Friday 12 November 2010

Guest Speaker Profiles

Dr Amanda Ravetz, November 2011

Guest Speaker Nov 2011 - Dr Amanda Ravetz (Manchester) Amanda Ravetz is a visual anthropologist who uses video to explore creativity, improvisation and play.  In 2010 she undertook a residency at Arts Reverie in Ahmedabad, India, culminating in the short film Entry, made with local residents over the course of one day. In 2009, she and her sister Ant Riviere, made the film Beautiful Colour about award-winning artist Ian Partridge who attends the Barrington Farm Art Barn in Norfolk. Amanda taught documentary filmmaking at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester before becoming a Research Fellow at the Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author, with Anna Grimshaw, of Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film and the Exploration of Social Life.


Guest Speaker May 2011 - Robin Blackledge (Brighton) Author of 'Creative Intervention in Healthcare' Is a multidisciplinary artist dedicated to researching the effects of technology on society and how we negotiate these rapid changes. He has recently completed a three year residency as Audio-Visual artist-in-residence at Trinity Hospice (originally appointed by 'RosettaLife'), London, creating a body of legacy artworks in collaboration with the hospice user, and as as a collaborative member of a clinical palliative care team. A key goal for this work is to create a framework for the inclusion of 'cultural interventions' at the final stages of life so that they will be considered as significant events that can be incorporated into the 'clinical appraisal' of the 'service user' (or put another way- a human being with a wide gamet of emotions and life experience) www.robinblackledge.co.uk   

Date TBC Michaela Ross (London) is an artist and is currently researching 'The role and status of the artist-educator in institutional contexts' at Chelsea college of Art and Design. 'The research is driven by a desire to understand my own practice and how my professional identity as an artist-educator is formed. The themes of my work, inside and outside of institutional contexts, are those of authority and the construction of knowledge: in the studio, I re-work images and text to reveal agendas that were hidden in their original context; as an artist-educator, my work questions hierarchies and power relationships within institutions. By comparing my understanding with others', I hope to discover themes that characterise the perception of the artist-educator as a mode of practice as critique.'
http://www.michaelaross.com/

Date TBC Bronwyn Platten
I am an Australian artist, researcher and curator whose practice explores sexuality, identity, gender and embodiment. I have exhibited my artwork in numerous group and solo exhibitions across Australia and internationally. Most recently I participated in the exhibition ‘Figuring Landscapes’ touring the UK and Australia in 2009-10 that was launched at the Tate Modern, London in 2009. Since 1985 I have also worked with diverse community groups to establish creative art projects most notably the award winning ‘Building Art Project’ in which, with artist John Foubister, I worked collaboratively with 25 artists with an intellectual disability. Between 2003 - 2008 I has been involved intensively in arts in hospitals working as both an artist and a curator for Grampian Hospitals Art Trust, Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and subsequently as an Arts Project Manager for Lime, an arts in health organisation which develops creative arts practice in hospitals across Greater Manchester.

I have received numerous awards for my art practice from the Australia Council for the Arts  and in 2004 received an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant to develop the international research project ‘Imaginal Regions’. In 2008 I was awarded an EPSRC bursary to undertake full-time post-doctoral research for the Health and Infrastructure Research and Innovation Centre in the School of the Built Environment, University of Salford.

Currently in the third year, I am researching the relationship between patient embodiment and creativity utilising a collaborative multi-sensory arts based approach. Titled Mouths and Meaning the research focuses upon representations of experiences of embodiment for people with an eating disorder. By the word, embodiment, I mean the way in which all our experiences, our daily lives are sensed, interpreted and communicated in and through our bodies.

Arts based approaches are often able to connect or represent felt or taken for granted experiences of embodiment. I have in my own practice as an artist produced a number of artworks investigated my own interpretations of embodied experience and in response eating disorders. I had anorexia nervosa and then bulimia between the ages of 16 to 26. I am interested to explore whether similar creative processes could also be of value to others and could assist in the communication of experiences that are perhaps intangible or unspoken.

My thinking is inspired by the fact that the focus of eating disorders is primarily upon body image and shape.  In other words, the current understanding of eating disorders focuses upon the visual perception of a socially desired body shape rather than also including how the body is experienced and communicated. By utilizing other senses – hearing, touch and taste as well as vision it is hoped that the approach may be of value to deepening understanding of the factors impacting on eating disorders. I have been working on the project with a co-collaborator who is in recovery from anorexia nervosa and we are working towards an exhibition of artworks to be held at the Chapman Gallery in May 2011. Also to be included in the exhibition are a series of drawings by more than sixty people who have participated in a creative workshop exploring experiences and representations of the mouth.