal meeting of artists over a number of years at the KODA Studios in the Grangetown area of Cardiff.
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Philip Nicol
CFAR Member
My paintings are first and foremost about the pleasure of seeing and of experiencing a space. The formal conditions of painting are of interest to me, but only as a means of engaging with and expressing something about the world. These paintings stem from the world I know; side streets, urban ‘pockets’ glimpsed, places that exist ‘out of hours’, at ‘closing time’, and the excitement of walking the city late at night in the summer and the early hours.
I am not interested in the classic modernist idea of the city as dynamic procession or social interaction. I am more interested with its alternative identity, as an empty place which forms another kind of playground. I have no agenda in this, other than it makes the architecture and sense of place more powerful in its atmosphere and as a place where possibilities exist.
Experience itself is a form of construct and the remaking of experience into a painting is certainly so. Life informs art, art feeds other art, but art also colours life. I am interested in that circular allusive condition between experience and its understanding through fiction. In both seeing and making I bring a lot of ghost to bear: the detective novel, other novels, photography, film noir in general and of course, lots of other paintings. So although these works are rooted in experience and are extremely particular they also, perhaps, have a more universal ring and hopefully resonate into other people’s experience, reminding them of what they know and have not yet seen.
`My other concern lies in a condition of light and both the passing and suspension of time. Of a still image that possesses an implied narrative pulse. There exists, in my mind, a parallel with the cinematic. Nearly all of my paintings have a strong lateral pull or ‘pan’ which arrests the image in a stressful way. This, together with the coloured emanation of luminosity THROUGH the surface, or the screen, or the paint film, creates a considerable amount of their tension. Some of these paintings are nocturnes or depict that twilight time when natural light is dying and electricity is switched on. This can be a time when shape and space takes different forms and colour can become highly charged.
The urbanscapes I paint are, I hope, delightful as well as disquieting, both dreamlike and metaphysical in character. The viewer is often the only human presence. You consequently become aware of yourself. |
