Jim Bloxam
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Jim is Senior Book Tutor on the BA (Hons) Conservation: Books and Paper course at City & Guilds of London Art School. Jim joined the Art School in Autumn 2022 after a professional career of over 35 years working as a bookbinder and book conservator. For the last ten years of his career, Jim was Head of Conservation and Collection Care, Cambridge University Library, UK.

His particular research interests lie mainly in the history of books; their structural qualities and their cultural context. He has taught historical book structures in the UK, Europe and the US, focusing mainly on European book structures.

International Projects

Montefiascone Conservation Project

Since 1998 Jim has been involved with the Montefiascone Conservation Project which includes a programme of summer schools. The classes provide an opportunity for librarians, conservators, cataloguers, bibliographers and those interested in the history and conservation of books, to assemble once a year to study one or more of the four, week-long courses. Many new professional contacts have been established and knowledge and skills have been generously disseminated by masters in the field. Jim has taught courses on Romanesque Book Structures, Gothic Book Structures, Medieval Girdle Books, the St. Cuthbert Gospel, Italian fifteenth century bindings and sixteenth century ‘Cambridge Bindings’.

St. Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai- Conservation Project.

In 2003, Jim was part of a team of conservators involved in the condition survey of the 3,307 bound manuscripts in the old library of the Monastery. In 2006 the most detailed condition for a whole collection of this size was completed after the participation of thirty-five people from nine different countries.

Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation & Dar al-Kutub Manuscript Project

Jim was one of a team of conservators whose findings, following a colloquium at the Dar Al Katub (National Library of Egypt), Sept. 2006, assisted The Foundation to sign an agreement with the National Library of Egypt (Dar al-Kutub) and the Egyptian Ministry of Culture to assist with the preservation, and conservation of the National Library’s manuscript collection and to work with the National Library to establish it as a regional leader in collection care and management. The National Library possesses around 60,000 manuscript titles. It is the largest manuscript collection in the Arab World and one of the most important collections of Islamic manuscripts worldwide. Jim was involved in training of Egyptian conservation staff and in assisting the set-up of a major exhibition.

I am a sculpture/installation artist of Uyghur ethnicity born and based in London. Emerging from experiential reflections, I delve into how the body experience forms an understanding of one’s diasporic identity while also shattering your sense of place. My life has been littered with misunderstandings from others regarding my ethnicity. My body felt invisible, and my mouth was unequipped to handle the tiring task of constant self-definition. As a therapeutic venture, I engage in sculpture-making to explore identity, memory and imagined homelands drawing from my own or my parents’ nostalgic imagery – a calabash gourd, sunflower seeds, or a stylistic window.

Emma Sheehy creates imaginative spaces that are escapist, funny and folkloric. They are filled with a somewhat weaponised naïveté. Often drawing upon medieval-inspired imagery, she builds up a collection of creatures to play with again and again in paintings and sculptures. Emma’s work is influenced by pre-modern polytheistic mythologies, medieval manuscripts and awkward public interactions.

Christopher Roantree trained at the Royal College of Art and is an award winning, multi disciplinary, London based artist practicing in traditional etching and developing the intaglio print tradition. Christopher has undergone residencies in Paris and the Belizean Jungle, travelling extensively as part of his practice which is now primarily collaborative.

Working in print and paint, I use the palimpsest and the inevitable variation within manual repetition to explore the themes of transience, time and memory. Although the specific materials and processes I employ vary between printmaking and painting, I create both types of work over an extended period of time using repeated processes which fall into two opposing categories – constructive and destructive. These categories can be seen as symbolic of the tension between the man-made and the natural, the conscious and unconscious, the structured and unpredictable.

My multi-disciplinary practice is steeped in decorative and illusionistic techniques. I work in a range of media which currently includes painting, printmaking and paper marbling. My pictorial style follows the tradition of trompe-l’oeil and I have a growing interest in combining a real three-dimensional element with the illusionary one already present in my work. The Painter-Stainers’ Decorative Surfaces Fellowship gives me the opportunity to build on these foundations and broaden my technical skillset to include a range of processes such as faux marbling and woodgraining.

I create still life compositions in which I tell the stories behind objects. I am drawn to decorative patterns as cultural signifiers which are deeply imbued with a sense of meaning and identity. I use analogy to weave multiple objects’ and patterns’ narratives together.

Holly Hooper (b.1991) is a British artist, born and currently living in London. She obtained her BA (Hons) in Communication Design from London College of Communication, UAL, in 2013. She subsequently worked as a theatre producer and designer in London for five years. Moving into the glass industry in 2018, she worked as a hot shop assistant before completing her MA in Ceramics and Glass at The Royal College of Art in 2023.

Valentino is an interdisciplinary artist working in both 2D and 3D. He recently graduated with an MA in Fine Art at City and Guilds of London Art School (September 2023) and he has been awarded a residency at Standpoint Gallery starting mid-November 2023 to mid-January 2024. In 2021-2022, he focused on developing his drawing at the Royal Drawing School. Previously, he worked in the fashion and beauty industry, and this led him to deepen his interest and understanding of fibres. He moved to London from Italy ten years ago. In 2014, he graduated in Art, Drama and Music Studies BA (Hons) from the University of Bologna.

Simon Robson trained as an actor and wrote initially for the theatre. His first play The Ghost Train Tattoo was premiered in 2000 at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester – the theatre where he spent the majority of his acting career, and where his many roles included Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion and Elyot Chase in Coward’s Private Lives. His most recent acting work was the in the Olivier-nominated Folk at Hampstead Theatre. In prose his collection of short stories, The Separate Heart (Cape, 2007) was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor prize and was second in the Edgehill Award. This was followed by a novel, Catch, (Cape, 2010).

As a writer he has a great interest in collaborating with musicians, including writing narrative and dramatic programmes for ensembles such as Ex Cathedra, the Belgian early music group Vox Luminis and the French baroque orchestra Les Arts Florissants for which he wrote an adaptation of Purcell’s Indian Queen. In 2018 the opera Schoenberg in Hollywood, for which he wrote the libretto, was premiered by Boston Lyric Opera, with music by Tod Machover. It was revived at the Volksoper in Vienna last year. He and Tod are about to begin work on a new opera together, an adaptation of Richard Powers’ The Overstory.

As well as writing, Simon also teaches the piano in London where he lives with his wife and two teenage sons. This is his third year as an RLF Fellow – after a year at De Monfort University and Goldsmith’s.

My work creates poetic gestures or actions through material that reference a truth in some way, and explores the built spaces which we inhabit. Current working ideas centre around finding connections between ‘homelands’ and ‘elsewheres’, and understanding our inheritance of place and culture.

I am thinking about water as a technology and harnessing its power to change material; as a vast force that both connects and separates people and places. Recent research has delved into the specific location surrounding the City and Guilds School of Art, known in a previous capacity as the Lambeth School of Art. I have been exploring the nearby beaches at Vauxhall to glean material and ideas; the motifs in my work this year, many of which have surfaced before, include searching for remnants of the past, understanding the interrelations of power and spatiality, and the companionship of animals. It is a process of dredging-up recollections that can be worked with materially in the workshops and I am thinking about the lifespan of wood and the memories it can hold.

I am a Taiwanese artist, I live and work in London. My work comes from the idea of creating a meeting point. I transform memory and time into a physical format. Movement creates moments, moments draw emotions, emotions become duration. I work almost exclusively with wood and steel. I see these materials as two elements, and explore how they support each other; how they are constructed with and alongside each other.

My practice is steeped in the traditions of Western art history, with an emphasis on craftsmanship and seductive materials. Born in Melbourne and based in London, I work across a broad range of media to explore and subvert past and present ideas of beauty, taste and the picturesque. I bring my training and extensive experience in theatre design to bear on many aspects of my artistic practice; in the construction of spatial and material illusions and the creation of a sense of drama and suggested narratives. Play, wonder and absurdity are also central to my approach, which also prizes the development of skills, material experimentation and decorative spectacle which is why the position of decorative surfaces fellow appealed so much.

Julia Peintner works in painting and printmaking. Drawing forms an intrinsic part of her practice in both her prints and paintings on paper. Working from her own photography, image archives and art historical references, her work is concerned with interpersonal dynamics and anxieties and discomforts of the modern condition.

Through intimate portrayals of bodily states, belonging and the experiences of adolescence and womanhood, her images offer a window into the complexities of everyday existence.

 

 

I am fascinated by the complex relationship between domesticated animals and humans, what we value and why. Born from personal memories, loss and experiences the works broaden into socio-political sculptures that frequently asks the viewer to look deeper into their own conscience. I am a story teller; a multidisciplinary artist with a passion for glass. I am interested in pushing my knowledge to new extremes, often resulting in recognised failure that I embrace as works in their own right. Recycling and experimenting with unconventional glass types is a part of my growing practice.

Andrea has been a lecturer in art and fashion for 20 years. She gained a degree in painting at Coventry University and an MA in Fine Art Textiles at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her work is multi-disciplinary and explores the relationship between fine art, retail and femininity.

During her early career Andrea worked as a gallery workshop educator at Cornerhouse Galleries, Manchester and has exhibited with Chris Ofili at Rochdale Art Gallery and Tracey Emin at T’Leerhuys Gallery, Bruges. As a freelance artist, her work has been shown in Belgium, Germany, Japan and France and her installation ‘Angels of the South’ was featured on CNN’s ‘The Art Club’.

Andrea also worked in an experimental collaboration with architects and designers at Manchester’s Castlefield Gallery.

After a PGCE in Art & Design Andrea took up a role as a lecturer in Art at Manchester University before moving to London where she has worked at institutions such as UCA, Ravensbourne University, Limkokwing University, and Kingston University.

At Ravensbourne she was Pathway Leader in Fashion and Textiles which involved curriculum and portfolio management alongside running a big department and forging links with institutions such as Central St Martins and London College of Fashion. She also ran workshops for the Sorrell Foundations Saturday Art club

I am a visually trained art theorist interested in the exchange between creative practice and critical knowledge production. With a PhD in Visual Cultures and an interdisciplinary background in subjects such as Graphic Design (BDes), Art History (BA) and Contemporary Art Theory (MRes), I teach across a wide range of courses relating to modern and contemporary art theory, history, and practice at various art schools and institutions in London and beyond – Goldsmiths University of London, City & Guilds of London Art School, Art Academy London, Buitenkunst Drenthe & Randmeer (NL). Passionate about disseminating art-critical thinking and visual literacy to people from all walks of life, I also ‘think’ and ‘do’ visual cultures with young adults in non-academic contexts.

The scholarly research underlying my pedagogical practice centres on the relationship between radical politics and aesthetic practices, as seen through the workings of representation and visual culture. Realising how arts, crafts and design are linked with other domains – from the personal to the political, from the everyday to the intellectual – I examine how visual technologies position us within networks of power, which may differently interweave matters of class, gender, race and ability.

Engaging conceptual reconfigurations of the precarious from a global perspective, my current work considers possibilities for finding commonality across difference through new non-identitarian practices of relationality that resist and transform the ways in which artists and cultural producers are rendered insecure and pitted against one another through the neoliberal imperative of competition and self-optimisation.

“We live in a society that sanctifies memory, keeping traces of each story and each object sometimes obsessively. My own work questions the notion of temporality: absence and displacement, identity and a sense of belonging. I chose to work in glass because of the wide range of lyrical messages it can convey and use a variety of techniques to express ideas which originate in a practical and poetic sense from its properties.”

Pippa Beveridge is a glass and mixed media artist with a BA in Landscape Architecture from Greenwich University and an MFA in the Theory and Practice of Art and Design in Architecture from the University of East London. She studied fine art at the Massana Art School in Barcelona and advanced techniques in glass at the Barcelona Glass Foundation, where she also taught.

She has lectured at colleges in the USA and Europe and organised international artists’ workshops in Barcelona and the USA. She was the director of the Syracuse University Abroad Visual Arts Programme for several years and has given master classes at the MusVerre, Sars-Poteries (France); Urban Glass and the Studio at Corning (USA); and the Glass Hub (UK).

Her work ranges from small sculptural pieces to large-scale installations and architectural glass. Architectural details, surface decoration, wallpapers and the natural world provide sources of inspiration.

Laura’s process involves researching, collaborating and investigating the material histories of things through performance, film, writing and sculpture. She is interested in how history is carried and evolved through everyday materials, trades and craftsmanship and works with specialists to develop sculptural and performative works that amplify the relationship between materiality, memory and tacit knowledge. Her interdisciplinary and research-based works have been exhibited widely around the UK and abroad and in 2022 she co-curated two exhibitions: I Have Eaten It (1-28 February) with Open Space and In-Side-Out-Side-In (22 September – 22 December) with Site Gallery.

A Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellow, Wilson has been awarded the inaugural Jerwood New Work Fund and the Dover Prize 2021. She has a forthcoming solo exhibition at CCA Derry~Londonderry (31 March – 28 May 2023) and is currently the MIMA Kitchen & Garden Artist in Residence where she has been encouraging new conversations and connections around food, nutrition and local producers in the North East.

Ana Vicente is a Portuguese-born artist-researcher- educator based in London. Ana works with multidisciplinary methods including moving-image, performance, photography, installation, drawing and book design to explore modes of attention and being-with. Her work has been exhibited in the UK, Portugal, Ireland and the USA. She has also worked collaboratively and collectively in a variety of projects. She was a co-founder of Wotadot, a self-publishing project (2005-2016) showcasing work at Counter Plymouth, Bookartbookshop, Small Publishers Fair, Bristol Artists’ Book Fair, LAB at ICA, Manchester Artist’s Book Fair and Publish & Be Damned. Wotadot works were acquired by Centre for Fine Print Research, UWE, Bristol School of Art, Media and Design and the Artist’s Books Collection of the Winchester School of Art Library. She is a member of the artists’ Ground Collective exhibiting and publishing work since 2015. Ana was one of the recipients of the ArtsAdmin BANNER Award (2018/19) as part of the collaborative performance duo Lorie Jo and Ana.

Joshua Uvieghara is an artist who works primarily in painting, as well as processes involving collage/assemblage, found objects, printmaking, sculpture and installation. These frequently come together as environments that incorporate different approaches to painting. His practice is influenced by a broad range of sources including philosophy, the substance of colour and film.

Uvieghara has exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally including: The Royal Academy, The Freelands Foundation in London and Towner Gallery in Eastbourne. Since becoming a steering group member following his first solo show with the Brighton-based Grey Area project space (2006-2012), he has collaborated in varied artist led activities. He was a member of the artist strategy/exhibition group at Phoenix Art Space in Brighton (2013-2018). His work has recently been featured at The Manchester Contemporary with Meter Room project space from Coventry (2022) and with The London Group, ‘the UK’s longest-running and most prestigious artists’ collective’ since he was elected as a member in 2022.

Takako Jin is a woodcarver, sculptor and gilder.

Takako initially studied fine art sculpture and, after working in the art world for a period, she moved into woodwork, first through an NVQ in violin making, and then studying Woodcarving and Gilding at the City & Guilds of London Art School between 2010-2013.

Takako trained and worked for six years as a woodcarver, gilder and restorer at Carvers & Gilders Ltd, a leading London workshop and Royal Warrant holding company specialising in 18th century giltwood furniture. Here, she was involved in the restoration of many notable pieces by renowned woodcarvers and designers from the past, such as Thomas Chippendale and William Kent. She has also restored a number of pieces held in establishments such as Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Hampton Court and Brighton Pavilion. Through this work, Takako has developed a sensitivity and expertise for working with traditional techniques and materials, and an intimate familiarity with the subtleties of particular historical styles.

In her freelance work, Takako has worked on a variety of commissions including woodcarving and gilding, with the occasional bronze sculpture and stone carving. Clients have included private individuals, designers, artists, churches and City Livery Companies.

Joshua Freddie Vaughan is an artist working in a range of materials, as well as teaching Art School students to work in metal on a variety of scales, from small castings in pewter and smithing silver, to steel fabrication and red-metal casting. After studying at Central St. Martins: Byam Shaw he apprenticed for renowned silversmith Michael Burton, then carried on to study sculpture at BA level.

He has an eclectic range of interests and broad range of skills, having worked as a Fellow in Wood Working, as an arts technician for various arts fairs, and managed several arts projects since graduating.

An accredited conservator specialising in preventive conservation, wall painting conservation, and conservation management of collections and historic interiors, Katy worked for the National Trust for 27 years, serving as Head Conservator from 2005 to 2019. She was also a Trustee of the National Heritage Science Forum, and Chair of Icon’s PACR Accreditation Committee, winning the Plowden Medal in 2020. Now a freelance consultant providing advice, talks and publications, Katy’s regular roles include lecturing for City & Guilds of London Art School, and acting as an external examiner for the Institute of Archaeology, member of Southwark Cathedral’s Fabric Advisory Committee, and from June 2022, Chair of Historic England’s Historic Estate Conservation Committee.

 

The link between materials, processes and meaning is at the heart of my research. In my multi-disciplinary practice, I explore materials and ideas through a variety of art processes that often involve glassmaking.

A medium of endless possibilities, glass is a constant in my work, often playfully disguised as other materials: wax, wool, soap or even white chocolate! For me, glassmaking is a means to reflect upon the intricate web of interconnected histories that relate to the specific material I am working with, to its past, and to what it represents in contemporary life both on a personal and universal level.

Barbara Norden is a writer of plays, many of which tend towards the comic and fantastical. Her first commissioned work, The Milkman, was an absurdist take on the theme of nurturing. She went on to write a play about children handling personal disaster, Meteorite (Hampstead Theatre, 2003, published by Oberon). Her play for Radio 4, Souvenirs, explored cultural assumptions through the recordings of a woman on a mission to create a family. She was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship during which she worked on Babylon, a historical epic about turbulent life at the time of the English Civil War (The Rosemary Branch, 2013).

Her short plays have been performed in art galleries, alongside or as part of exhibitions, and in outdoor settings and she collaborated with The Factory theatre company on a series of projects including a devised production of The Odyssey which toured the UK.

As a lecturer she set up the Creative Writing MA at City, University of London where she taught on the playwriting programme for a number of years. Former students have gone on to successful careers in the drama industries and to do PhDs. Her own PhD looked into dramatic structure in the context of 20th century European and American playwriting. The research involved writing formally experimental plays and spending time on exchange at New York University.

She has also worked as a journalist writing on arts and social issues and in editorial roles on both mainstream and countercultural magazines. She is currently working on prose fiction.

 

www.bnorden.co.uk

Sandra Smith, the Head of Collection Care at the British Museum, was presented with an Honorary Fellowship of the Art School in 2019 in recognition of her support for the Art School’s Conservation Department through her role as external consultant during the re-validation of the Conservation courses in 2016 and her contribution as an industry expert during the Art School’s 2017 Quality Assurance Agency Review.

Prior to taking up her new post at the British Museum in 2019, Sandra was Head of Conservation and Technical Services at the Victoria & Albert Museum, with an overview of the long-term care of collections including contemporary design. During her 16-year tenure, she fostered research into the conservation and preservation of modern materials and the associated development of conservation practice to ensure the Victoria & Albert Museum collections would be accessible to future generations.

Sandra has also taken a leading role in the development of the conservation profession as the Co-ordinator of the Ceramics and Glass working group of ICOM-CC, participating in working groups within ICON to develop career opportunities and education strategies in conservation. She was the Senior Judge of the Nigel Williams Award for over 15 years, was Treasurer of IIC and ICON and is a Trustee of the Gabo Trust and Vice president of IIC. Sandra is an accredited conservator and Fellow of the International Institute of Conservation (IIC) and the Society of Antiquaries (FSA).

Professor Roger Kneebone was named the Art School’s first Honorary Fellow in 2017, in recognition of his commitment to stimulating cross-disciplinary dialogue in order to foster new and innovative ways of thinking and approaches to disciplines, in the arts, science and beyond.

Professor Kneebone is a clinician and educationalist who jointly leads the multidisciplinary Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science and the Centre for Performance Science at Imperial College London, where he is Professor of Surgical Education and Engagement Science. His innovative work on contextualised simulation builds on his personal experience as a surgeon and a general practitioner, and his interest in domains of expertise beyond medicine. Roger has built an unorthodox and creative team of clinicians, computer scientists, design engineers, social scientists, artists, performers and prosthetic experts.

Roger has an international profile as an academic and innovator and from 2013 to 2016 was a Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow. He publishes widely and speaks frequently at national and international conferences. His book Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery was published as a Penguin paperback in 2021. Roger is especially interested in collaborative research at the intersections between traditional disciplinary boundaries and brings his considerable knowledge and insight to thinking on art and the nature of craft. Since 2019 Roger has been the fourteenth Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy of Arts, where he is exploring how artists, doctors and scientists perceive the human body. And he hosts a fortnightly podcast, Countercurrent, in which he invites scientists, artists, musicians, clinicians, craftspeople and writers to take part in free-flowing discussions.

Further information is on Roger’s website: www.rogerkneebone.co.uk

Jaimini Patel is an artist based in London whose work explores the agency of matter through a negotiation of boundaries, systems, and performative actions.  Slight interventions are made to materials and spaces to reveal their ability to hold memories or associations and examine how these can be transformed, shifted, or even removed. Increasingly working with remnants from her daily existence Patel invites the contemplation of time through the intricate interdependence of things, both animate and inanimate.

www.jaiminipatel.com

Tom Worsfold (b. 1990, Cambridge) is an artist and Fine Art tutor based in London. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools and the Slade School of Fine Art and has exhibited widely across the UK and internationally, including: Castor Projects, Carlos/Ishikawa, Block 336, MAMOTH, Recent Activity, Mackintosh Lane, Space K, Spike Island and more.

Worsfold embraces painting’s ability to accommodate disparate forms, styles and references – seeing the medium as a model for interdisciplinary thinking and cultural dialogue. More than this, he sees painting as a means of producing complexity, nuance and ambiguity.

Candida Powell-Williams makes sculptures and performances that layer narratives about cultural and biological evolution. Underscored by feminist themes, she collages history, ancient mythologies and science fiction, drawing parallels and contradictions across time and space.

Sculptural forms accumulate into playful installations – ranging from theatrical landscapes to intimate grottos and probe the transformative potential of the psychedelic. Riffing on the notion of a shared symbolic language, Powell-Williams breaks away from the strictures of storytelling to examine how humans find meaning in disparate things. She often engages with a site’s history and explores how bodily encounters with the environment effect our psyches. Forms frequently reference the Baroque or ‘90s computer games and are fabricated in saccharine colours to evoke theme parks– all genres concerned with movement, journeys and sentient experiences. Interested in sculpture as a live experience Powell-Williams often incorporates performative elements like fountains and motifs such as wheels – human-made technologies- which teeter between dormant and activated states.

Powell-Williams collaborates with dancers on movement sequences and transformation rituals like yoga or labyrinth-walking and is guided by an underlying interest in how a choreography of the body could evoke restless psychological states, such as boredom. The act of making a performance creates its own mythology and informs new sculptures. Accompanied by synthesised soundscapes, performance documentation is collaged with animation becoming a new work which embraces the language of the screen.

Powell-Williams plays with all these different notions of animation to reflect on what it is to feel our way, adapt and find meaning, in the endlessly moving world.

Following a classic, academic training in Florence, Kate Dunn studied MA Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School, graduating in 2018. Kate’s practice centres on renaissance, rave, light and sacred space, taking the form of altarpiece paintings and multi-sensory installation; the multi-sensory aspect coming from UV light, darkness and sound. The sound coming from collaborations with several producers, most frequently one under the alias of Shoobz Darg. Looking at the many ways we engage in worship, Kate references the spectrum of sacred spaces emerging from this engagement. The term ‘collective effervescence’ describes the basis of her research, coined by Emile Durkheim in the 1900s; Durkheim argued that the church congregation were not worshipping god but the feeling of communal ecstasy they experienced in the space.

Richard Nichols is a Book and Paper Conservator, accredited by Icon in 2000. After graduating in Archive Preservation and Repair from Camberwell College of Art in 1976 he enjoyed 44 years working in Archive Services and Record Offices and has now embarked on an exciting new venture as a Conservator in Private Practice. His experience ranges from Anglo Saxon parchment documents to volumes representing all aspects of bookbinding development from the 12th century onwards.

He is passionate about conservation training, having been an instructor for 26 years on the ‘Archive Conservation Training Scheme’ of The Archives and Records Association (ARA), teaching modules in paper, parchment, and book conservation to student interns.

He believes in the importance of contributing to the wider conservation community including ARA, The Institute of Conservation (Icon), Society of Bookbinders (SoB) and the Midlands Conservators Group. Between 1992 and 2002 he served as Secretary and Chair of the Preservation and Conservation Group of ARA. In 2002 he co-organised and hosted the ARA three day conservation conference at Staffordshire University.

He was a member of the Icon Accreditation Committee for 13 years, scoring applications for accreditation. He also served as a mentor to accreditation applicants for 5 years, supporting them through the accreditation process. He currently serves as a CPD reader for the accreditation scheme.

Nick Rampley joined the Art School in 2021, having worked in financial and operational positions across the education sector for many years. He was Vice Principal of Morley College for 11 years, following senior roles at The Purcell School in Hertfordshire and The Thrombosis Research Institute.

As Vice Principal at Morley College, Nick was a key part of the team leading the development and implementation of its business, providing adult education to over 13,000 students, and, amongst other achievements, led the acquisition of an independent training provider and a community-based outreach centre. Leading the College’s property strategy, Nick planned and delivered complex building development projects including specialist arts studios, and completed the first (£3.5M) phase of Morley’s estates masterplan.

Nick gained a BA (Hons) in Music at Merton College, Oxford University and in 1996, achieved an MBA at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine (University of London), where he was awarded the Director’s prize for best dissertation. Since 2020, Nick has been completing an MA in Public Histories at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Nick is a keen musician and is principal bassoon for Kensington Symphony Orchestra, as well as an occasional member of other orchestras and chamber groups.  The variety of trustee positions he holds reflect his passion for music and the arts, including the Margaret Engering Music Trust, NonClassical, and the Samuel Gardner Memorial Trust. He is also a Director of WeAreWaterloo, the Business Improvement District close to the Art School.

Sophie studied at London Metropolitan University and has a BA Hons in Design Studies. She went on to work as a photographer for 15 years and specialised in portraiture. During that time she photographed a wide range of people from MPs to children. She taught photography to secondary school students as an enrichment subject for six years. She has also worked as a creative artworker. She designed a variety of printed material as well as electronic publications. In recent years she has been working with clay and experimenting with form.

 

EDUCATION

2001-2004, BA Hons Design Studies, London Metropolitan University. London, UK.

 

EMPLOYMENT

2003-2018, Photographer, Sographia Photography, UK.

2010-2016, Photography Teacher, Hasmonean High School, UK.

2010-2016, Creative Artworker, Hasmonean High School, UK.

Nikkie Amouyal comes from a family of Italo-French artists in Fashion and Fine Art. In 1990 she got a BA (Hons) at the ECV in Paris and worked for over a decade as a Creative Designer in the Music Industry in Paris. Nikkie moved to London in 2000 to carry on her career on an international level. She started to work at Dewynters for the West End productions before joining Eagle Rock Entertainments for 14 years where Nikkie has created visuals for a very wide range of international artists. In 2010 she received a BVA Award for Best British Authored DVD and Design for her work with Monty Python.

From 2006 to 2009 she directed a monthly themed club night called Rockabaret. Rockabaret was dedicated to freedom of expression with glamorous extravagant rock parties held in London clubs involving live art performances.

Nikkie has been with the Art School since 2016 and has brought an added glamour to our daily life – she is also a most considerate and helpful addition to our technical team. She is delighted to be back to the roots of Art in a new career as a Conservation Studio Manager as well as Photoshop Teacher. She is committed to the success and safety of our Conservation students and ensures the smooth and efficient running of our Conservation labs and studios.

 

 

 

Sarah Davis is a multi-media artist using hands on sculptural techniques to explore the cyclical nature of recovery and renewal. Davis’ approach to making is informed by a love for historic crafts such as carving and gilding. Her carving is very sculptural and contemporary but rooted in the language of ornament.

Since 2020 Sarah has been practicing the art of illumination which is listed on The HCA Red List of Endangered Crafts.

In 2012 Davis graduated from Chelsea College of Art with a BA in Fine Art. She returned to education in 2015 to study woodcarving and gilding at the the City & Guilds of London Art school. She graduated with a distinction in 2019. Since then Davis has set up her studio in South London and now teaches on several of the Art school’s specialist degree courses: Carving; Conservation: Stone, Wood & Decorative Surfaces; and Conservation: Books & Paper.

www.sarahgdavis.co.uk

Thomas Ball is a freelance carver specialising in ornamental woodcarving.

Originally training as a technical illustrator and model maker, Tom moved his focus to working in wood and studied Woodcarving & Gilding at City & Guilds of London Art School between 2005 – 2008.

Since this time, Tom has worked extensively within the field of carving and restoration, working for many of the country’s top conservation companies. This has provided Tom with a great opportunity to develop an understanding and a sensitivity for working within many period styles, as well as building a high level of competence for working with valuable and often fragile historic objects. Recent projects include the removal, repair and re-gilding of the entire carved ceiling at Lincoln College Chapel Oxford, restoration of Grinling Gibbons carving at Trinity College Chapel Oxford and  carving and gilding the main canopy columns for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

Wycliffe trained as a cabinet maker and made furniture for business and private collections in London and Ireland for many years.  After returning to university to  study materials practice he developed a pared down technique investigating and attempting to show the inherent beauty of timber and its fragile and robust qualities, without the distractions of form and function.

Working from his workshop in south London, Wycliffe makes work to commission for private clients, art specifiers and speculatively for galleries and art fairs.

Vanessa Simeoni ACR, is a stone and preventive conservator and Head Conservator at Westminster Abbey. On graduating from the Art School’s BA (Hons) Conservation Studies in 1992, she was employed by Cliveden Conservation Workshops for seven years working across the UK on a variety of stone conservation projects. She worked at various National Trust, English Heritage and Historic Royal Palaces sites as well as Uppark House and Windsor Castle, post fires. She developed a specialism in the conservation of medieval floor tiles through projects at numerous cathedrals in the UK. Historic floors and churches remain a passion for her.

She set up conservation at Westminster Abbey and heads a small team of dedicated conservators covering a variety of specials. In addition to stone, Vanessa focuses on preventive conservation and collection care. Major Abbey projects include the conservation of the Cosmati pavement and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries.

Vanessa is an accredited conservator, CPD reader and PACR assessor for ICON. She is currently a conservation committee member on the Sculpture and Furnishing group for the Cathedral and Church Building division,  Church of England. She has lectured on the Historic Floors course at West Dean and published on her work at the Abbey.

Since graduating from the Art School’s BA (Hons) Conservation Studies in 2010, Lou has built up her experience as a conservator, primarily with stone, but also related materials such as plaster, mosaics and ceramics. She particularly likes the complexities of treating and maintaining exterior statuary and architectural detail.  Working in the private sector has given her a good understanding of the financial implications of operating in a highly competitive environment and the kinds of skills employers need.

Her work has taken her to many churches and cathedrals (Norwich Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, St Mary Abbot’s Kensington, All Saints Margaret Street), Historic Royal Palaces (Hampton Court, Kensington Palace, Tower of London), National Trust properties (Ham House, Polesden Lacey, Rainham Hall) English Heritage properties (Kenwood House, Jewel Tower, Eltham Palace) and museums (Royal Academy, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Tate Galleries, V&A). As well as these practical projects, Lou has carried out various condition surveys including jobs at the Bank of England, the Guildhall, the Houses of Parliament and the London City Walls.

Lou has been supervising practical stone conservation projects for second and third year students since 2018. Before changing to a career in conservation, Lou taught English in Spain for many years and she is now enjoying recycling the skills she learnt there in a new context. She has also organised training days for National Trust volunteers and has given talks about the projects she has worked on at Norwich Cathedral and the Museum of London. Together with a colleague, she has recently had a paper published in the Proceedings of Stone 2020 14th International Conference on the Deterioration and Conservation of Stone (Ana Logreira, Lou Ashon, Conservation of the Cloisters at Norwich Cathedral).

Sarah Healey-Dilkes ACR is a part-time Senior Sculpture Conservator at the V&A Museum. She has worked on the V&A’s large scale refurbishment projects for the Medieval and Renaissance, European Galleries and more recently the Cast Courts. The projects include the conservation of both immoveable monumental artworks in stone, stucco and plaster, to more portable sculpture. She has an interest in both the V&A’s contemporary and historic collections and is routinely involved with the preparation of the collection for exhibitions, loans and display.

She was awarded Accreditation by ICON in 2012 and is an Assessor for the Conservation and Collections Care Technicians Diploma (Level 4) run collaboratively by the V&A and ICON.

Since graduating in conservation studies from the City & Guilds of London Art School (1990) she has worked at the British Museum and now combines part-time work at the V&A with running a private conservation practice based in Cambridge.

Cheryl Porter is a books and paper conservator who has worked in the UK and around the world. She has led major conservation projects at the Montefiascone Seminary Library and the Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation, as well as freelance conservation work with a wide range of clients. She has taught and lectured throughout Europe, the USA and Egypt and has been published in many conservation journals and publications. Over a 14 year period, she conducted a series of field research, collecting and analysing pigments around the world, including sea snails from Italy and Kermes insects from Languedoc, France.

Cheryl is a member of many professional bodies including the International Council of Museums, American Institute for Conservation, International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works  and the Institute of Conservation. She is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and has been the Secretary of the Islamic Manuscript Association (TIMA): Conservation sub-committee and Advisor to the Friends of the Coptic Museum and curators.

Bridget Mitchell is a Book Conservator, Icon accredited in 2000. She has run her own book conservation studio since 2003, trading under the name Arca Preservation which undertakes book conservation treatments, exhibition and display preparation, book cradle design and construction and specialises in the design and construction of preservation solutions for books, manuscripts and complex manuscript objects. She is also the designer of the “Book Shelter”, a project she developed in collaboration with the National Trust to facilitate the quick, easy and protected display of books where a display case is neither desirable nor available. Her interests lie in enabling objects to impact their viewers to their maximum potential by facilitating the objects’ use, display and storage appropriately. She also has a keen interest in the business of running a craft-based business and helping professional craftspeople and conservators run businesses that succeed.

Bridget trained in Bookbinding and Conservation with Maureen Duke at Guildford Technical College, graduating with Distinction in 1991. She went on to gain the position of Conservation Assistant at the Bodleian Library where she worked in the library Bindery and the Conservation Department before receiving a Conservation Trust Scholarship to study the Conservation of Rare Books and Early Manuscripts with Christopher Clarkson and David Dorning at West Dean College. Returning to the Bodleian for a year to work on a project to make book shoes for Duke Humfrey’s Library in 1995, she took a position as Book Conservator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She became Senior Conservator in 1998 with responsibility for some of the museum’s major book projects and galleries refurbishments.

Amanda Brannan is a London-based book artist, papermaker and workshop leader. She observes and engages with patterns, images and informative text to create her visual arts language that is heavily influenced by her interaction and research with the architecture of London.

While living in California during the 90’s she studied both Japanese and Western styles of hand papermaking, which led to the development of her personal style that involves experimenting with different traditional papermaking fibres, recycled materials and pigmentation methods. She uses complex layers of different manipulated fibres to create patterns that are influenced by her research.

Amanda’s approach to support effective teaching is to create an environment that encourages cooperative learning in a relaxed atmosphere, allowing everyone the opportunity to participate in all aspects of the processes, encourage group idea sharing and discussions, as well as experimentation with all the different techniques.

Following an education and career in immunology, Judith Gowland gained a BA in Art History from the Open University and an MA Conservation Fine Art (Paper) from the University of Northumbria. Since then she has practised paper conservation, setting up her own studio in 1992. In her studio practice she has worked for a large range of private clients and public institutions including National Railway Museum, York Minster Library, Henry Moore Foundation, RHS – Lindley Library and Red Cross Museum.  She recently exhibited her work on an important collection of fire-damaged 20th century watercolours and drawings at the Museum of Everything exhibition at Kunsthal, Rotterdam.

Judith is an Accredited Conservator of the Institute of Paper Conservation, an Accredited Member of  the International Organisation of Paper Conservators and Co-ordinator of the Independent Paper Conservators’ Group on Google.

Edward Cheese is an Accredited conservator specialising in books and manuscripts.  Following Postgraduate work in English Literature at the University of Durham he studied book conservation at West Dean College, where he was awarded the President’s Prize for his work and won a Queen Elizabeth Craft Scholarship.  On qualifying as a conservator, Edward was invited to join Melvin Jefferson and Elizabeth Bradshaw at the Cambridge Colleges’ Conservation Consortium workshop to prepare the Parker manuscripts at Corpus Christi for digitisation.  He was offered a permanent position at the end of the project and worked for the Consortium for just over eight years in total, the last three as Conservation Manager.  In 2015 he took up his current post of Conservator of Manuscripts and Printed Books (Assistant Keeper) at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Edward has wide experience of practical conservation of printed books, manuscripts and archives, and is particularly interested in the history of bookbinding.  He has also served on the Icon Task and Finish Group to formulate an ethical code for the conservation profession in the UK, been external examiner in Book Conservation at West Dean College, and has given many lectures and study sessions on the history of bookbinding and conservation issues.

Shaun Thompson has 30 years’ experience as a professional bookbinder. He began his career at London Journal Bindery, now Blissett Bookbinders, where he served a four-year modern apprenticeship. In 2011, he took up a new position at Cambridge University Library, where he is currently Conservation Collection Care Manager. He is responsible for overseeing and coordinating the activities of six members of the Collection Care Team. He has a comprehensive knowledge of the methods and materials and their suitability from different genres that include trade bookbinding, modern journal rebinding, fine binding, artisan binding and medieval book construction. Over his career, he has acquired considerable knowledge of techniques used in the repair and conservation of books from medieval parchment to digital press paper.

He is particularly interested in the history of books and their structural qualities. he has taught historical book structures in the UK and Europe, focusing mainly on Romanesque, Gothic and limp book structures. In 2013, he taught a short course to the MA conservation students at West Dean College.

Dr Joanna Russell holds an MSci in Chemistry with Conservation Science from Imperial College, London, and an MA in the Conservation of Easel Paintings from Northumbria University. She completed an internship in paintings conservation at the Hamilton Kerr Institute and also worked as a freelance paintings’ conservator for various clients, before returning to Northumbria University to undertake her PhD on the analysis of painting materials, focussing on the artist Francis Bacon. While at Northumbria University she also carried out teaching for postgraduate courses on conservation.

Since completing her PhD she has gained over seven years’ experience of working in scientific research departments in museums, first at the British Museum, and then at the National Gallery, working on the technical imaging and analysis of museum objects, particularly drawings and paintings. Joanna is currently Scientist at a specialist independent laboratory, where she conducts scientific analysis of paint and pigment and carries out technical imaging.

For over 30 years, Heather has built an extensive career in stone masonry and conservation at Canterbury Cathedral. As Head of Conservation since 2013, she worked collaboratively across the organisation, with oversight of all conservation-related matters. Previously, Heather had been the Cathedral’s Head of Stonemasonry and Conservation from 2006, and Stone Mason & Head Conservator since 1988, working on site and in the workshop to produce carved stone and conserve original fabric.

During her time at Canterbury Cathedral, she managed some of the building’s most recent and high-profile major projects, and has had a leading role in ‘The Canterbury Journey’, a major five-year development to conserve and safeguard the Cathedral’s heritage and enrich the visitor experience, including extensive restoration of the West Towers, the Nave roof and Christ Church Gate. She also developed and co-founded the Cathedrals’ Workshop Fellowship, a training initiative run in partnership with eight other cathedrals and the University of Gloucestershire.

As well as her work at Canterbury Cathedral, Heather has been designing and carving memorials in stone and wood with husband Gary, for almost 20 years.

 

Kim teaches on four courses at the City & Guilds of London Art School: Fine Art, Historic Carving, Conservation, and Foundation. She is a senior associate lecturer at the University of the Arts and is currently external assessor at the Art Academy.

Her sculpture is concerned with observation of the life model, the human head, and portraiture. The work may involve the whole body, part of a body or the configuration of the head alone. The portraits involve the scrutiny and selection of external properties to reflect something of the internal personality or character. Her models may be strangers or people she knows well. She says “my work is often modelled in clay because of its palpable quality and the way it moves so easily, like the body, like flesh. It evolves through a process of part drawing, part painting, part construction, and is cast in a variety of materials including paper, plaster, resin, reconstituted stone and bronze.”

Her modelling and the meticulousness of her mold making and casting techniques have led to collaborative research projects with the National Portrait Gallery, the Whitechapel Gallery, the Forty Hall Museum & Estate, Shepperton Film Studios, and University College London.

Diane Magee has been running the Drawing Studio at City & Guilds of London Art School since 1996. She graduated from the Royal Academy Drawing Schools with a Diploma in Painting, and prior to that completed an Advanced Diploma in Teaching, Fine Art, at the Adelaide College of the Arts and Education. She holds an MA in History of Art from Birkbeck College.

Saena studied ornamental woodcarving and gilding at the Art School and after graduating set up a studio, working as a self-employed carver and gilder. In 2007 Saena returned to the City & Guilds of London Art School as a woodcarving tutor in the Conservation and Carving Departments and she also teaches at the Building and Crafts College.

Saena has worked within both the traditional and contemporary sectors including the Tower of London, New College and Oriel College in Oxford, Penguin Books, Kopparberg and Guinness.

 

Ghislain is a sculptor and Stone Carving Tutor at the Art School. He trained at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris, gaining a BA and MA, with key tutors Richard Deacon, Joel Fisher, Jean Cardot. His work has been exhibited in London and Paris and is included in a public collection at Tatihou Island Museum in France.

His work focuses on the tensions between the form of the sculpture, the material used and the process by which the form is created out of that material. Ghislain is also interested in the relationship between the plinth and the sculpture and the restraining force the plinth imposes on the artwork. He experiments with different ways of anchoring or hanging his work to challenge this.

Joanna is a trained chemist and paintings conservator, with a PhD in the analysis of paint materials, and extensive experience of the technical imaging and analysis of museum objects, particularly drawings and paintings.

Having worked as a freelance paintings conservator for clients including Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Kiffy Stainer Hutchins Conservators, Joanna then went on to teach on postgraduate conservation courses at Northumbria University and was Postdoctoral Fellow at The British Museum specialising in the examination and analysis of drawings and researching the materials and techniques of Renaissance metalpoint drawings. She has also worked as a Specialist Scientist for Paintings Examination at The National Gallery. Joanna is currently  Scientist at a specialist independent laboratory, where she conducts scientific analysis of paint and pigment.

Dana Melchar is a Senior Furniture Conservator at the Victoria & Albert Museum and tutor for the Conservation Department at City & Guilds of London Art School. She graduated with a Masters of Science in Art Conservation, with a specialisation in furniture, from the Winterthur University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. Additionally, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and trained as a cabinet and furniture maker at the North Bennet Street School in Boston, Massachusetts. At the V&A, she works on many different types of furniture and 3-D organic objects carrying out both preventive and interventive conservation treatments as well as object-based research.

Gerry Alabone is concerned with understanding, managing and communicating the assistance that frames give to paintings within their settings.

He studied Fine Art (painting) at Bath Academy of Art and Restoration and Conservation (wood and metals) at London Guildhall University. He has over 20 years of experience specialising in picture frames including working in the frame-making trade, as a Gallery Technician and as lead frames conservator at the City of London’s Guildhall Art Gallery. He was Head of Frames Conservation at Tate from 2004-2016 and is presently Senior Conservator (furniture and frames) at the National Trust.

Gerry is Joint Chair of the Gilding & Decorative Surfaces group (Icon), and  a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

My work explores time, memory, experience and space. Work manifests through and intimate understanding of my upbringing and surroundings, in affinity to childhood memory and Northern Irish identity. I seek to blur the boundaries of space, public and private, focusing on the urban and domestic. My cathartic means of working displays a time that once was, or never has been. As Fictions emerge through repressed memories, dreams and encounters of stories as images. Narrative is constructed through 2D and 3D objects, prints and installation. Time is reactivated, and there is a re-enactment of experiences. Concepts of austerity, conflict and identity within the work relate beyond my own experience and to a wider social and cultural context. My work is a response. I use my own experience as a means to retell and to break down barriers.

My practice is rooted in the figurative. My aim is to create an atmosphere at once exuberant and humorous but at the same time, one of disquiet.  I am increasingly interested in exploring parallels between the human and natural worlds, seeking shared patterns, thereby emphasising that we are essentially part of the world of matter, and no more.

My work utilises contemporary carpentry to build monuments that merge the architectural and design styles of historic political hegemonies with contemporary consumer aesthetics (particularly those from fitness, wellbeing, and ergonomics). The idea being that if we can see ergonomic detailing as filigree – which is a conscious extravagance rather than a performance enhancing, engineering necessity- then the scientistic parlance of this industry becomes more open to interpretation or appropriation, and less authoritative. In order to mimic the visual language of ergonomics, I often take patterns found in grips for razors, toothbrushes, or trainer soles, and recreate them in much more pronounced positions.

Information on a particular climate, time, environment and more can be taken from a tree. It seems as if the tree acts as a bookmark for the inner workings of the earth.

In woodworking processes, the additive and subtractive qualities are of interest to me, as are the labour, devotion and communal aspect of woodworking.

I collect images, memories and objects and use them as influences in my practice, making unexpected associations to create a fiction in its own right. My work is informed by the processes of hybridisation and the mistranslations that happen when elements from one culture travel and adapt to a new one. I make installations where I use smell, paintings, and sculptures made of wood, polystyrene and plaster, painted to look like different surfaces. I like drawing connections between everyday materials, especially processed meats and stone, as they have a similar type of conglomerate composition.

Embedded in the processes through which I make and think is a fascination with the material properties of things. These accumulate into a mass of material objects and a variety of critical ideas. I pursue a tactile, affective, object-driven process, methodically exploring the material itself, flirting with language and investigating what things are in essence, or what they might become. The works are like material propositions; they occupy a physical space in the process of becoming something else.

I am a multidisciplinary artist who produces visual representations of my dyslexia when faced with sequential information. Creating physical manifestations of how I process written and verbal language, I use the illustrative metanarrative of Greek mythology. Analysing these written stories, I select words that embed in my mind and that defy my lack of working memory. I signify these words by using motifs, signs, and an alphabet of shapes that weave in and out a structure’s clasp. The shapes hint at broken and suspended connections, existing as floating silhouettes that create illusionary depth.

I am currently working as a sculptor but have been a B-BOY (break dancer) even before this. Being a B-BOY is the base for making my works. I emphasise the movement of the body in the way a B-BOY does. I mainly work with wood carvings, expressing the momentum and motion, and in contrast symmetrical poses.

In addition to the sculptures of B-BOY, I also refer to sculptures that are abstracted to the limit as “BUTTAI” (object in Japanese) and create photography works and films.

It looks like a contrastive expression to a sculpture work that is three-dimensional, but it is a work created from the perspective of a B-BOY’s body expression. They are all in one extension of a “B-BOY”.  The two expressions exist in a contradictory relationship in all senses of “representation and abstraction”, “three dimensions and two dimensions”, “gravity and weightlessness”, and “static and movement” on their extended lines.

In recent years I have been using 3D scanning and 3D printers to change the size of the sculptures and output, replacing them with other materials, and mass-producing.

Laura’s practice focuses mainly in printmaking and film.  Her work explores how the subconscious is brought to the fore. It is heavily concerned with exploring theatrical imagery that has erotic and fantastical overtones. She is fascinated by what it means to be human; what makes us human. Sex, death, beastiality, mythologies, symbolism and transgression are common themes in her practice.

Laura’s work is in private collections across the UK and she exhibits widely. Recent exhibitions include the Bankside Gallery, Royal Academy, Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the London Short Film Festival.

After completing a Graphic Communication degree at Bath School of Art, Laura went on to gain an MA Fine Art Printmaking at Royal College of Art in London. She was a Fellow at Royal Academy Schools from 2012-15.

Different from most of my peers, I will say that I want to be a printmaker instead of an artist. More precisely, I want to be a craftsman or an artisan focusing on making prints. Ozu Yasujiro is my favourite movie director, and probably my favourite artist. In an interview, he once said, “I only know how to make tofu. I can make fried tofu, boiled tofu, stuffed tofu. Cutlets and other fancy stuff, that’s for other directors.” Because he spent his entire career to make nothing else but “tofu”, he made the best “tofu”. Ozu probably did not consider himself as an artist, but a craftsman who repeatedly practiced the same craft until he reached perfection. This is what I want to be – a tofu maker; a craftsman in printmaking. Except through practicing the same craft repetitively and constantly, I do not know any other way to achieve perfection.

My works are a culmination and accumulation into site specific history to depict socio-cultural entropic narratives. They explore the correlation between architecture and sculptural landscapes of derelict and disused spaces. I seek sites where the intersection between function and intention have fallen into decline and disrepair, where untold histories recount themselves, in all their brevity, satire, beauty, and collapse. I work within the reimagined human landscape: the world we shape to suit our needs and what happens when their obsolescence renders them irrelevant.

Gray’s work explores Gender and Sexuality and how they intersect with other structures of power and identity. They create an iconography that both maintains and interrupts coded imagery to build an alternative space of both familiarity and discomfort, allowing the viewer to recognize and deconstruct their relationships to familiar images, objects, spaces, and notions of themselves. Ultimately collage plays an integral role in their practice, taking on many forms, from video and sculpture to sound and printmaking.

As they explore their own tenuous relationship with their gender and body, Gray’s work uses a variety of strategies through which to explore identity, specifically ambivalent relationships to masculinity. Recently Gray’s research and practice uses sports for both aesthetics and metaphor as an entry point to explore themes such as national identity (specifically the US and Americana), desire, myth making, surveillance, hierarchies, race, and gender. Ultimately Gray’s practice becomes a way to engage directly with the realities and contexts within which we live while at the same time imagining and proposing alternatives, even if it’s just in our imaginations.

Gray Wielebinski is an artist working between London and Los Angeles in print, video, performance, sound, sculpture, and installation. They graduated from The Slade School of Fine Art with a Masters in Fine Art Media in 2018 and was recently Artist in Residence at the Academy of Visual Arts in Hong Kong. Gray has recently exhibited with Gazelli Art House and B. Dewitt Gallery in London, Primary in Nottingham, TURF Projects in Croydon and exhibits internationally in places like LA, New York, Canada, Greece, Copenhagen. They have an upcoming residency at Casa de Dona Laura in Portugal funded by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and have upcoming exhibitions at Lychee One in London and Organon in Odense, Denmark in September 2019.

Website: www.graywielebinski.com

Jemma’s practice explores the documentation of urban and industrial decline. Her fascination with recording the passage of time is evoked with nostalgia and the questions that arise around the lost and forgotten landscapes. Urban exploration and documenting architectural decline reconnects the present day to the past. She increasingly feels this is important and a way of recording our heritage before it is obliterated from our society. Drawing, photographing and producing prints permit the experience of authenticity of place which is lacking in our forever developing, shiny and pre-fabricated landscapes. Jemma’s recordings invite the viewer to reflect upon the degeneration of architectural spaces and to experience the city as a living museum.

Sally Kindberg is an author, illustrator, and comic strip maker. She was born in Devon – almost in the sea – and grew up in Nottingham.  She came to London to make her fortune after completing a BA in Graphic Design, has written and illustrated over thirty children’s non-fiction books, illustrated many more, and is a City of London Guide, which came in useful when researching and writing a book about London.

Sally illustrated regularly for the Guardian and Independent newspapers, eventually writing a travel column and features for them. One of her many travel assignments included going to Elf School in Reykjavik.  Her comic strip commissions include a CBBC series and books for Bloomsbury Children’s Books, including one about Space.

Sally has run many workshops for children, families and adults in places as diverse as the Outer Hebrides, China and Swedenborg House in London. Workshop participants have included migrant workers’ children in Beijing, dancers in Shetland and psychotherapists in London. Sally collects robots amongst other things, and is the Curator of a Museum of Dust.

The Hand Book (of hopes and dreams) will be published by Design For Today in 2019.  Sally is currently working on Unfinished Business, an unreliable memoir in comic strip form.

 

Dr Oriana Fox is a video and performance artist and an art historian, and teaches art histories across several of our courses including Fine Art and Foundation. She holds a PhD in Visual Cultures and an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London; as well as a BFA in Painting from Washington University in St. Louis.

Her written and practical work explore the connections between self-disclosure, non-conformity, belonging and mental health. More specifically, Oriana’s doctoral thesis investigates risky truth-telling within feminist and queer performance art from the 1970s to today, weighing up its therapeutic and political outcomes. In her videos, she combines sincerity and humour, taking on many roles from housewives and exercise goddesses to Viennese Actionists, in order to infuse the fantasies of those great myth-makers, TV and Hollywood, with feminist criticality.

 

Combining my interests of museology, science, and my surrounding landscape, I undertake investigations that seek to re-visualise an experience of my own, and ignite an experience in the viewer.

The natural world has always interested me, and I spend a lot of my free time exploring my surroundings on walks, which I record in immediate formats such as photos, sketches, maps, coordinates, rubbings, as I am fascinated by topography and how it differs around the world. Through these immediate responses I create both two-dimensional and three-dimensional artwork, which tend to go through transformations, to subsequently trigger memories of my experiences.

Dan Mifsud studied furniture design at London College of Furniture before gaining a B.Ed. in Design Education awarded by Exeter University. Consolidating his interest in narrative and socially engaged design, he has recently completed an MA in Narrative Environments at Central Saint Martins.

Jacky studied at Middlesex University and the Royal College of Art. Her career has two mutually beneficial aspects to it – her own practice creating work for commissions, residencies and exhibitions and the facilitation of others’ artistic work. Working mainly in metal she utilizes a range of techniques and processes, including jewellery, silversmithing and blacksmithing skills to create small hand held objects through to large-scale architectural pieces. The one thing common to all her work regardless of scale is the attention to detail, gained from her training as a jeweller.

Teresita Dennis has worked in the Art School as a Senior tutor in Fine Art since 1999. Her role as a support tutor began in 2007 and since then she has developed the department to encompass the changing needs of students, with a focus on enabling access to learning and promoting confidence and inclusion, in relation to their individual needs. As Head of Access to Learning, Teresita is trained to support students with a variety of learning differences, alongside making course based needs assessments, individual learning plans, reasonable adjustments where needed, facilitating  DSA applications, providing pastoral care and giving advisory information and advice regarding mental health and general wellbeing.

Gabriel Birch is an Interdisciplinary Artist, Researcher and Educator with a practice informed by the crossover between Art and Design. He studied Sculpture at the Royal College of Art 2012-2014, previously attending Brighton University from 2002-2005. In 2009 he co-founded Pavilion; an Art Architecture collaboration for which he has produced a range of funded multiplatform projects and worked in curatorial and exhibition design capacities.

Gabriel has exhibited across the UK and internationally, with institutions such as Arnolfini, V&A and Glasgow International. Important projects include Second Skin (solo exhibition Caustic Coastal Manchester 2017), The Future Museum (Artquest residency project at the Foundling Museum 2016), Hollow Reef (Spitalfields public art commission 2015), Carnet de Reves, (fiac offsite exhibition at Studio Orta, Les Moulins France 2013) and Auditorium (touring large scale video installation exhibited at Dilston Grove and Limbo Margate 2012). Gabriel has worked as a lecturer and visiting practitioner for over 10 years on Fine Art and Design courses across the UK. He has also delivered public facing talks, lectures and research seminars at Galleries and Universities in the UK and internationally.

The Painter-Stainers’ Decorative Surface Fellowship at City and Guilds of London Art School presents the opportunity for me to explore decorative techniques, diversifying my imagery and compositions to a wider range of processes and crafts.

I am particularly attracted to incorporating marbling, wood graining and stone blocking it will really enhance the effect I wish to capture in my paintings, also to gain a better understanding of gilding and glazing to combine into my own pieces.

I make wooden sculptures and paint them like other materials as I am interested in the idea of the fake in relation to cultural stereotypes. I like the unexpected effect of the fake; things don’t seem what they are. The shapes and textures come from different places and times. I play with the processes of hybridisation and the mistranslations that happen when elements from one culture travel and adapt to a new one. I associate objects that have a similar texture or connotation, like salami and terrazzo.

My art practice is about creating machines and objects that are self-defeating and that play with the viewer’s expectations; in the past I have made things from mostly found objects, merging them together to create strange/dysfunctional/odd assemblages. Recently my work has become more technical and precise, exploring laser cutting in various materials such as wood and acrylic.

Matthew’s approach to art making is through the construction of critical and research-oriented projects. These projects have thus far been couched in his time-based media studies background and take the form of prints and videos with a foregrounded materiality. These forms—silkscreens printed with gelatine and silver in a recent framework—are assembled through an engagement with theories and modes of working surrounding materialist ontologies, creative cultural geographies, and caring in a more-than-human world. Central to this cultural production approach is an aim towards shifting viewer perceptions towards photographic media: his working process intends to place material affect on the same plane of recognition as depicted mimetic representations.

Matthew beach received his MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art and BFA from the University of Florida. He also participated in the 2016 Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art. Recent exhibitions include The Political Animal Event, The Showroom, London and Individuating, Rosa–Luxemburg–Platz Kunstverein, Berlin. Beach is currently a Geography MA candidate at Queen Mary, University of London and artist-in-residence at Charleston House as part of the 2018 Diep~Haven festival.

 

Harriet Lam studied for her MA Library and Information Management at Manchester Metropolitan University, having previously gained BA (Honours) and MA degrees in English Literature at the University of Leeds. She has a background working in academic and art libraries including Christie’s Education, Courtauld Institute of Art, and Birkbeck, University of London. She is a member of ARLIS/UK & Ireland: the Art Libraries Society, sitting on the Professional Development Committee (2013-17) and Conference Working Party for the London 2018 conference.

Rachel Warriner is an art historian, curator and critic. She graduated from University College Cork in 2016 having completed her doctoral thesis which examined the work of American feminist artist Nancy Spero in relation to anti-Vietnam War and feminist activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Her research and teaching interests focus on European and American Art, feminist and political practice, and cultures of display. Rachel has lectured in Museum and Gallery Studies at the University of East Anglia, Art History and Women’s Studies at University College Cork, Ireland, and Visual Culture at the National College of Art and Design. She has published on contemporary and feminist art, and her book Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art: Activism in the Work of Nancy Spero is forthcoming from IB Tauris. 

Elizabeth Johnson completed her PhD, titled ‘What do you call a sculptor who doesn’t make sculptures? Bruce Nauman, 1965 to 1975’, at the London Consortium, Birkbeck College, University of London in 2017. Her research focuses on the continuing influence of the discourse of sculpture on contemporary art and the ways in which digital concerns inform contemporary sculptural practice.

Saya Kubota’s practice revolves around memory and physical traces of the past. Old and new, decay and growth, artifice and organic, human, animal and nature all share the same horizon of scattered parallel existences. She gravitates towards invisible yet certain matters; worn out teeth of a dead deer that once gorged the fruits of the land; the presence of the moon visible only as a reflection of sunlight; letters to someone who cannot be reached; or an evocative mirage of burning incense. Her historical and philosophical enquiries are materialised in diverse works from tracing paper, oil painting, photography, self-devised machines and installation to embellished minerals and porcelains.

Saya undertook a residency at the City & Guilds of London Art School in 2015 and was invited to show work produced during the residency in a solo show at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation in London January 2016.

Saya has taken part in many international group exhibitions in Tokyo, New York, and Hong Kong she completed her PhD at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2016.

http://sayakubota.com

Amelia Crowley Roth studied BA (Hons) Fine Art followed by a PG Diploma in Historic Carving, specialising in woodcarving, both at City & Guilds of London Art School.  Since graduating in 2015 she has been working full time as a woodcarver completing high-end commissions including a Crozier for the Pope’s presentation gift to the Archbishop of Canterbury on his visit to the UK. Amelia continues the development of her fine art / craft practice, which she has exhibited at various events including London Craft Week, the V&A, Lincoln Cathedral and Windsor Castle. She was awarded the Art School’s first Decorative Surfaces Fellowship in 2016/17. This new Fellowship, a collaboration with the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers, provides a recent graduate of City & Guilds of London Art School with a studio base and training in a range of decorative surfaces.

 

Anne Petters is a multi media artist with a background in glass art and design. In 2009 she received a Diploma in Fine Arts/ Glass at the Institute of Ceramic and Glass Art in Germany and in 2011 the Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture/ Dimensional Studies at Alfred University, New York. Anne has been showing work in glass museums and art institutions in Europe and the USA, such as the Saatchi Gallery, London 2018, the GlazenHuis Lommel Belgium 2018, the Nürnberger Kunshalle Germany in 2014, the European Museum for Modern Glass, Coburg in 2014, the Shack Art Center, Everett, WA and the Vergette Gallery at Southern Illinois University, IL in 2015.

Born in Dresden, Anne grew up in the German Democratic Republic. The political change in her country, which she experienced as a displacement of reality, has had a profound influence on her lifestyle and artistic work. Her interest in controlling and displaying moments of our fleeting, vulnerable existence leads her to a poetic, metaphoric use of glass and other materials, including natural phenomena.

Anne has developed a specific glass kiln forming technique and is teaching internationally. She has been a visiting lecturer at the Institute for Ceramic and Glass Art in Germany in 2012, a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art in 2016 and instructor at the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington, at NorthLands Creative in Lybster Scotland and the Summer Academy Bild-Werk in Germany.

Eva Masterman graduated from Kingston University in 2008 with a First Class Honours BA in Fine Art, and completed her MA in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art in 2016. She has exhibited widely across the U.K. and abroad, including two solo-shows at the William Bennington Gallery, London. She was the recipient of the 2016 Anthology Art Prize at the Charlie Smith Gallery, and the Royal British Society of Sculptors 2016 Bursary Award. She was selected for a six week exchange residency between the Camden Arts Centre, London and Arts Initiative Tokyo, Japan in Spring 2017. In 2016, she founded a social outreach art collective, Collective Matter, which was selected for the 2016 Tate Exchange Program, exploring clay as a creative learning tool. Eva also writes for the online journal Cfile, and also teaches at both University of Westminster and the Camden Art Centre.

Investigation into material and process led practices through cross-disciplinary workshops, seminars and writing, predicates her art-work. This dual approach of direct research into the boundaries and preconceptions of the visual arts, coupled with her own artistic practice, allows her to create a critical discourse that surrounds her own sculptural territory; one that sits firmly in the middle of the ‘expanded field’ of inter-disciplinary, material-specific making and fine art sculpture.

My work is positioned around a continuous dialogue between historical and contemporary techniques of printmaking, drawing and photography. Through my process I investigate spaces and connections between the physical, immaterial, digital and ‘natural’, to form a relationship between the observed and the observer. As seen in nature, the pieces build in layers over time, resulting in hybrid objects that index both the computational and the artist’s attention. My process-based works often involve de-constructing and re-forming an image by means of digital intervention to using a scalpel to cut-away details by hand; pencil rubbings to reveal a surface or colour mixing through multi-plate transparency etchings.

Gabrielle’s practice is based around attempting to put shape and form to feelings of insecurity and loss in times of forced change. She is interested in how we react to the space around us including both what is physically there and our perceptions and feelings toward it. We are frequently changing states in order to fit in with changes around us. Each situation has its own set of unwritten rules to negate. Gabrielle is interested in how ‘difference’ is dealt with. When someone does not ‘fit’ in one-way or another. Who in this situation is forced to change or adapt? She is interested in the collective and the individual and which is prioritized during times of change. Her work comes about through process driven activity, becoming a metaphor to ways of reacting to situations that are constantly in flux.

Lucy Devenish’s practice is driven by her explorations of remote landscapes. She makes journeys to far-flung coastal areas of the British Isles where she undertakes wild swims. Each swim is an act of endurance and immersion: working becomes breathing, sweating, struggling.

Lucy translates the sketches she has made, the maps she has scrutinised and the film footage from the swims into bodies of work relating to the coastlines experienced. Recognition of the dispersal of her wake in the water is the driving force for her making through which she seeks both to recollect and to map her encounters.

 

Blaze was born in Wiltshire and now lives and works in London. She graduated from the City & Guilds of London Art School in 2014 with an M.A. in Fine Art after a previous career as a designer in the fashion industry. Blaze is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (R.E.) and an elected member of the Society of Wood Engravers. Working within the mediums of drawing, etching, woodcut and wood engraving, her primary subject area is landscape, and her work focuses on the beauty and complexity of trees in nature.

My work employs sculpture, wood working, metal casting, writing, and image production to synthesise various topics I am researching, often dipping into irreverence and hyperbole, but earnest at base. Current topics of research are the rise of genetic determinism (a deeply inhuman form of religion), the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster, North Korea, and science fiction. As such my current works carry the appearance of objects of worship, altarpieces, totems and relics that are redolent of a modern day spirituality, but ultimately relate to the human in scale and use.

My research began with an obsession for perfecting movement up an accessibility slope in a newly designed architectural extension. As my research developed theories regarding embodiment started to influence and disciplines outside of sculpture including, contact improvisation dance, accessibility engineering, environmental psychology and spatial research in architecture, were used as a source of building a holistic understanding for my aim. This approach transformed the idea of the sensing body from being in contact with architecture, to being in connection with architecture, as though our surrounding is an extension of our own body.

The paintings progress from a chaotic beginning towards a meticulous, systemic order.

First, the ground is applied liberally, embracing the intrinsic behaviour of large volumes of paint, which shift as they dry to a gestural veneer. This process hovers between intention and chance as the surface inevitably hosts accidents. Surveying the painted canvas with forensic attention discloses regularities and trends in the paint, although initially it seems disordered. These uniformities are organized and systematically categorised, then demarcated, linking similarities and plotting the topography of the surface in isotropic detail.

Rules govern the decision-making. Protocol is devised upfront and applied objectively to all the prescribed incidences. However, there is slippage between legislation and interpretation, and so the systems and the imagery spiral in complexity.

These paintings reflect how humans organise socially and politically. Clustering occurs quite naturally in the works, contemplating the topographical impetus behind settlements and methods of communication within and between groups. The use of rules reflect the dilemmas of regulation and the limits of implementation of the law. Complex systems proliferate throughout our socio-political and economic structures: these paintings contemplate details of policy and variants in political and legalistic frameworks. Essentially, the core consideration in these works is the societal balance between regulation and individual freedom as represented by supervision of intuition.

www.katiepratt.net

Instagram: @katiepratt_artist

Twitter: @Katie_L_Pratt

Greenwood is inspired, in part, by 17th century Spanish or Dutch still life paintings with ‘cabbages, melons, weird carrots and threaded sparrows.’ He is an unapologetic raider of other people’s paintings. To his mind, art of the past must be fermented and feasted upon to bring nourishment to his own. And what a mush of things and qualities lie buried there: things that hang, overflow, ooze, bulge, and glisten; lunar cheeses, velvet peaches and barnacled bread. None, however, appear directly in Greenwood’s paintings. Instead they await transformation in the heat of the ferment. Only then do glass vases in the floral still lifes of de Heem and Ruysch emerge as ‘objects that have observable internal spaces, viewable through glass, crystal, or inflated transparent membranes’.

Through the use of one point perspective and painstaking painting technique, Greenwood imprisons his symmetrical creations in confined and claustrophobic spaces. In doing so he brings a mixture of humour and pathos to their pointless wrigglings and fumblings, squashings and balloonings. Will they fall flat, dilate, deflate, or dissolve? Amusing speculation for the viewer perhaps, but underlying their absurdity there is also a sense of outrage rumbling away. Of a recent painting, El Dorado, Greenwood writes: ‘As I worked on this I felt its heart lay in this post-Thatcherite/Reaganite world where we’re meant to function as desire machines, mindlessly consuming the world.’ The symbolic still lives painted for the newly prosperous Dutch Republic were intended to warn of the moral perils of this compulsion to consume and flaunt. In Greenwood’s paintings, dysfunctional desire and material excess are similarly exposed; just this time it is as disorderly, pretty, playful, repulsive things that over-extend themselves with limpid gestures within clinical confines.

There is no window onto the world in these interiors. There is no light source from without or within other than that provided by the artist himself. No other world is implied or invited in; it is a world of a singular imagination. As such, Greenwood’s highly personal, obsessive and absurdist practice recalls the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or Yves Tanguy, the animated films of Jan Švankmajer, or the sculpture of Cathy de Monchaux.

‘The carving out of space is essential to the works, whether as spaces to allow the depicted objects to live, or as implied spaces around, or within which, to create their character.’ states Greenwood. Having imposed severe constraints on their depth of field he makes their scale and situation ambiguous and open to interpretation: ‘the allusion to realistic proportions, where the object is life size; or possibly inflated from some microscopic investigation; or my favourite, an implied vast disjuncture of scale to the cosmic, where the small, decorative baubles refer to much bigger entities, rendering the small space a model in a child’s bedroom.’

Greenwood’s process is ‘pre-verbal, or sub-verbal’ he suggests, but behind such a modest claim there would seem to lie an inconsolable imagination being put into play.

Dr. Frances Woodley

 

Born in Leeds, 1959, John Greenwood graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1990, where he received the Cite Internationale Paris residency award, the Burston Award and the Midland Bank purchase award.

Solo exhibitions include: Jason Rhodes Gallery, London (1995 and 1998), Galerie Helmut Pabst, Frankfurt (2000) and Europaische Zentral Galerie, Frankfurt (2002).

Selected Group exhibitions include; ‘Young British Artists’, Saatchi Gallery (1992), ‘mutations’ (two person show with William Latham), Manchester City Art Gallery (1993), Helen de Sybil and John Greenwood, Jason Rhodes Gallery (1994), ‘Fusion’, Rhodes + Mann Gallery inaugural show (2000), ‘The Modern City in Europe’, Museum of Contempory Art, Tokyo (1996), ‘Cheers’, Sun and Doves Gallery, London (1999), ‘The Armory Show’, Rhodes + Mann Gallery, New York (2002), ‘Trailer’ (2001) and Guns and Roses, London (2002), curated by Juan Bolivar.

Following a career break, recent shows have included; a solo show, ‘Being John Greenwood’ in 2014, curated by Juan Bolivar at the C+C Gallery, London and group shows in 2015, ‘Doppelganger’, No Format Gallery, London, ‘Tutti-Frutti’, Turps Gallery, London, ‘Anti-Social Realism’, Charlie Smith, London, ‘Present Tense’, Swindon Art Gallery and Museum and the ‘2nd Nanjing International Art Festival, Nanjing, China.

In 2015 John won the Bronze Award at the 2nd Nanjing International Festival, had a residency at the C+C Gallery, London, and an article: ‘John Greenwood,’ published in the Autumn Turps Magazine.

In 2016 John took part in ‘El Dorado,’ curated by Juan Bolivar at Horatio Junior Gallery, London and Geraint Evans’, ‘The Abject Object’ at Wimbledon College of Art. He was also a finalist in the Marmite Art Prize.

John also had a one man show at the Turps Gallery, London. He took part in Frances Woodley’s show at the Bay Gallery, Cardiff: ‘Models and Materialities,’ and Rosalind Davis’ ‘Telling Tales’ at the Collyer-Bristow Gallery, London.

In 2017 he was included in ‘Earth, Wind and Fire’ at the Griffin Gallery in West London.

In 2018, John is going to the London Art Fair with Turps Gallery and ‘In the Future’ at the Collyer-Bristow Gallery.

www.johngreenwoodartist.com

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Jonny Green makes paintings of sculptures… Mad-men rendered crudely in Plasticine and electrical tape or abject-looking re-animated brains adorned with filthy paper flowers and grubby clockwork parts. Each depicted object/character seems to be demanding recognition and validation from the viewer in spite of their manifest flaws, they seem to be trying to adorn themselves in an attempt to make their appearance more palatable. In contrast to the gleeful, almost slapdash making of the sculptures, their subsequent rendering in paint is meticulous. Green explains this approach as ‘an attempt to dignify and document or give testament to something that seemingly lacks dignity or a voice’. The resulting paintings are both still-life and portrait, animate and inanimate. As viewers we experience a kind of cognitive dissonance as we are simultaneously attracted and repelled by them at the same time.

In an interview with Tom Groves, Head of Art Histories, Jonny reflected on his experience of the residency at City & Guilds of London Art School: “I can’t emphasize how much the use of the Art School’s expertise and facilities has helped me. It’s been a wonderful opportunity for me to broaden my practice, particularly the staff in the print room and the casting room – so helpful and generous with their time. I also spent some time learning how to do glass casting, which is something I can’t imagine I would ever have gotten-round to without the residency…..Until I started the residency, I didn’t realize that places like this still existed. It is in some ways an old fashioned art school, and I mean that in the most positive way. The staff to student ratio is really wonderful and this means the students are much more nurtured and challenged than the norm.”

http://jonnygreen.net

Jamie Shovlin’s work explores the tension between imagination and reality within issues of identity, history and memory as expressed through the seemingly objective experience of the archive and the institution.

Questioning the reliability of information in the digital age, each project proposes new types of storytelling that incorporate devices including unreliable narration, parallel realities and meta-commentary in developing alternative methods to navigate and deconstruct history. He is interested in how the messily subjective minutia of information is shaped and transformed into knowledge and consequently becomes known as history.

Shovlin completed an MA at the Royal College of Art in 2003. He first exhibited in New Contemporaries 2003 and he was selected for Beck’s Futures and had his first museum solo show at Tate Britain in 2006. More recently he has exhibited his work within curated displays from the collections of Tullie House, Carlisle and Southampton City Art Gallery. In 2013, Shovlin released his debut feature film Rough Cut.

During his time at City and Guilds of London Art School, Shovlin will develop a series of drawings which will form a physical counterpart to the video installation, Widows & Orphans. These works feature meticulously detailed copies of sculptures from the art history canon inlaid with Braille translations of passages from of the secondary school textbook A History of the Modern World.

Widows & Orphans, named in relation to isolated lines without context in typesetting layouts, uses the highlighting, underlining and marginalia left behind by previous readers of A History of the Modern World as source material in creating a script, employing a cut-up editorial technique from annotated fragments within multiple editions of the textbook.

Takumi Kato works as a painter. Takumi has been exploring the possibility of painting from materials, based on the technique of Cennino Cennini, an Italian artist working in 14th-15th century Italy. Through his material research, he salvages the history of materials and the essence of them. In his recent works, he observes his own painting strokes in self-made watercolour, and replaces them on other gypsum supports by fine brush of egg and casein tempera. He changes his scale of observation and his final images depending on the difference of materials. In his practice, he aims to rewind the painting history and re-connect to the contemporary situation from a materialistic perspective.

Takumi Kato lives and works in Gifu city in Japan. He has been a lecturer at Nagoya Zokei University since 2018. His major solo exhibitions include ARRAY (The Three Konohana, Osaka, 2016), ~ | wave dash (Awai Art Center, Matsumoto, 2015), and Seen from a Vehicle (Kultuurikauppila, Ii, 2015). His works have been part of several exhibitions, including New Mutation (Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto, 2018), Transfer Guide (The Three Konohana, Osaka, 2017), and World Event Young Artists 2012 (Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, 2012). He curated Reminder for Making Methods (Nara Prefectural Art Festival, 2015) and ISLANDS (The Lorong 24A Shophouse Series #13, Singapore, 2013).

He has been supported by the 30th Holbein Scholarship (2016), and  Nomura Foundation (2018).

Jessie Makinson’s practice focuses on multi-figure paintings of women as a reference to the representation of women in art history and celebrity pop culture. The paintings are dense with recollections and impressions, questioning with humorous and often capricious proposals. The figures are difficult to separate from their place and relation to the rooms and spaces they inhabit. The eye is drawn first to their rich intricacies, before the planes surrounding them tilt and pull away. Scale affects pace, and the act of looking transitions between recognition and interpretation as it scans both the scene and its painterly textures.

In an interview with Tom Groves, Head of Art Histories, Jessie reflects on her time on the residency:   “I think all residencies are different. In some you don’t make anything while you’re there, because you are busy experiencing things. The City and Guilds of London Art School residency is incredibly valuable – probably the best residency in London. It’s such a fantastic location, beautiful studios, great facilities and technicians. If you want to experiment with new mediums, this is perfect. You can walk into a workshop and tell the technician what you want to make, and they’ll have loads of ideas and patience to help you make it.” 

www.jessiemakinson.co.uk

Hannah Birkett studied fine art and creative writing at Lancaster University, and after graduating went on to study fine art at the Royal Academy Schools.  Her practice incorporates sculpture and painting, with a strong foundation in drawing.  She continues to exhibit both nationally and internationally, including Mostyn Open Exhibition (2014), the Royal Academy, Hack the Barbican, and Wisnicz Castle, Poland.  Hannah continues to teach both fine art and art and design to both Foundation and BA students in the UK.

 

David MacDiarmid trained in Architectural Design (MA Hons.) at the University of Edinburgh, and in Fine Art (MA) at City & Guilds of London Art School. He has been a recipient of the Fenton Arts Trust, and a chosen MA Stars recipient from arts organisation Axisweb. He has been artist in residence at Chisenhale Studios, London, GARAGE as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival and at Extractor Space, London.

As part of on-going collective Expedition to the Icebergs he received a commission to create a radio broadcast for Project Radio, Leeds. Recently he has shown at Blueprints, Romamsusan, Chicago, was commissioned to create work for the Arts Council funded Engage Festival, Berkshire, and is currently working on the creative design for a series of Wellcome Trust funded installations.

Jack Southern graduated from Falmouth University in 2001, and went on to complete an MA at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL in 2003. Southern continued at the Slade as research fellow between 2003-2005, before being selected for an Acme Studios residency in East London (2005-2010). Alongside Southern’s varied creative career, his passion for education and pedagogy have led him into a number of substantial teaching roles, including BA Fine Art Course Leader at the University of Gloucestershire (2011-2016), a role he took up after writing the new BA course. Southern has been invited into various intuitions as a visiting lecturer both nationally and internationally, and his writing has been published in a number of newspapers and magazines including AN magazine, the Guardian, and the Telegraph.

Southern’s creative work spans teaching, research, writing and publishing, as well as a significant exhibition history as an independent artist. He has also managed large-scale collaborative projects which draw on a fascination to bring Drawing theory and practice together through a diverse range of activities such as exhibition making, artists in-conversations, discussion and practical workshops. Key examples include Time / Image / Construction (2016) and ‘Drawing making, Making drawing’ (2014), which both took place at the Drawing Room Gallery, London. Southern devised, co-ordinated and curated these projects, working with Drawing room co-directors, Kate Macfarlane and Mary Doyle as well as artists Cornelia Parker, Charles Avery, Dryden Goodwin, Franziska Furter, Claude Heath, Tim Knowles, Gemma Anderson and Emma Stibbon.

Eva Masterman graduated from Kingston University in 2008 with a First Class Honours BA in Fine Art, and recently completed her MA in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited widely across the U.K. and abroad, including two solo-shows at the William Bennington Gallery. She was the recipient of the 2016 Anthology Art Prize at the Charlie Smith Gallery, and the 2016 Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary.  She also works in a social outreach art collective, collectiveMATTER, which has been selected for the 2016 Tate Exchange Program.

Investigation into material and process led practices through cross-disciplinary workshops, seminars and writing, predicates her art-work. This dual approach of direct research into the boundaries and preconceptions of the visual arts, coupled with her own artistic practice, allows Eva to create a critical discourse that surrounds her own sculptural territory; one that sits firmly in the middle of the ‘expanded field’ of inter-disciplinary, material-specific making and fine art sculpture.

Teresita is Senior Tutor in MA Fine Art. She studied Fine Art and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths College, and an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, where she was awarded the Painters Stainers prize for painting. In 1999 she won the Mark Rothko painting prize USA. She has exhibited in the UK and Europe and continues to exhibit nationally, her work can be found in public and private collections including Nomura Bank, BBC National Art collection, RCA and British Airways.

Eyal was born in Israel in 1978. He graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from Camberwell College of art, London 2012. Eyal lives and works in London and has extensively collaborated with various creatives based in England and abroad. Eyal’s work has been exhibited in Asia, Europe and North America. Eyal has been a visiting lecturer at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. He is currently working as a technical construction manager for a cutting edge experiential event company based in east London.

Harrison Pearce is an art historian and practicing artist.

I studied Art History at Warwick University which included a term in Venice, hence 16th century Venetian painting developing into a life-long interest. Free-lance teaching for the Education Department of the National Gallery made me realize that I particularly enjoy the interaction between a group and the work of art being studied so much of my teaching has been in front of the object. Throughout my teaching career I have taken groups abroad to visit galleries and museums and have also set up study weeks in various cities both in Europe and America.

Jon K Shaw is a writer, editor and educator based in southeast London. He teaches in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London; City & Guilds of London Art School; and West Dean College. With Tom Robinson he founded and edited Rattle: A Journal at the Convergence of Art and Writing, and with Theo Reeves-Evison edited and introduced the book Fiction as Method (Sternberg, 2017). His ongoing research concerns immanence, substrate and the philosophies, cultures, biologies and geontologies of movement, with a particular focus on postindustrial contexts. He is currently working on two books: one on the lucid materialism of Antonin Artaud, and a second on performance, poetry, dance and financial products that suspend oppositions between life and death.

 

Rosa was born in Italy where she studied Fine Art and worked as a textile artist. She discovered a love for beautiful writing in the UK where she trained as a lettering artist at the City & Guilds of London Art School in 1994/95, graduating with Distinction in Lettering.

Her work includes a wide range of calligraphy and lettering projects, from letter design and engraved or brush-written inscriptions to calligraphy for certificates and wedding stationery. Her main interest is to explore the expressive potential of the written word through various media, including wood, stone, glass and collage.

Philip was among the last students to complete the Lettering diploma course at City & Guilds of London Art School graduating in 1996. After short spells assisting Ralph Beyer and Richard Kindersley he set up his own studio in London and has taught at the Art School for the past 20 years.

Works include letter carving in stone and wood, painted and sign written lettering and architectural gilding. Commissions include Tate Britain, Royal Academy of Arts, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Palace, numerous churches, cathedrals and Livery Companies and painting the name on HMS Victory.

Charlotte Howarth is a sculptor, designer, stone carver and letterer. Working in a variety of materials her work shows a deep sensitivity to line, pattern and texture and is imbued with a sense of fun and joyfulness.

She has a wide experience of teaching, ranging from organising and running formal lettering workshops, teaching lettering to primary school children as well as taking on a full time apprentice for two years.

Charlotte  works on a range of commissions including sculptures and lettering design as well as working on her own projects for exhibition. She has experience of working on small hand made projects to large-scale architectural pieces.

Rian Kanduth is a graduate of Conservation from the City & Guilds London Art School. Since graduating in 1997, Rian has specialised in all aspects of Gilding. She has returned to the City & Guilds college where she teaches Gilding for the Carving and Conservation departments. During her career, Rian completed projects in both private and public sectors and clients include English Heritage, The National Trust, Mercers Company, The Fishmongers, the V&A Museum, Seven Dials, Stoke Park, Chateau De Moncla as well as a portfolio of private individuals.

Rian is a Brother of the Art Workers Guild, and member of SOG, ICON and MA.

 

Diane Magee has been running the Drawing Studio at City & Guilds of London Art School since 1996. She graduated from the Royal Academy Drawing Schools with a Diploma in Painting, and prior to that completed an Advanced Diploma in Teaching, Fine Art, at the Adelaide College of the Arts and Education. She holds an MA in History of Art from Birkbeck College.

Thomas Merrett is a London based sculptor. He originally trained as a carver at the Art School between 2005-2008 and has taken on a number of architectural commissions throughout the UK. Tom received a scholarship from the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust (QEST) and moved to Italy to study at the Florence Academy of Art. Whilst there he had the opportunity to study from the live model enhancing his skills in drawing and modelling of the human form. Tom finds working in clay the best medium for developing ideas for his sculpture before converting them in to Marble, stone or Bronze. He has exhibited several times with the society of portrait sculptors and was selected to became a member of the society in 2017. He was awarded the Founders Sculpture Prize by the Worshipful Company of Founders in 2016 and has recently completed his three figure sculpture ‘Flight’ which will be exhibited later in the year.

Sophie Barton specialises in the conservation of decorative surfaces and polychrome wooden sculpture, having worked as a freelance conservator for churches and cathedrals and currently working commercially for private clients, institutions and historic houses.  Recent conservation work involves carrying out condition assessments, collection surveys and practical treatments in situ and workshop based.  Major projects over the last few years have included the conservation of lacquer and japanned furniture for The National Trust and historic properties in England and Wales.

 

EMPLOYMENT

2015 – Present Conservator at Tankerdale Ltd, specialising in the conservation of decorative surfaces, japanning, lacquer and polychrome wood.

2015 – Independent supervisor/lecturer for the Wood Module at City & Guilds of London Art School Conservation Department.

2009-2013 – Sculpture restorer in the sculpture department of the CRRCOA (Regional Centre for the Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art) Vesoul, France.  The work consisted of the conservation of polychrome objects, ranging from small wooden sculptures, to large composite altarpieces and church furniture.

2008 – Conservation of the string course at St. Johns College, Cambridge, under the supervision of Sarah Healey-Dilkes and Jonathan Kemp.

2008 – Two weeks emergency fixing of polychromy on medieval church screens, Norfolk, under the supervision of Pauline Plummer.

2007 – Conservation of a 12th century wall painting at Torquay Abbey and cleaning of alabaster and limestone monuments, Kent with the Wall Paintings Workshop.

2006 – Conservation of a decorative ceiling, Norwich Union with Kiffy Stainer-Hutchins

2006 – Conservation of the Rood Screen and Organ Cover (Comper) at Lound Church Suffolk, under the supervision of Pauline Plummer.

2006 – Conservation of an 18th century wall painting, Mereworth Church, Kent, with The Wall Paintings Workshop.

2006 – Paint survey of a 20th century ceiling, Norwich Union, with Ms. Kiffy Stainer-Hutchins.

 

EXPERIENCE / WORKSHOPS

2015 – Workshop on the conservation and restoration of Urushi (Japanese Lacquer) (Tobunken) Cologne.

2014 – Workshop in the Conservation and restoration of Urushi (Japanese Lacquer) (Tobunken) Cologne.

2008-9  –  Internship in the sculpture department at CRRCOA (Regional Centre for the Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art) Vesoul, France.

2006 – Presented poster on laser cleaning of bone and ivory at ‘Lasers for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage’ in State Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

2005 – Conservation of stonework for re-installation in the Medieval Gallery, Archaelogical Conservation Department, under the supervision of Rebecca Lang, Museum of London.

2005 – Conservation of wall paintings, attributed to Antonio Verrio, Reigate Priory School under the supervision of The Wall Paintings Workshop.

 

EDUCATION

2014-2015 –  HLF funded ICON Internship in decorative surfaces on furniture at Tankerdale Ltd.

2008-9  –  Internship in the sculpture department at CRRCOA (Regional Centre for the Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art) Vesoul, France.

2007-8  –  Nine month Internship in the polychrome wood studio, KIK-IRPA, Brussels.

2007  – Paid internship in the polychrome sculpture studio, under the supervision of Arnold Truyen, SRAL, Maastricht.

2004-2006 – Postgraduate Diploma in Conservation, City & Guilds of London Art School. (1:1)

2001-2004 – History of Art, BA Hons, University of York. (2:1)

Tom Young trained at the City & Guilds of London Art School on the full time Lettering course that ran until 1996. Since then he has undertaken a variety of commissions for clients including St George’s Chapel, Windsor, The Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, the Olympic Park in Stratford and Eton College, producing lettering work in a variety of materials, including stone, wood, metal, brick and concrete. Having taught Lettering on the Carving course at the Art School since 2006, Tom took over as the Senior Lettering tutor in 2014 and also runs the annual carving and lettering module for the Conservation course.

In 2023 Tom was appointed to the role of Head of Carving and joined the Art School’s Senior Management Team.

Dana Melchar is a Senior Furniture Conservator at the Victoria & Albert Museum and tutor for the Conservation Department at City & Guilds of London Art School. She graduated with a Masters of Science in Art Conservation, with a specialisation in furniture, from the Winterthur University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. Additionally, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and trained as a cabinet and furniture maker at the North Bennet Street School in Boston, Massachusetts. At the V&A, she works on many different types of furniture and 3-D organic objects carrying out both preventive and interventive conservation treatments as well as object-based research.

 

 

Benjamin Cohen is an artist living and working in London and Athens, Greece.

He studied Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design (2005-6), Loughborough University School of Art and Design (2006-9) and Central Saint Martins (2012-14).

Gary Colclough studied at Chelsea College of the Art & Design 1996-1999 and Central Saint Martins 2008-2009. He exhibits regularly in the UK and internationally. His work has been exhibited at ArtSeen (Cyprus) Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts, Xi’an (China), P.P.O.W (New York) , Jeanine Hofland Contemporary Art , (Amsterdam),) IAG (Hong Kong), Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno (Wales).

Wesley Schol studied at St Martins School of Art and London College of Fashion, prior to spending many years working in Art, Design & Performance education specialising in course design and quality assurance. Wesley has worked and contributed to developments as both a lead and consultant at a number of institutions including: Trinity Laban; Chelsea College of Art;  Camberwell College of Arts; London College of Communication; London College of Fashion; University of West London; Wimbledon College of Art; University of the Arts London and Central Saint Martins. His expertise has supported course and curriculum development across a wide range of subjects, from Drama to Fine Art and from Sportswear to Stone carving.

Wesley joined the City & Guilds of London Art School in 2014 where he is an active member of the Senior Management Team. His main focus is on quality assurance, registry and the line management of the office team.

His time working in education is balanced with occasional design commissions and consultancy; theatre sound, set and costume design; and his work as an independent fringe theatre producer.

Emma Montague is a Danish-Australian designer based in London. Her  multi-displinary approach to product design demonstrates a preoccupation with materials and experimentation, with an acutely honed eye for image-making and creative direction.

A Royal College of Art MA graduate Emma formerly studied Fine Art in Australia specialising in jewellery before moving onto Copenhagen and later London where she cut her teeth working in the industry. In addition to her current studio practice and projects, Emma is a consultant designer and has worked in the fields of luxury interiors, textiles, jewellery, eyewear and accessories, with international brands such as Atelier Swarovski, Alexander McQueen, Cubitts, Gentle Monster and Lara Bohinc.

Phil Ashcroft was born in Farnham, Surrey and lives and works in London. He completed a Post-Graduate Diploma in Illustration at St Martins and a BA Illustration at Harrow College of Art & Design.
Ashcroft was a Finalist in the John Moores 2014; the Celeste Art Prize 2007 and was selected for the Contemporary Art Society’s ARTfutures in 2005 and 2007. His work is held in The New Art Gallery Walsall’s Permanent Collection and in private collections worldwide.
Ashcroft’s recent painting and graphic work integrates gestural, emotive abstraction with flattened out ’80s style art deco and graffiti influences to present a vision of environmental, financial and political threat, a world of semi-surreal settings, cartoon-like motifs and the detritus of the modernist ideals of the past.
Solo exhibitions include Cave Paintings, Lewisham Arthouse, London 2015; Galácticos, Gamma Transport Division, Edinburgh 2013; Toxicity, Margaret Harvey Gallery (UH Galleries), St Albans 2006; Yeti In Hong Kong, EXIT, Hong Kong 2005 and Nitro Deluxe, Deptford X, London 2001.
Group exhibitions include Zinger!, CANAL, London 2014, Intervention Intervention, Fishmarket Gallery, Northampton 2011; No Soul for Sale, Tate Modern, London 2010; Deptford X, London 2009; The Golden Record, The Collective Gallery, Edinburgh 2008.
Commissions include work for Aedas Architects, Amnesty International (UK), British Film Institute, muf architecture, The Royal Mail, Sony and Yahoo (UK). Solar System Parameters, an overview of works from 2005-13 with text by Paul Hobson, Director, Modern Art Oxford, was published by Gamma Proforma in 2013. For further information on Phil go to www.philashcroft.com

With a background in product design and applied art, Ian employs a mix of industrial design and craft skills to his work – producing installations, studio editions and developing shapes, materials and techniques for industry. He was highlighted by the Crafts Council in 2008 as being “amongst some of the most promising makers who are applying their training and skills in new and exciting ways”.

In 2006 Ian gained a first class degree in Three Dimensional Design from Manchester Metropolitan University. In 2010 he received an MA in Applied Art from the Royal College of Art, London. He is a product designer, visiting lecturer to Kingston University and the Royal College of Art and a founding member of Studio Manifold who are based in Hackney, East London. From 2012 onwards, Ian has been a BA ceramics lecturer at Havering College, London.

Alex is a partner and graphic designer within the graphic design studio Work-Form. He is responsible for all parts of the business from seeking out new work, managing projects on small to large scale and business administration. Working with a variety of clients primarily within the cultural sector covering editorial, identity, website and packaging design. Alex teaches at Camberwell on the Graphic Design BA and has recently joined the staff at the City & Guilds of London Art School as a visiting sessional staff member on the Foundation Diploma.

Kiera Bennett studied at The Royal College of Art and The Ruskin Oxford University. Since graduating from the RCA in 2002 she has consistently exhibited both nationally and internationally. Bennett was also involved in creating Rockwell, an artist run gallery and studios in East London 2002-07. She was a Cocheme fellow at Byam Shaw School of Art in 2004. She is represented by Charlie Smith Gallery London and has work in various collections including: Mario Testino, Arthur G Rosen, David and Serenella Ciclitiras, Amlin plc, Cornelia Parker and Julian Opie.

Dr Paolo Plotegher is interested in making use of art and theory in collective practices of social solidar­ity and micropolitical transformation. He experiments with those practices mainly in London, in the neigh­bourhood where he lives, with the New Cross Com­moners and at The Field. He writes primarily for the collectives he is part of. He collaborates with other so­cio-politically engaged artists and theorists, like Brave New Alps and the Nanopolitics Group. He teaches at Goldsmiths and for us at City & Guilds of London Art School.

Viv Lawes is a lecturer, curator, author and journalist, with over twenty years’ experience in the art market. Aside from teaching the History of Decorative Art and the History of Carving Techniques at the City & Guilds of London Art School, she is Course Leader for the Asian Art & Its Markets semester course at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, and a short course tutor in the History of Art and British Cultural Design the University of the Arts, London.

In this short film recorded on Zoom during Lockdown, Viv speaks to Tom Groves, Head of Art Histories, about the content of her taught sessions at the Art School and discusses the different methodologies she employs.

As Senior UK consultant to Singapore gallery One East Asia, she has co-curated many commercial exhibitions of Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art in London and Singapore since 2011. She is also Director of the company’s new virtual gallery, One East Asia London.

Viv is an accredited lecturer for The Arts Society (formerly NADFAS) and travels widely in the UK, Europe, Asia and Australasia.

 

John Goodall is the architectural editor of Country Life. He is responsible for writing and commissioning the celebrated series of architectural features published in the magazine every week. John has been involved in various television series on history and architecture. He was the series consultant for the BBC1 television series on architecture presented by David Dimbleby, The Way We Built Britain (2007).

Previous to his present post, John worked as a researcher and historian at English Heritage (1997-9 and 2003-7), where he was involved in launching the new guidebook series known as the Red Guides and worked on several flagship exhibitions at sites including Battle and Dover.

Working as a freelance, John has lectured widely to specialist, university and general audiences. He has also contributed articles to books, journals and magazines. The English Castle is John’s second book. The first, God’s House at Ewelme, was published by Ashgate in 2001. It was the winner of the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize

John Farndon is our current Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow in residence

John is a writer of non-fiction books, and a playwright, lyricist, com-poser, poet and literary translator. Spurred by intellectual curiosity, his interests range widely and he writes on topics from chemistry to China. He’s currently writing the hubristically-conceived Omnipaedia, about how to know everything and has just finished the very straightforwardly titled The Shakespeare Book, The Sherlock Holmes Book and The Movie Book. Another recent project is Do You Still Think You’re Clever? a follow-up to his successful Do You Think You’re Clever?: the Oxbridge Questions.

He’s written hundreds of books, published worldwide – including bestsellers such as Do Not Open, a cult-hit in both the USA and Russia – and contributed to major reference works such as Science. In earlier years, writing mostly for children, he was shortlisted four times for the junior Science Book prize. Now he writes more for adults. An urge to inspire and inform is a com-mon thread, evident in his acclaimed Atlas of Oceans on endangered life in the oceans.

He’s translated literary works from Russian, including the poetry of Pushkin and Grigorieva, and the beautiful lyrical memoir Letters to Another Room by Ravil Bukharaev. He is currently translating a major Kazakh novel. His verse translations of two of Spanish Golden Age playwright Lope de Vega’s comedies are soon to be performed in Houston and Prague. His acclaimed new libretto for Puccini’s La Boheme set in contemporary Dalston was recently performed at the Arcola’s Grimeborn Festival.

His works for stage have been performed at theatres such as the Donmar and Almeida in London and his songs by artists from Russian folk group Koleso to West-end star Anthony Cable. Now he’s venturing out to perform himself, reading his poetry, performing his songs and hosting the Cauldron evenings in Islington that stir together writers, thinkers, musicians and anyone with an idea. In 2014 he recorded one of his songs with legendary folk-fiddler Dave Swarbrick for the Passing the Baton showcase EP and performed on Swarbrick’s tour. He is also super-assessor for the Best New Play and Most Promising New Playwright Awards for the Offies (Offwestend Theatre Awards). Earlier this year he was invited to create a multimedia storytelling event for the Moscow Polytech Festival.

More information about John can be found here: http://www.rlf.org.uk/fellowships/john-farndon/

After studying photography and film at the Art Acadamie St Joost in Breda Holland,  Thuring moved to London and set up his own photographic studio at 5 Thurloe Square. Particularly engaged in portraiture and still life photography, working on major advertising campaigns and editorial, Thuring lived in Paris and Brussels before deciding to give it all up to pursue his continued interest in woodwork.

Peter has worked for many years, as woodcarver, sculptor, gilder and restorer of antique furniture and picture frames with commissions from The National Trust, the Royal Collection as well as numerous museums, institutions and private collections worldwide.

Alongside his practice he has worked with the Art School for the last 5 years, sharing his execeptional knowledge and experience with the next generation of carvers. He is very keen in this digital age to celebrate the hands on experience and satisfaction gained by a combination of  physical and cerebral application to the whole process of woodcarving.

He feels that the intimate atmosphere and fertile ground of the City & Guilds of London Art School, with its small groups of students, enables individuals to tackle the challenges and exciting prospect of building a professional career as a specialist carver.

‘I hope to be a complimentary part of the teaching team and to enrich the students further through my practical knowledge and understanding of this fascinating subject.’

More of Peters work can be found at www.peterthuring.com

A film of Peter making the stunning Uppark table can be found here 

Following gaining a Diploma in Cabinet-Making and Design at London College of Furniture, Robert Randall completed the Diploma in Ornamental Woodcarving & Gilding at City & Guilds of London Art School.

He has since worked on a wide range of commissions and national heritage projects. His original and restoration work can be seen at several Wren churches in the City, Shakespeare’s Globe at Southwark, the Geffrye Museum, St Paul’s Cathedral and churches and schools around the country.

Sae Na Ku studied ornamental woodcarving and gilding at the City and Guilds of London Art School. After graduating in 2000, Sae Na set up her studio and worked as a self-employed carver and gilder.

During the next seven years she also worked part-time at a local charity, teaching adults with learning disabilities. As part of her work, Saena also achieved her Level 1 teacher-training certificate.

In 2007 Saena was offered a return to City & Guilds as a woodcarving teacher in the Conservation and Carving Departments.

“During my studies at C&G, I have always enjoyed the village-like atmosphere, the sense of community and the close attention and support I received from my tutors.

I forged great friendships and lasting work relations during my time at the college, so when I was asked to return to my British alma mater to teach, I was very happy and excited to become a member of the team.”

Andrew Grassie left Edinburgh to study at St Martins School of Art. He then went on to complete his MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, where he continues to live and work today. He exhibits regularly both in the UK and Internationally including solo shows at Tate Britain, Sperone Westwater New York, Talbot Rice Gallery Edinburgh, Johnen Galerie Berlin and the Rennie Collection Vancouver. He has lectured extensively across a range of institutions in the UK.

Ben Spiers studied at Falmouth and Goldsmiths, graduating in 1995. He is a painter who has exhibited in England and abroad, notably at James Hyman Fine Art, Hales Gallery, James Coleman Fine Art, the Museum of the Benemerita, Universidad Autonoma de Puebla, Mexico and in the John Moores at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

 

Alex is a partner and graphic designer within the graphic design studio work-form. He is responsible for all parts of the business from seeking out new work, managing projects on small to large scale and business administration. Working with a variety of clients primarily within the cultural sector covering editorial, identity, website and packaging design. Alex teaches at Camberwell on the Graphic Design BA and has recently joined the staff at the City & Guilds of London Art School as a visiting sessional staff member on the Foundation Diploma in Art & Design.

With a background in product design and applied art, Ian employs a mix of industrial design and craft skills to his work – producing installations, studio editions and developing shapes, materials and techniques for industry. He was highlighted by the Crafts Council in 2008 as being “amongst some of the most promising makers who are applying their training and skills in new and exciting ways”.

In 2006 Ian gained a first class degree in Three Dimensional Design from Manchester Metropolitan University. In 2010 he received an MA in Applied Art from the Royal College of Art, London. He is a product designer, visiting lecturer to Kingston University and the Royal College of Art and a founding member of Studio Manifold who are based in Hackney, East London. From 2012 onwards, Ian has been a BA ceramics lecturer at Havering College, London.

In 2015 Ian was awarded the Jerwood Makers Commission at the Jerwood Makers Open, which is a major initiative in the Jerwood Visual Arts programme and recognises rising stars in the world of applied arts.

Selected projects include:

‘Candela’ for the London Design Festival at the Victoria and Albert Museum,

Mediums 1 for ‘Wrong for Hay’

Series One Pottery for ‘Another Country’

Helen Hamlyn Centre and Croatian British Council, Zagreb, Croatia – invited to Zagreb as a creative team leader to steer a series of inclusive design workshops for sheltered manufacturing devised by RCA senior research fellow Julia Cassim. The project won the Croatian Designers Association Grand Prix at D (Design) Day.

Designed ‘Slush Cast Bowl’ – an edition of the bowl was commissioned by 10 Downing Street as a gift to each world leader at the G20 summit in London, 2009.

Jane Dixon Jane Dixon graduated from the Royal College in 1988 and lives and works in London showing both nationally and internationally. She was the Kettle’s Yard Fellow, University of Cambridge between 2000 and 2001. Jane has works in many important collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, the Arts Council of England, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, the Kasser Foundation, New Jersey, the Frissiras Collection, Athens, Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno and many private collections the UK and worldwide.

 

Chris Poulton works in a range of mediums including sculpture, film installation and painting. He has exhibited in London and The North of England and was recently elected to the London Group.

Katie New is a jeweller who also has extensive teaching experience in jewellery and metalwork, 3D design, interior and spatial design, fashion, textiles and mixed media. She has worked at Chelsea College of Art and Design, Havering College, South Thames College, City and Guilds of London Art School and recently Morley College.

Her work is material led and draws on the experience of travelling in Japan in 1994 researching traditional Japanese crafts. Celebrating an affinity with nature, the work focuses on translating texture, line, shape, colour and form into precious metals and gems. Preliminary studies for making work are made at botanical gardens where observations of fruit, seeds, leaf shapes, exotic structures, coils and furls inform the pieces. Translating the ephemeral quality of nature into permanent form communicates the co-existence of strength and fragility in nature. Works are made in organic material, perspex, anodised aluminium, tropical wood, paper, leather, fabric, feathers, glass and resin.

Kim Amis teaches on four courses at the City & Guilds of London Art School: Fine Art, Historic Carving, Conservation, and Foundation. She is a senior associate lecturer at the University of the Arts and is currently external assessor at the Art Academy.

Kim Amis’s sculpture is concerned with observation of the life model, the human head, and portraiture. The work may involve the whole body, part of a body or the configuration of the head alone. The portraits involve the scrutiny and selection of external properties to reflect something of the internal personality or character. Her models may be strangers or people she knows well. She says “my work is often modelled in clay because of its palpable quality and the way it moves so easily, like the body, like flesh. It evolves through a process of part drawing, part painting, part construction, and is cast in a variety of materials including paper, plaster, resin, reconstituted stone and bronze.”

Her modelling and the meticulousness of her mold making and casting techniques have led to collaborative research projects with the National Portrait Gallery, the Whitechapel Gallery, the Forty Hall Museum & Estate, Shepperton Film Studios, and University College London.

Lucy Le Feuvre studied at Newcastle and then the Royal Academy Schools. She was a guest student at Vestlandets Kunstakademi, Bergen, Norway for two years and for one year studied at the Ecole d’Art de Marseille Luminy, France. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships including a one-year studio residency in New York City and was also the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award and a two-year Delfina studio residency in London. Le Feuvre has exhibited extensively in Britain, Norway and the USA. She is currently working on commissions for both private collections and public art consultancies.

 

Matthew Rowe is a philosopher whose primary interests are in aesthetics, the philosophy of art and relationship between artistic practice and art theory. He is currently primarily a writer, although he also engages in solo and collaborative visual art practices when appropriate. His current writing research focuses on site specificity within artistic production and issues surrounding morality and photography. Future writing projects include an essay on John Waters and an analysis of irony and sincerity. Current artistic projects are predominantly concentrated on contributing to other author’s works in the form of documentation and archiving. He takes an object-centred approach to his work, so any future projects will depend on how the idea that strikes him is best expressed: Whatever gets made will get made within the mode of cultural production suited to that concept – whether it is art, philosophy, fiction, comedy or politics, will be decided as the project progresses.

When Lucy was an MA student studying Fine Art at the City and Guilds of London Art School, her interests centred around the human body as an object of perceptual study and the nature of her own subjective interest in its ‘pathology’. Her practice was, to an unusual degree, underpinned by a researcher’s mentality – she had studied anatomy and had drawn cadavers at the Hunterian and in Norwich. The doctorate work that she subsequently embarked on at Sheffield Hallam University in 1999 (Delineating Disease: A system for investigating Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressivaon) was a natural development of these interests. She took up the position as Postdoctoral Fellow at the Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen in 1999 and has, since 2011, worked part-time with the Foundation students teaching sessions to introduce research methodology. She has been Artist in Residence at Bart’s Pathology Museum, visiting lecturer, MA Art & Science at Central St Martins and Artist in residence at Drawing Spaces in collaboration with the Gulbenkian Institute of Science, Lisbon. She is a member of the Medical Artists’ Association of Great Britain and RMIP (State Registered Accreditation of Medical Illustration Practitioners).

 

Michael Paraskos studied first at the University of Leeds, and then gained his doctorate, on the aesthetic theories of Herbert Read, at the University of Nottingham. He has taught at universities and colleges around the world, including at the University of Leeds, University of Hull, University of Nottingham and Cyprus College of Art, and in addition to working at City & Guilds of London Art School he also currently works at SOAS University of London and Imperial College London.

As a visiting lecturer he has spoken at institutions including the National College of Art and Design (Dublin), University of Nicosia, Goldsmiths’ College (London), University of Graz, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Eastern Illinois University, Minerva Academy of Art (Netherlands), National Gallery (London), Dulwich Picture Gallery (London) and the Whitechapel (London).

Michael lectures on various aspects of art history and culture, specialising at City & Guilds of London Art School on the architectural history of London, but he has broader interests in British art history and theory, and the historical and contemporary relationship between art and anarchism.

In this conversation with Head of Art Histories Tom Groves, Michael discusses how he delivers The History of British Architecture lectures on the Historic Carving and Conservation courses, and the benefits of experiencing architecture in person.

As well as being the co-founder and co-organiser of the annual conference Othellos Island held in Nicosia, Cyprus, he is a member of the judging panel for the annual PMSA-Marsh Award for Public Sculpture and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2010. Michael is also the inventor of a cocktail called the Ouzini, recommended the Cyprus Weekly newspaper as ‘worth a try’.

Niamh Clancy was born in Ireland in 1975. She graduated with a joint honours degree in the History of Art and Fine Art from NACD, Dublin 1997 and with a Masters in Printmaking from the Royal College of Art, London 2002. Clancy currently lives and works in London as an artist and has established an editioning service for reputable artists based in England. Niamh has exhibited regularly in Europe and America. In 2000 she held three solo shows: the first at The Original Print Gallery, Dublin, Ireland; the second at The Basement Gallery, Dundalk, Ireland; and the third at The Droichead Arts Center, Drogheda, Ireland. She has received funding awards from the Arts Council of Ireland, Department of Foreign Affairs, Royal College of Art, and Queens University Belfast. Niamh has taught at City & Guilds of London Art School and Putney School of Art & Design and has been a visiting lecturer at Kunstskolen i Rogaland. She is currently working as printer for Norman Ackroyd RA.

Nicholas Middleton studied painting and desktop publishing at Harlow and Winchester. He is a painter but also has interests that range across photography and print. He won the John Moores Visitors’ Choice Prize in 2006 and 2010. He has exhibited across the country, notably in the Royal Academy, the BP Portrait Award, the National Portrait Gallery, the Minories, Colchester, Abbott Hall (From Bacon to Rego) and Hoopers Gallery. He teaches fine art, digital and analogue photography and design to Foundation Diploma students.

 

Nicholas Mortimer’s professional practice has been focused on production design and coordination for Film, Artists projects and Museums. He is the founder of Studio Scenomatic: a production design studio for freelance contracts which undertakes and oversees a wide variety of design briefs ranging from concept development, detailed design to project management. He studied Fine Art Sculpture at the University of Brighton in 2002-2005 and then completed an MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in 2011-2013. He is now a workshop leader and visiting lecturer for the Design Products and Design Interactions MA at the Royal College of Art. Nicholas has worked on many projects including production design for Painter Jonathan Wateridge and production design for the Studio Scenomatic project: Undead Sun, for Jane and Louise Wilson, delivered initially for the Imperial War Museum London.

 

Tim Martin’s special interests include future trends, the dynamics of technology & society, typography and creative computing. His experience covers industrial design, design research, publishing, prepress and information design.

Robin Mason leads the BA (Hons) and MA Fine Art courses. He studied Fine Art at Wolverhampton winning the Northern Young Contemporaries. Following his MA in Painting at The Royal College of Art he established a studio in London. He has continued to exhibit nationally and internationally and his work can be found in public, significant private and corporate collections including those of Unilever and the Government Art Collection.

Andy Bannister is the pathway leader for fine art sculpture.  He studied at Nottingham Polytechnic and Chelsea College of Art where he specialised in sculpture, graduating in 1992.  His work was included in the BT New Contemporaries 1993-4 and featured in the influential ‘Institute of Cultural Anxiety’ exhibition at the ICA in 1994; since then he has gone on to exhibit widely in the UK and abroad.  Working in higher education since 1993, he was previously a senior lecturer in fine art at Nottingham Trent University and has worked at City and Guilds of London Art School since 2002.

Reece Jones graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2002 going on to set up the Rockwell Project Space in Hackney, London. His work has been shown extensively worldwide and is featured in many significant collections. His curatorial activities include The Hair Of The Dog at Block 336 in Brixton and Terminalia at Charlie Smith London. He recently produced text for Jonathan Wateridge’s monograph Hinterland and the essay for Lisa Wilken’s catalogue The Shadow Of An Unseen Power. He has chaired many artist interviews and panel discussions and is a current trustee of artist led project space Block 336.

Keith Price studied at Liverpool and the Royal Academy and has worked in the Art School for many years, taking over the running of the Foundation department in 1997. He has built up the department from what was a relatively small and not too well known course into the thriving and highly regarded position it enjoys today. In 2012 he designed the interior of the new Foundation studios in the old BT telephone exchange, adjacent to the Art Schools main site, producing a plan which has transformed this space into a superb environment for students to work in. In the same year, he worked to secure external approval for the course from UAL Awarding Body.

Abi 2

Abi is writer and lecturer in the fields of art history and feminist theory. Her research interests lie in the study of post war and contemporary interdisciplinary art practices that explore questions of gender, sexuality, space, embodiment, agency, and authorship. After undertaking an investigation into feminist installation art practice in her studio work during a Foundation Fine Art degree in 2011, she is particularly interested in art making that takes into account the relationship between theoretical, artistic and activist practices. She is currently completing a PhD in Art History at McGill University that examines women artists working at the intersections of installation art, architecture and feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Education

  • (2011, ongoing) PhD Candidate in Art History in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, Montréal.
  • (2010-11) Foundation Diploma with Distinction in Fine Art & Design at Coleg Menai, Bangor.
  • (2007-8) MA with Distinction in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
  • (2004-7) 1st Class BA Hons in Combined Arts in Art History and English Literature at Durham University, Durham.

Teaching
Abi has previously been the course instructor for ‘Methods in Art History’ and ‘Art Now: Contemporary Art from 1980 to Today’ at McGill University. At City & Guilds of London Art School she currently teaches the BA Histories of Modern Art course and Art & Design Histories at Foundation level. She also supervises BA theses and MA dissertations.

Publications and Papers
(2015) ‘Foreword’ Oak and Iron: Theo Shields, Exhibition Catalogue http://www.theoshields.com/catalogues.html
‘An Early Installation Art Maverick Gets Her Due with a Madrid Retrospective’

Hyperallergic, (2015) http://hyperallergic.com/236499/an-early-installation-art-maverick-gets-her-due-with-a-madrid-retrospective/
“The Personality Laboratory” (artwork by Abi Shapiro), InCirculation, Issue 2, Vol 1, Department of Art History and Communications Studies Graduate Journal, 2012

Abi has presented research conference papers at The Association of Art Historians in Norwich (2015), The Feminist Art History Conference at American University (2014) and at McGill University (2012).

Christine Palmer lectures Gilding. She is Director and joint founder of Carvers & Gilders which was set up in 1979 with other conservation graduates.

Carvers & Gilders Ltd. is a specialist conservation and restoration practice for fine decorative woodcarving, giltwood furniture, mirror frames, ornament etc., which undertakes large and small scale projects in both the public and private sector. Commissions for new work are regularly undertaken. Carvers & Gilders has both advised and worked on many large restoration and conservation programmes. These include furniture belonging to the Royal Collection at Hampton Court, Kensington Palace, Windsor Castle, Osborne House and the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace; also projects for Harewood House Trust, Woburn Abbey, Houghton Hall, Uppark, The Wallace Collection and the National Trust.

Christine has been an accredited Member of the Institute of Conservation since 2002.

Dr David Peggie is a specialist in Analytical Chemistry, Spectroscopy, Materials Chemistry

David Peggie obtained a Masters degree in Chemistry at The University of Edinburgh (2002) and then a PhD (2006) for research into the identification of dyes on historical textiles (in collaboration with the National Museum of Scotland). He then joined the scientific department at the National Gallery, London as an Organic analyst, where he uses a variety of chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques for the characterisation of materials in support of conservation treatments and for the understanding of painting technique. His main research interests include the analysis of natural products (such as oils, varnishes and dyestuffs) and the investigation of their deterioration.

Ned Scharer is a specialist in the conservation of Lime and its uses in conservation today. He teaches fresco, lime repairs to stone and free-hand modelling. He established Schärer Conservation in 2003 working on a wide range of conservation projects including Cynwyd War Memorial, for the Landmark Trust, Lancaster Cathedral, National Trust, Portmeirion Estate, Voelas Estate and others.

Ned is a member of Westminster Abbey’s Cosmati Sanctuary Pavement Advisory Group.

 

Alex Schouvaloff is a specialist in conservation of decorative surfaces, with extensive experience in lacquer and japanning.

Alison is an easel paintings conservator with a studio in Kent. She works at other private studios in the South East of England, and is currently working on a project at Chichester Cathedral for the Hamilton Kerr Institute. Since qualifying with a postgraduate diploma in the Conservation of Easel Paintings from the Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge, she has experience with working for private clients and institutions. She undertook internships at the Guildhall Art Gallery London, and Southampton City Art Gallery, and was employed at the National Museums Northern Ireland during the recent refurbishment of the Ulster Museum. She has recently carried out data work concerning conservation and access for the National Trust, and has delivered conservation training sessions for the Museums Association and Maidstone Museum, Kent. Her interests in conservation range from artists’ methods and materials and gilding within works of art, to public engagement with conservation.

I am an architectural sculptor working principally with stone. My early career was in the restoration of historic monuments, and I have carved work for King’s College Chapel, Cambridge; Ely Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. Once established, I was soon called upon to design my own work, sometimes for historic locations, sometimes for contemporary buildings. As an architectural sculptor I make work which is an integral part of a larger whole, and enjoy collaboration with architect and client. This gives my work a function and purpose that is self evident and allows me to feel comfortably located within a great tradition of architectural stone sculpture that goes back millennia, and which is a constant source of inspiration. My hope for the future is that there will be more opportunity to design work for contemporary buildings, where there is tremendous potential for figurative, foliate or abstract ornamentation.

Albert Traby is a specialist in stone conservation. He has been a freelance conservator since 2009, with recent projects including conservation work at the Cutty Sark, Kensington Palace, the Victoria & Albert Museum and Westminster Abbey.

Mark Frith is a lettercutter and stonecarver. Working in wood and stone, his commissioned projects range from sundials to inscriptions in foreign scripts and languages. The most notable work of this kind, undertaken with Sally Bower, is the Language Pillar at the Tibetan Peace Garden in London, with the words of the Dalai Lama carved in four languages.

Mark studied at the City & Guilds of London Art School in the 1980s, followed by several years working for Richard Kindersley on a wide variety of architectural lettering and heraldry projects in different media. He subsequently set up his own freelance practice. He is a member of Letter Exchange.

 

I come from a family of Master Craftsmen.

From the beginning I was encouraged to respect the nature and practical limitations of natural materials.

I was taught the necessity of process and creativity in completing that challenge, and the rational behind the use of discipline and the development of various formal tool skills to help achieve not only the true potential of the material, but your own.

When you choose to truly understand stone, as with wood, you make the commitment to study its uses and aesthetic styles historically associated with it. Through this you gain a design freedom that cultivates creativity through limitation. You learn to continually push your own professional practice through frustration. Learning through every new task how to solve a variety of problems and in doing so becoming a “better” designer and sculptor. It is I believe the first commitment you undertake when craft becomes your chosen career path and something that if you are lucky, gives you immense joy for the rest of your life.

 

The Atlas Fountain at Kenilworth Castle: Paul Jakeman’s most recent carving (for Fairhaven & Woods) can be seen at the newly restored Elizabethan Gardens at Kenilworth Castle. In just seven months, Paul singlehandedly brought forth from a 5 ton block of Carrara marble, the twin Atlas figures carrying the globe aloft surmounted by the Earl of Dudley’s Staff. This fountain is the centrepiece of English Heritage’s garden recreation. Paul’s work also included modelling the panels on the base of the fountain entitled; ‘Doris and her Daughters and ‘Triton’.

Paul is currently carving decorative cornice in Portland stone, involving, egg and dart work, rosettes and oak-leaves at Ketton Stone. His next project will involve modelling a coat of arms 2metre square in size for Andy Tanser.
The Beasts of Bloomsbury: One of Paul’s most notable, recent large-scale projects (also for Fairhaven & Woods) was carving the front-facing unicorn on the steeple of St. George’s of Bloomsbury completed in the spring of 2006. This was a significant architectural and decorative restoration project of an important, Hawksmoor church that received substantial lottery funding and much media attention.

Richard Kindersley studied lettering and sculpture at Cambridge School of Art and in his Father’s workshop. In 1970 he set up his own studio in London, accepting commissions for lettering and sculpture. Among his sculpture commissions are works for Exeter University, British Telecom, Sainsbury’s, Lloyds Register of Shipping, Flaxyards, Christies’ Fine Art and Night and Day Grosvenor Square London, Winner of 7 major brick carving competitions and awarded the Royal Society of Art, Art for Architecture Award.

 

He has designed title lettering schemes for London Bridge, Tower Bridge and the M25 Queen Elizabeth Bridge over the Thames at Dartford; the New Crown Court Buildingsin Liverpool, Leeds, Swindon, Newcastle and Luton; University buildings in Cambridge, Oxford, Exeter, Kent and Staffordshire. Designs for theatres and major shopping centres where both the main building titles as well as the signing systems were produced, including the Grafton Shopping Centre, Cambridge, Piries Place, Horsham and St. Peter’s Place, Grantham. Title lettering for the London Business School, Bank of Ireland, British Bank of Hong Kong in Dubai and Barclays Bank International; Penguin Books, Liberty’s of London and the Lindisfarne Museum, Public Record Office, Kew, Shirley Sherwood Gallery Kew Gardens. Title Lettering for National Gallery of Ireland, and the new British Embassy Algiers. Inscription on glass, wood and stone for the Supreme Court, Parliament Square London. Inscriptions for many of the great churches and cathedrals around the country including St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey.

 

Richard Kindersley has lecturedwidely on both the historical aspects of architectural lettering and the present development within the context of his own work. Individual lectures to: Newcastle University, Keele University, Faith and Image, RIBA Regional Associations, Society of Scribes, Planning Associations, Central School of Art, Hulland Exeter Schools of Art, Cromarty Arts Trust, Wells Civic Society and Letter Exchange, amongst many others. Appearances on BBC and Independent Television; ‘Kaleidoscope’ on Radio 4, ‘Night Lines’ on Radio 3, ‘Poetry Nation’ on BBC. LWT Television talking about People of London Memorial. Commissioned to carve an inscription forpermanent display at the V&A Gallery of the 20th Century. Invited to produce special Art work to mark and celebrate the 150 Anniversary of the founding of the V&A.

Richard Kindersley organizes yearly study trips in the spring to Rome and Pompeii to visit significant Roman classical inscriptions both of the Republican, Imperial and Renaissance periods. Included are visits to the Epigraphy Museums in the Museo Nazionale Romano and the new Epigraphy museum at Museo Palatino. On the Pompeii trip a day’s study is organised at Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples. A highlight of the trip is a visit to the summit of Vesuvius and to walk around the rim of the volcano to put the whole experience into its terrible historical perspective.

Richard is a Trustee of the City & Guilds of London Art School

Nearly all my sculptures start as carving in wood or stone. The subject is sometimes derived from natural forms and simetimes from mathematical ideas of proportion or geometrical figures which I develop into organic shapes.
Carving satisfies me because I delight in the physical activity and because of the way in which ideas and problems with the material emerge during the process of searching for the intended shape. This induces a collaboration between me and the material which gives the completed piece a life of its own. I am trying to make forms that never would have existed but for me. Their underlying purpose is a celebration of life.

There are two main themes in my sculpture work. The first is the tensions between the form of the sculpture – the way it inhabits its space, the material used and the process by which the form is created out of that material. For example, I have used industrial machinery to create seemingly organic structures out of stone or wood. Whilst respecting the original shape of the material, I am also interested in the process of fracturing, bending or moulding this shape to give a new dimension to the material.

 

The other major theme of my work is the relationship between the plinth and the sculpture. Since I began creating sculptures, the plinth has always seemed to restrain the sculpture, simultaneously elevating it and anchoring it to the ground, which is why I created a series of suspended sculptures. I am currently working with everyday objects that I use as a base material, breaking their original form and function to give them a new life. Here the plinth is absorbed into the sculpture, where it supports the work but is also an integral part of it.

Keiko Nakamura is furniture restorer and conservator, and a specialist in Urushi (Asian lacquer) and lacquered objects.

Education & Qualifications

  • 2008 – 2009 Buckinghamshire New University
    M.A. Furniture Restoration, Conservation & Decorative Arts
  • 1996 – 2002 Kanazawa College of Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan
    B.A., Art &Craft Major: Craft Main Major: Urushi (Asian Lacquer) Craft
  • 1999 – 2001 Leeds College of Art and Design, Leeds
  • City & Guilds Creative Skills Certificates:
    Upholstery, Design for Upholstery, Upholstery Buttoning
    -BTEC National Diploma in Design: Furniture Making and Restoration
  • 1993- 1996 Ibaraki High School, Ibaraki, Osaka, Japan

Dr Naomi Luxford is a Conservation Scientist working at English Heritage, current research projects include environmental control within collections stores, the suitability of underfloor heating within historic houses, and the use of mesh blinds in historic properties. Previous research has looked at the use of UVC for cleaning mould on architectural stonework, understanding Daguerreotype environmental sensitivity as well as a wide range of objects including silver, textiles and furniture. Her primary interests are in Preventive Conservation, Conservation Science and Conservation Research focussing on the building, its environment and collections, and understanding their interactions to improve preservation. She has taught at City & Guilds of London Art School, West Dean College, UCL and the Royal College of Art.

Having completed her Chemistry degree at University of Bristol, she volunteered at the Conservation Centre, National Museums Liverpool. This led to an MA in Conservation at the Royal College of Art / Victoria & Albert Museum specialising in Conservation Science in the Care of Historic Collections with English Heritage. This was followed by a PhD at the Textile Conservation Centre, University of Southampton and an AHRC/EPSRC Science & Heritage Programme post-doctoral fellowship at University College London, both in collaboration with English Heritage. She then spent a year working in private practice with Tobit Curteis Associates focussed on environmental monitoring in historic buildings, especially churches and cathedrals. She has presented and published widely and currently serves as an Associate Editor for Studies in Conservation.

 

Art conservation has become a challenging multidisciplinary field where the professional conservators apply their knowledge of crafts, science, ethics and history of arts and technology.

Dr Marina Sokhan received an MSc in Physics (Optics and Spectroscopy) at the department of physics, Kiev State University, in 1983, and a High Course Certificate in patent law from Moscow in 1980. After six years working as a research engineer (infrared spectroscopy and electrophoresis of organic complexes) at the Kiev Institute of Plant Physiology, she left in 1986 to become a lecturer in physics at the Kiev State High School where she stayed until 1990.

After moving to the UK she became a lecturer in higher mathematics for the international baccalaureate at Southampton Technical College between 1998 and 1999, and in 2000 she received a BA (Hons) in Fine Arts Evaluation and Art History at The Southampton Institute.

Between 2000 and 2006 she completed a PhD in Conservation Science at the Materials Department, Imperial College London. Her thesis is entitled “The Surface Analysis of LASER Cleaned Museum Materials” and the project was carried out in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Gallery and the Natural History Museum. During these years she completed a number of conservation projects at these institutions and conducted a series of training seminars for conservators.

From 2004 to 2005 she was also a research fellow (corrosion analysis; mass spectrometry, prophilometry, scanning electron microscopy, Q-switch Nd:YAG LASER operation) at Imperial College London in collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Gallery and the Natural History Museum. In 2005 she was appointed senior conservation tutor (materials science and laser cleaning) at the Art School and has actively helped to develop the department’s LASER technology section. She has considerable experience in LASER treatment technology and practice, and has been one of the main instigators behind the LASER Consortium and the new cleaning technology course offered in October 2006. In 2007 she was appointed Head of Conservation at the City & Guilds of London Art School.

Gerry Alabone is concerned with understanding, managing and communicating the assistance that frames give to paintings within their settings.

Gerry studied Fine Art (painting) at Bath Academy of Art and Restoration and Conservation (wood and metals) at London Guildhall University and has over twenty years of experience specialising in picture frames, including employment in the frame-making trade, as a Gallery technician, as lead frames conservator at the City of London’s Guildhall Art Gallery. He was Head of frames conservation at Tate from 2004-2016. He is presently Senior Conservator (furniture and frames) at the National Trust. Since 2009, Gerry has been Joint Chair of the Gilding & Decorative Surfaces group (Icon).  He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

Jennifer has had a long involvement with conserving, studying and writing about stone sculpture. She is also a conservation consultant, concerned with providing advice, training, and assessment of collections and objects and the environments in which they are housed for museums, galleries, churches and private collectors in Britain and elsewhere. The work involves an understanding of materials and how they change over time, the risks that objects may be exposed to and how these can be managed, as well as knowing the benefits and limitations of conservation interventions. She also works on exhibitions and installations and one of her current projects concerns the touring programme for the Wave and the Weeping Window, sculptures drawn from the work, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, displayed at the Tower of London in 2014.

Dr Tracey Chaplin is an Independent Scientific Consult specialising in analysis and identification of artists’ materials and their degradation products on objects such as paintings, sculpture, furniture, manuscripts, wallpaper, textiles and architectural elements. This includes the application of polarizing light microscopy, cross-sectional analysis, Raman and infrared spectroscopies, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) analysis, X-ray fluorescence and gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS).

Tracey lectures in conservation science at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Course contents include basic and advanced polarizing light microscopy, polymer chemistry (plastics, adhesives, consolidants and coatings), solvent theory & practice, cross-sectional analysis, environmental monitoring & control, the chemistry of colour and analytical methods in chemistry and physics.

Between 1998 and 2001, Tracey was Post-Doctoral Research Assistant in the Department of Earth Sciences and between 2001 and 2003 in the Department of Chemistry at University College London.

Hugi Hicyilmaz is a freelance conservator with experience in a wide range of materials including wood, stone and decorative surfaces.

Recent projects have included work with Ely Cathedral, ceremonial Thames barges, Syon House, Eton College, the Fishmongers’ and Mercers companies, the Nek Chand Foundation, contemporary artists and private clients. The works have included: analysis, preventative conservation, gilding, collections care and surveys, refurbishment, restoration and art fabrications.

Hugi’s qualifications include BA (Hons) Conservation Studies from City & Guilds of London Art School and BA (Hons) Fine Art: Painting from Norwich School of Art and Design.

He was won numerous awards including:

  • Venice in Peril Scholarship
  • NADFAS Research Prize
  • Anna Plowden Bursary
  • Taylor Pearce Drawing Prize
  • City & Guilds Bursary
  • Student Conservator Prize
  • Decorative Surfaces Prize

Recognized internationally as a leader in the field of Architectural Paint Research and Historic Interiors Research, and with over 25 years working with English Heritage, Helen Hughes has now established a private consultancy.
She is an ICON accredited conservator-restorer. Her aim is to provide her clients with an understanding of the decorative developments of the historic buildings in their care, and present pragmatic options. Follow -through support is provided for a wide range of conservation and redevelopment programmes.
Professional Affiliation:

FIIC (Fellow of International Institute for Conservation), Individual Member
AC-R ICON (Institute for Conservation), Accredited Member
Education
1980 -1981 Diploma in Easel Paintings, Gateshead Technical College
1976 -1979 BA.Hons History of Art & Architecture, University College London

 

Professional Experience:
2009 – Freelance Consultant Helen Hughes – Historic Interiors Research & Conservation
1985 – 2009 Head of Architectural Paint Research – English Heritage
1981 – 1985 Freelance conservator – Easel Paintings, Polychrome & Architectural Interiors

 

Mendes holds a BA Painting from Chelsea School of Art, and an MA Painting from City & Guilds of London Art School, where he continues to teach. He graduated on 9/11 and his work reflects this. Working from newspaper clippings, his paintings are meditations on politics and mortality. The Obituaries series has gradually become dominant within his body of work. He exhibits internationally, mainly in the USA and Europe. His studio is in London .

Frances Richardson was born in Leeds and studied at Jacob Kramer Leeds College of Art, Norwich School of Art and the Royal College of Art, graduating in 2006 with MA in Fine Art Sculpture and presented with the Conran Award for overall best graduate exhibition. Publications in which her works feature include The Art of Drawing: British Masters and Methods since 1660 by Susan Owens, V&A, 2013 and Vitamin D: New Perspectives on Contemporary Drawing, Phaidon NY 2005.

Kate Palmer studied Fine Art Painting at Central St Martins and then studied for her MA at The Royal College of Art. She became Artist in Residence at Trinity College, Cambridge. As a qualified mountain snowboard instructor and an involvement in psychotherapy research her Artist in Residency in Saas-Feeualified halfway up a mountain brought these two areas of interest together. She has work in UK and international public and private collections.

Alex Gene Morrison is a practising artist and has consistently exhibited his work nationally and internationally, from London to Tokyo, New York and Shanghai. Morrison graduated from the Royal College of Art Painting course in 2002. His practice revolves around an ongoing exploration of varying painting methods and processes, at times extending into areas of digital video and 3D animation. He is represented by Charlie Smith London gallery and his work is held in various public and private collections including the David Roberts collection. Morrison was one of the founders and curators of the Rockwell Gallery and Studios in Dalston, London 2002-2007, an influential artist run space.

James Jessop studied Fine Art at Coventry University graduating in 1995 and went on to study at The Royal College of Art in 1997. He established his studio in East London where he works to this day. Jessop has exhibited in major cities such as New York, Sao Paulo, Copenhagen and Turin. 2004 saw James’ first UK museum show; New Blood at the Saatchi Gallery alongside the likes of Tal R, Daniel Richter & Jonathan Meese.

Underlying my practice is the idea that representation is tautology. (a chair would be made out of its own matter into a painting of itself). This position reverses the age – old maxim, which states that representation excludes its subject.

Jane Hayes Greenwood is a lecturer in the Fine Art department. Alongside her practice, she is the Director of Block 336, a UK registered charity, artist-run project space, studio provider and independent publisher in Brixton, London. Block 336 hosts one of the largest, non-institutional and architecturally unique spaces in London. They offer opportunities for artists, encouraging ambitious projects and providing a sympathetic and supportive environment for the development of new work. Jane recently managed the large scale exhibition: Unspeakable Freedom >> Tastes Like Chicken by Jennet Thomas which was supported by the Arts Council England.

Tom Groves is an academic, writer, artist and curator. He is Head of the Art Histories Department at City & Guilds of London Art School, Curator and Academic & Education Co-coordinator at the Brixton based Gallery Block 336, and the Programme Leader of BA (Hons) Photography at the University of Greenwich.

Through writing, curating, painting, photography and installation, Tom Groves’ practice shifts between different conceptual registers and formal concerns. Underpinned by an engagement in psychoanalytic theory and a critique of historic and contemporary trends of art’s reception, Groves plays with preconceptions of what constitutes object, place and meaning and questions whether the desire for certainty is driven ultimately by an objectless, placeless and meaningless relation.

Tom Groves 2

Recently curated exhibitions include:

Recent Publications Include:

  • Art Histories Journal: City & Guilds of London Art School. A publication featuring the written work of students, writers and artists including Mark Wallanger, Gabriel Gbadamosi, Michael Paraskos, Annette Kobak and others. 2015
    http://issuu.com/cityandguildsoflondonartschool/docs/art_histories_2015
  • IT IS AS IF: A Publication of the work and writing of Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier. Block 336 Ltd 2015. 9780957622821
  • The Deepest Darkness: A Publication of the work and writing of Robin Mason. Block 336 Ltd. 2013. ISBN 978-0-9576228-0-7

Recent Events include:

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