One of the obvious USPs of the MA in Art & Material Histories is the outstanding quality and unparalleled quantity of its teaching. From the start of the course in September, right through to the summer break, students are taught by experienced, engaging academics and artists who explore a wide range of historical and contemporary approaches to thinking about art’s use of materials and our relationship with the material world.
For many students, one of the most exciting elements of the course is taught by Dr Rebecca Sykes who leads a series of all-day lectures and seminars under the title ‘Contemporary Matters’. Through the discussion and analysis of key artworks, Rebecca’s sessions explore how interrogating art’s materials can disrupt the accepted narratives of the history of art and put art in dialogue with other practices and disciples.
Full-time MA student Matilda Sample comments on Rebecca’s sessions: “Learning about materials through the Contemporary Matters lectures was a great start to the course. We discussed the digital and concrete, wax and hair, a variety of materials that brought with them a multiplicity of meanings. It introduced us to the prominence of individual materials within modern and contemporary art, encouraging us to critically engage with materials politically, socially, historically, and culturally, all starting with the question ‘what material is this piece made from?’. Becky’s one-to-one tutorials gave me the confidence to position my own research within the broad spectrum of interpretations and approaches that material histories can include.”
Rebecca Sykes recently completed her doctoral thesis on the artist Andrea Fraser at Birkbeck College. Her research is concerned with the aesthetic and ethico-political registers of institutional critique (with a special emphasis on art discourse); she has a developing research interest in ‘post-critical’ writing methodologies, was winner of the Art & Culture Art Criticism Prize Volume VIII and her writing has appeared in The Burlington Magazine, Photomonitor, and The Arts Desk. Between 2015 and 2017, she was General Editor of Dandelion Journal.
Photograph taken October 2019