The Photography Degree Show returns!
Visit unit 12 in Weston-super-Mare’s Sovereign Shopping Centre to see the amazing work on display form our fantastic students studying Photography and Visual Cultures, BA (Hons).
Saturday 7th May – Thursday 12th May 2022
Guest Seminar - Sam Francis - Creative Producing, Curating
Sam Francis joined us for another guest seminar, this time focussing on working as a Creative Producer and Curator. Recording of session is on Teams, see links and notes from this session below. For notes from yesterday’s Experimental Media Arts workshop go to this page
‘I am a creative producer, maker and doer now living in Weston Super Mare after 15 years in Bristol.
I am interested in engaged, live work that is not bound by a singular art form, and am currently project producer for Outlands experimental music network, a member of Supernormal Festival and arts collective Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (BEEF).
I also create things and make stuff sometimes. I like to observe and experience things through sound, image and words; snippets and moments, as a way to connect with place, space and spirit. I like working collectively and collaboratively, building and being part of communities, connecting people and responding creatively to contexts.
I am a creative producer, maker and doer now living in Weston Super Mare after 15 years in Bristol.
I am interested in engaged, live work that is not bound by a singular art form, and am currently project producer for Outlands experimental music network, a member of Supernormal Festival and arts collective Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (BEEF).
I also create things and make stuff sometimes. I like to observe and experience things through sound, image and words; snippets and moments, as a way to connect with place, space and spirit. I like working collectively and collaboratively, building and being part of communities, connecting people and responding creatively to contexts.’
Notes and Links from Session
Supernormal Festival
SUPERNORMAL is a three-day, experimental arts and music festival taking place at Braziers Park in Oxfordshire. It offers a platform for artists, performers and musicians to work collaboratively and creatively for a new kind of audience seeking experiences out of the mainstream. It is determinedly small and intimate with an audience of 1,500. It has been born from a place that values the currency of ideas and imagination, as well as the inclusivity of artists and audiences alike, rather than commercialism and profit. Read more
Trailer:
Short Film (2015) by James Hankins & Richard Edkins
BEEF - Bristol Experimental Expanded Film
Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (BEEF) is a film and sound collective supporting experimental practice in Bristol since 2015.
BEEF provides an independent platform and much needed resource for artists’ production, distribution and critical engagement, predominantly focusing on experimental and analogue practices. BEEF members collaborate and work together to organise a regular programme of events, screenings, performances, exhibitions, residencies, and film & sound workshops. Read More
Why you Shouldn't be an artist
LINKS - Weston super Mare
Weston Artspace: a studio hub and workshop space for Weston’s creative community, on the High Street.
https://www.westonartspace.com/
Culture Weston: develop inspiring cultural initiatives and events
https://cultureweston.org.uk/
Creative Meet Ups for young and emerging artists and creatives. The next one is 13 April. Book here: https://cultureweston.org.uk/listings/creative-meet-up-emerging-artists-creatives/
There will be event volunteer opportunities, and specific student opportunities.
Keep an eye out on FACEBOOK: Culture Weston / Weston Artspace.
FURTHER INFO + LINKS:
•Curating Context – Beyond the Gallery and Into Other Fields, edited by Magdalena Malm, 2017
•What Does an Art Producer Do? by Grace Bordelon
•BFI Future Film Festival film industry festival for young, emerging filmmakers
•BFI Film Academy - opportunities for young creatives aged 16 to 25:
Further Viewing:
Day in the life of a film programmer
Curator talk: curating in context - making exhibitions work
How to succeed as an artist
How to get your short screened at film festivals:
The fifth sense: making exhibitions
See more of Sam Francis’s work at: https://samfrancisco.co.uk/
Inside Out - Photography Symposium - RPS
‘Inside Out’ Photography reclaiming identity in a complex society
Who are we? What do we believe? And what are our values?
With questionable histories to refer to and our online presence increasingly reflecting a negotiation between manufacturer and marketer rather than a meaningful identity, where does true expression of the self exist?
In a world which encourages us to rapidly adopt and shed identities, through consumption and self- publicity, to what extent can we be expected to know ourselves? If we treat these new technologies within the context of photographic tradition and practice, we may better understand how they function. Contemporary photographers often work in the space between traditional visual arts and current vernacular practices, questioning each in attempting to define meanings for themselves.
Presented here, these research led photographies explore notions of personal and social identity as a critique of the ‘now’ and an attempt to reach out and make meaningful connections with our past and future through performative and poetic personal anthropologies.
Speakers
Dr Dawn Woolley is a visual artist using photography, video, installation, performance, and sound. She completed an MA in Photography (2008) and PhD by project in Fine Art (2017) at the Royal College of Art. Her practice encompasses photography, video, installation and performance.
Woolley uses photographs of objects and people to question issues of artificiality and idealisation in relation to consumer culture and stereotypical gender representations. Her research examines the relation between people and objects, to explore how and why different objects and bodies are valued in popular and consumer culture. Her central argument is that commodity culture turns everything into adverts, from seventeenth century still-life paintings to selfies. She considers social networking sites to be the commercial space where commodity culture invades our social interactions.
Her photographic work blurs the boundary between self-portraiture and still-life, producing inanimate bodies and seemingly animate objects. The practical outcomes of her research include photographic and installation works, but also public interventions in physical commercial advertising spaces in cities and in virtual ones on online social networking sites.
Heather Agyepong is a visual artist, performer/actor and maker who lives and works in London. Her art practice is concerned with mental health and wellbeing, activism, invisibility, the diaspora and the archive. She uses both lens-based practices and performance with an aim to culminate a cathartic experience for both herself and the viewer. Agyepong adopts the technique of re-imagination to engage with communities of interest and the self as a central focus within the image.
She has worked within photographic & performance arts since 2009 with a range of works that have been published, performed and exhibited around the UK and internationally.
She has been nominated for Prix Pictet & Paul Huf Award in both 2016 & 2018. Her work exists in a number of collections including Autograph ABP, Hyman Collection, New Orleans Museum of Art and Mead Art Museum.
She has been commissioned by a number of organisations including the Mayor of London, Photoworks, Artichoke & Tate Exchange.
In her television/film and theatre work, she is drawn to challenging and compelling writing with an intrigue for unique voices. She has previously been an associate artist of black led theatre company Talawa and continues to perform both nationally & internationally.
She was nominated for the South Bank Sky Arts Breakthrough Award 2018.
Michal Iwanowski
On April 27, Michal Iwanowski set off from his adopted home in Cardiff to walk back to his family home in the village of Mokrzeszów in Poland, having been haunted for several years by graffiti he spotted on a wall in his Roath neighbourhood that read “Go Home, Polish”. His dogged 1,200 mile journey, mapped out in regular Instagram photographs that merged various approaches – diaristic, documentary, staged, conceptual – was by turns funny, revealing and marked by moments of drama amid the drudgery. When I asked him if the journey changed his way of thinking about home, he replied, “It confirmed something. I feel utterly at home walking in the landscape, wherever that landscape is. I don’t need to be told by a government, ‘This is your home.’ The ground beneath my feet sanctifies my belonging in this world – not the passport given to me by a country.” Amen to that. (Best of 2018: Sean Hagan, The Guardian)
Tom Roche (Alumnus) is a photographer based in Bristol is work is rooted in Documentary, with a subjective way of thinking. He borrows from the esoteric and fiction, blurring the line between genres. He is interested in creating a narrative and raising questions on truth and authorship within the medium of photography, and storytelling in general. His most recent work Black Blood, is a body of work about his Romany Gypsy heritage; which relies on speculation and folklore, to uncover how his past has tropes that affect his current way of thinking. Formalities and records were not available to him when making the work, so the process was one of meditation and following trails on the road, with people he met, and information he found out along the way.
Emma Iris Hill (Current Student) Emma’s work to date has been focusing on using therapeutic photography as catharsis. Using predominantly self-portraiture Emma has studied the relationship of photography with memory and emotions as a form of self-reflection and progression.
Organised by FdA Photography in Practice / BA Lens Based Media - University Centre Weston
Sam Brooks & Jamie Dormer Durling. Email: Sam.Brooks@weston.ac.uk
With Liz Williams - RPS, Bristol
liz@rps.org
01173164482
Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam released from prison
Shahidul Alam after his release from Dhaka’s central prison on 20 November. Photograph: Suman Paul/AFP/Getty Images
‘The award-winning Bangladeshi photographer and activist Shahidul Alam has been released from prison after more than 100 days behind bars, in a closely watched freedom-of-speech case.’ Read report from Guardian 20/11/2019 here.
University Centre Weston participated in a Mass Exhibition of Dr Shahidul Alam’s work in support of the campaign to free him. #FreeShahidulAlam
We have kept prints from the exhibition on display in the gallery at UCW Loxton Campus, more details and online exhibition at: http://poool.co.uk/freeshahidulalam
London Trip - Friday 7th December 2018
Careful reconstructions … The Long Duration of a Split Second by Forensic Architecture at Tate Britain. (Turner Prize 2018). Photograph: Dinendra Haria/Rex/Shutterstock
The Photography department is running an educational visit to London to visit the exhibition ‘All I Know is What’s on The Internet’ at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. The Photographers’ Gallery also has an excellent Photo Book shop and Print Sales library which students can view.
Interested students can also join staff to see the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize at The National Portrait Gallery or take the opportunity to photograph/ film London in the run up to Christmas.
Another option is to see Turner Prize 2018 at Tate Britain (£11 concs) which has a considerable amount of artists using video, film, moving image.
This is an opportunity for students to engage in primary research relevant to their upcoming final major projects.
We will be meeting outside Loxton Campus no later than 6.50am for a prompt departure at 7am. We will be leaving London at 7pm to return home around 11pm.
It is essential to bring a notebook, pens and a camera.
The cost of the trip is £25, which includes return coach journey and entry to the Photographers’ Gallery. Entry to the Taylor Wessing Prize will cost £3.50 with a student card.
It is also advisable to bring enough food to last a full day or sufficient funds to purchase lunch and dinner.
The trip is open to Photography and Film students. Book via the shop