Fine Art
At º¬Ðß²ÝÊÓƵ, Fine Art research takes the form of scholarly and critical investigation, and practice-based and practice-led creation.
Fine Art research means innovation and engagement, on a national and international stage. Recently completed projects engage with diverse digital and analogue technologies, craft processes, drawing research and history from all many different chronological periods.
Current research ranges from dynamic architecture to contemporary abstract sculpture and conceptual art. As we collaborate with practitioners in other disciplines, including scientists, architects, historians and sociologists, we investigate a variety of spaces including galleries, museums and public sites of heritage.
Fine Art is a laboratory for creativity and research leadership that is recognised by the whole sector. Research entails investigating the interactions between artists, objects and observers in the generation of meaning. This may involve investigating the relationship with other animals, such as spiders, using video, performance, text and printmaking and examining the interaction between our human and nonhuman making practices. Or considering ways that sculpture can address health and wellbeing challenges in global communities.
Key projects
As contemporary artists, we radically embed our practice within historical collections towards new iterations of dynamic heritage. Spatial relationships are transfigured by creating massive architecturally bespoke inflatable sculptures, to physically challenge and modulate architectural spaces and their structural features, to induce temporal changes in the building and psychological changes in the viewer. Our research recovers the lost histories of our own discipline, including the retrieval and reinstatement of slide-tape as an art practice and resulting in curating exhibitions and publications accounting for, recording and contextualising this missing history.
Our Doctoral researchers are skilled, contextually aware, astute and questioning. They participate and lead in a number of our research groups, including the work of the Drawing Research Group’s (DRG) annual international conference/exhibition and in the newly-formed interdisciplinary Sculpture Research Group (SRG) which analyses and embraces new technological opportunities and category-defying conceptual challenges, tapping into pillars of research excellence across the breadth of arts and science disciplines in the University. Fine Art is a unique environment for arts practice and theory.
