Research fellows 2014
Each year our fellowship programme enables artists and researchers to develop their work.
In 2014 our visiting fellows included Jessica Barker, Kate Sloan, Rebecca Wade, Dawna Schuld, Michael Tooby, Monica Amor, Cecilia Canziani, John Dummett, Sophia Hao, Tom Overton and Magdalena Wroblewska.
Jessica Barker
The Courtauld Institute of Art
Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship
2014-15
Experiencing Tomb Sculpture in Medieval Europe
Funerary monuments are essential to our understanding of sculpture in the medieval period. Tomb monuments were a form of sculpture in which broad sections of medieval society participated, whether through commissioning a memorial, being depicted on one, or seeing tombs in their local church. Studies of medieval monuments have tended to focus on the process of creation, examining issues of patronage, manufacture and dating.
This project seeks to understand and characterise tomb sculpture from a different perspective: the interaction between the monument and the viewer. Exploring issues such as visibility, time, emotion and sound, Dr Jessica Barker will consider the ways in which funerary sculpture sought to condition particular responses from the viewer. Her project will also examine images of medieval tomb sculpture (drawings, engravings, photographs and digital models) from c. 1700 to the present day, considering how these reproductions affect our perception and experience of the memorials themselves.
Kate Sloan
University of Edinburgh
Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship
2014-15
Radical Pedagogies in Post-War British Art
Dr Kate Sloan’s project will investigate radical visual arts pedagogies in the post-war era in Britain. She will be examining the instrumental presence of system, cybernetic and network theories in the art school and also exploring the highly conceptual use of sculptural objects within the curriculum. The project will culminate in the production of a book about ‘Groundcourse’, Roy Ascott’s innovative foundation course at Ealing and Ipswich in which students created devices, machines and games which were intended to modify their interactions with different environments and situations. This course, with its exploration of wartime environments and its revolutionary approaches to fine art education was one of the most experimental teaching models of the twentieth century.
In addition, the project will produce a number of articles reassessing the Basic Design movement in art education at Durham and Leeds in a post-war context. Using hitherto unpublished student works of art as well as original interview material with staff and students, these articles will offer exciting new insights into both the teaching and working practices of several British artists, including Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, Tom Hudson and Harry Thubron. With regards to both Groundcourse and Basic Design, the pedagogical models offer fascinating insights into the creative ideologies of the day – a post-war world changed irrevocably by a new age of technology.
Rebecca Wade
Henry Moore Institute
Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship
2014-15
Domenico Brucciani: Casting the Nineteenth Century
Dr Rebecca Wade is writing a history and a critical analysis of the sculptural practice and plaster casting business of the Anglo-Italian formatore Domenico Brucciani (1814-80) from circa 1840 to 1950.
Brucciani was the principal manufacturer and supplier of plaster casts for art galleries, museums and schools of art in Britain, with a significant role in the establishment of cast collections in North America, Australasia and India. The firm was responsible for the international circulation of reproductions invested with very specific formal and ideological qualities that would inform the display, interpretation and production of sculpture for almost a century.
So important was the business that when it began to struggle during the First World War, a group of eminent artists, architects and museum professionals successfully lobbied for it to be effectively nationalised under the auspices of the Board of Education. The operation was transferred to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1921, where it continued for another thirty years.
Based at the Henry Moore Institute, Rebecca’s fellowship will culminate with the exhibition Object Lessons, opening in Gallery 4 on 30 September 2015, with an associated conference on 3 October 2015. Beginning with the concrete object, direct experience and observation, ‘object lessons’ provided a mode of encountering the world through form, material and process. Conceived as a mode of elementary education, the idea that objects had intrinsic instructive potential came to characterise nineteenth-century approaches to the ways in which sculpture was taught, collected and displayed. A Victorian box of object lessons forms the centrepiece of the exhibition, containing an encyclopaedia of natural and manufactured specimens carefully selected to produce knowledge through sensory perception.
Dawna Schuld
Indiana University
Senior Research Fellowship
2014
Michael Tooby
Bath School of Art and Design, Bath Spa University
Senior Research Fellowship
2014
Monica Amor
Maryland Institute College of Art
Research Fellowship
2014
Cecilia Canziani
University of Naples, Federico II
Research Fellowship
2014
John Dummett
University of Dundee
Research Fellowship
2014
Sophia Hao
University of Dundee
Research Fellowship
2014
Tom Overton
British Library / Kings College, London
Research Fellowship
2014
Magdalena Wroblewska
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut
Research Fellowship
2014