Abstract
A group exhibition bringing together recent works by artists Matthew Cornford, Fergus Heron, Alexander James Pollard and Naomi Salaman. The art school is the connective thread throughout this exhibition, providing a shared context for the works on display. It reflects an interest in the physical site of the art school as a platform and resource, alongside its disappearing histories, the rise of data technology and AI, and the social and political narratives surrounding art education in higher education. Each of the participating artists studied at art schools and have spent many years teaching within them. Their combined experience as students and educators act as a kind of tachometer – measuring the passage of time in art education and revealing the lived politics, events and transformations that have shaped and continue to shape its history.
| Original language | English |
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| Publication status | Published - 12 Jun 2025 |
| Event | Artist Panel Discussions: Tuesday 17 June 18:00 – 19:00 (discussion chair, Danit Ariel, curator at Photoworks): Image, Memory, Place - The Project Space, Phoenix Art Space, Brighton, England, Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom Duration: 17 Jun 2025 → 17 Jun 2025 https://phoenixartspace.org/Events/image-memory-place/ |
Bibliographical note
Matthew Cornford is an artist and teaches Fine Art at the University of Brighton. For over 15-years he has worked with John Beck on The Art School Project, a project to find and document former art school buildings or the sites upon which they stood. Recent solo exhibitions: The Art Schools of North West England, Bluecoat, Liverpool (2018); The North West Art School Record Machine, Bury Art Gallery and Sculpture Centre, (2019); Harmony, Contrast & Discord: Rochdale and the Art Schools of the North West, Touchstones Rochdale, (2021); The Art Schools of the West Midlands, The New Art Gallery Walsall, (2023); The Art Schools of the East Midlands, Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University, (2023); The Art Schools of the Midlands, Martin Hall Gallery, Loughborough University, (2024).Fergus Heron is an artist and Course Leader for MA Photography in the School of Art and Media at the University of Brighton. He studied at the Royal College of Art and the University for the Creative Arts. Exhibitions featuring his work have taken place at venues including Tate Britain, Museum for Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark; K3 Project Space, Zurich, Switzerland. His writing is published in Emerging Landscapes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). He selected The Photographers’ Gallery Photography Culture: Photography and Landscape (2018), edited Visible Economies (Brighton: Photoworks, 2012) and contributed to A Companion to Photography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2020).
Alexander James Pollard (b. 1977) is an artist. In 2005 Pollard represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale. Other selected exhibitions include: Jungle at Celine Gallery, Glasgow in 2017, WoW PAINTINGS at Young Team HQ gallery in London in 2016, Black Marks at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, 2007 and Counter Facture at Luhring Augustine, New York, also from 2007. Pollard has worked as a Fine Art Painting Lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art, Wimbledon College of Arts, London, and now at The University of Brighton, where he is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Painting and MA Fine Art.
Naomi Salaman is an artist who teaches Fine Art at University of Brighton. Her work investigates art practice, pedagogy and cultural institutions using historical, critical and feminist perspectives. She has a doctorate in Visual Arts Practice, on the history of art history and theory taught in the art school, from Goldsmiths College, supervised by Victor Burgin. Recently she has been organising Sweetshop Window Gallery, researching and working on a community archive of one of the fine art courses at University of Brighton, Fine Art Critical Practice.