Tag Archives: Creativity

I go undercover into arms fairs – and secretly draw caricatures of the ‘hell’ I find there

Jill Gibbon is an artist and activist with research interests in drawing, and art as an interdisciplinary method. She currently uses performance and drawing to research the secretive world of the international arms trade. She has exhibited in the UK and US, and has drawings in the permanent collections of the Imperial War Museum, and the Peace Museum.

She has a B.A in Illustration from Leeds Polytechnic, an M.A in Visual Arts from Keele University, and a PhD from Wimbledon School of Art. She teaches Graphic Arts at Leeds Beckett University, specialising in drawing. She is an early career research fellow at the ISRF, and a founder member of Art Not Arms.

Through his art, a former prisoner diagnoses the systemic sickness of Florida’s penitentiaries

Nicole R. Fleetwood is Associate Professor of American Studies, Rutgers University. She is a cultural theorist and writer interested in visual culture, black cultural history, gender and feminist studies, performance, creative nonfiction, and poverty studies.

She is the author of two books: “Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness,” which was the recipient of the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, and “On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination” (Rutgers University Press, 2015). Her articles appear in African American Review, American Quarterly, Aperture, Callaloo: Art and Culture in the African Diaspora, Public Culture, Signs, and Social Text.

She is completing her third book, “Marking Time: Prison Art and Public Culture,” a study of visual art in the era of mass incarceration.

David Haines and the Black Mirror/Facing faces

Images sourced from the internet often form the basis of David Haines’s work, whose practice actively examines the artist’s own position as someone who makes pictorial and textual narratives in the wake of abstraction, conceptual art and photography, and whose themes include an exploration of digital identities, online communities, contemporary myths and the indexical nature of drawing itself.

Drawn Forms

Massinissa Selmani’s work aims to create drawn forms mingling a documentary approach with fictional constructions and animations, while taking as its point of departure contemporary political and social issues from press cuttings. Through confrontation, juxtaposition and even the superposition of actual elements, whose contexts have systematically been concealed, the artist creates enigmatic, ambiguous scenes unlikely to happen in reality.

The human condition and the question of personal identity

Shelly Tregoning’s work is a response to the intimacies of her life – “an emotional connection to those closest to me and to fragments of the everyday that I encounter. I am trying to make sense in some way, of life and personal identity – through conversations with friends, places I have been and the things I see along the way. Visually gathering ‘moments’ which inform my work, these drawings and scribbles create a scaffolding upon which I build my images”.

Drawing, the Body, and the Cognitive Unconscious

“My work begins with simple gesture drawings made with graphite. Executed without plan and with as few strokes as possible, the forms that emerge record a confluence of forces. A kind of collaboration between a sensing organism and the dynamics of its environment, each drawing is unique, irreproducible by definition.”

Taney Roniger is a visual artist, writer, and educator based in New York. Since the late 90s she has been exploring the relationship between art, science, and the spirituality of immanence in both her work as an artist and in numerous essays and symposia.

Drawings hand-stitched

Wura-Natasha Ogunji is a visual artist and performer. Her works include drawings hand-stitched into tracing paper, videos and public performances. Her work is deeply inspired by the daily interactions and frequencies that occur in the city of Lagos, Nigeria, from the epic to the intimate. Ogunji’s performances explore the presence of women in public space; these often include investigations of labor, leisure, freedom and frivolity.

Dialogues and Double-Slits

Artist and writer, Richard Bright, has addressed the relationship between art, science and consciousness for over 30 years. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and was the recipient of the ‘Visions of Science’ Award, The Edge, Andrew Brownsward Gallery, University of Bath (Second Prize Winner). In his recent series of drawings he explores the impermanent and shifting process of time and waves.

History, memory, masculinity and power balance

History, memory, masculinity and power balance are central themes in Marc Bauer’s work that consist for a major part of black and white drawings, but extends to animation film, ceramics, oil paint and sculpture. He describes drawing as “a way for me and the viewer, to comprehend reality in all its complexity – subjectively, politically, symbolically – and show how history, memory and shifting power structures shade the present.”

Transformations

Annie Cattrell’s practice is often informed by working with specialists in neuroscience, meteorology, engineering, psychiatry and the history of science. This cross-disciplinary approach has enabled her to learn about cutting edge research and in depth information in these fields. She is particularly interested in the parallels and connections that can be drawn within these approaches in both art and science.