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2024

Photograph of an open book, fingers holding the page at one side. There is a bookmark with the names of birds in alphabetical order.
Common Ground, Great North Wood pages, James Berrington, 2023

©the artist

An exciting, new installation is opening at UCL East. Created by alumnus James Berrington, COMMON GROUND invites us to contemplate a single woodland scene and consider the role of nature in shaping our mental health, identity and sense of self.

Free and open to all, and no need to book except for selected events and late night openings. Find out more and book for the launch event on 16 January.

Exhibition runs: 13 January 2025–27 February 2025

First Floor Galleries
UCL East - Marshgate
7 Sidings Street
London
E20 2AE

Ruqaiya Asim and her Guide dog Bertie standing next to The Cass Art Prize 2024 exhibition entrance sign.
Ruqaiya Asim and her guide dog Bertie, 2024

Dave Benett / Getty Images for The Cass Art Prize

Congratulations to 2nd year BA Fine Art student Ruqaiya Asim who has been awarded the People's Choice award at this year's Cass Art Prize for her multimedia work of art "Communication with My Guide Dog".

The award is voted for by visitors to the exhibition, which took place at the Copeland Gallery 8–16 November 2024.  

"Communication with My Guide Dog", 2024 Newsprint & tissue paper ink monoprints, Brailled black card, clay & plaster, 220x110x30cm.
This installation explores the communication between the artist and her guide dog, Bertie, emphasising their trust and bond. The monoprints trace the shape of Bertie's harness, whilst the Braille piece in the centre allows those who cannot read Braille to experience the inaccessibility of art for sight-impaired people.

The Cass Art Open Call will reopen in spring 2025.

See the Cass Art Website for more information about the prize.

Four installation photographs from the Slade's Degree Shows, Roman Sheppard Dawson's film - two screens, one with a person touching another's head (there is a cello in the background) and the other with two figures one touching the other's head. Isabella Sartori: two multi-coloured paintings, almost abstract, one with plants in the foreground, the other a bicycle. Raquel Yago Boy: four colourful photographs of interior spaces with a shape in each. Ross Head: 3 paintings two figurative, one abstract.
UCL East Provost Art Prize winners 2024, 2024

left to right top: Roman Sheppard Dawson, Isabella Sartori
bottom: Raquel Yago Boj, Ross Head

Photo credit Thomas Jenkins.

Congratulations to recent graduates Roman Sheppard Dawson, Ross Head, Isabella Sartori and Raquel Yago Boj, who have been awarded this year's UCL East Provost Art Prize.

The winners will present existing pieces and create new work for UCL East: installing two visual artworks from Isabella Sartori and Ross Head, supporting a new film work by Roman Sheppard Dawson and commissioning new photographic work by Raquel Yago Boj.

📷 Installation photos from Degree Shows 2024 1. Roman Sheppard Dawson, MA/MFA Degree Show 2. Isabella Sartori, BFA/BFA Degree Show 3. Raquel Yago Boj, MA/MFA Degree Show 4. Ross Head, MA/MFA Degree Show. 

To read more see the UCL East news page: 2024 UCL East Provost Art Prize Winners.

 

Jo Volley and Kimberly Selvaggi stand beside large, colourful letters spelling ‘UCL’ outside a building with a brick wall. Each letter is in a different colour and texture—red for ‘U,’ yellow for ‘C,’ and green for ‘L.’ The letters are planted in green boxes.
Jo Volley (right) and Kimberly Selvaggi (left), Wilkins Terrace

©UCL

New 'UCL' letters are now up at the Wilkins Terrace created by Jo Volley, Coordinator Material Research Project & Network and Kimberly Selvaggi, PhD student at the Slade School of Fine Art.

The new winning ‘UCL’ Letters have been unveiled by the Campus Experience and Infrastructure (CE&I) team, showcasing and raising awareness of the ongoing research into colour within the Slade School of Fine Art and their Pigment Farm Project.

To read more, see the UCL News website.

Installation photo from Slade MA/MFA Degree Show 2024. Large painting suspended from ceiling of vase of wilting flowers. Smaller figurative paintings on the walls of studio.
Early Hours, acrylic and oil on canvas from Slade MA/MFA Degree Show 2024, Lexia Hachtmann, 2024

Photo credit: Thomas Jenkins

Congratulations to Lexia Hachtmann who has been shortlisted for the Student Award at this year’s Cass Art Prize.

Congratulations also to current BA student Ruqaiya Asim, who was longlisted for the Student Award, and alumna Jione Choi, who was longlisted for the Main Prize.

The show of short and long listed artworks is on display from 8–16 November at Copeland Gallery, London SE11. Prize winners will be announced on 14 November. For further details see the Cass Art Prize website.

Colourful painting of inside of body.
Growing reclining figures, Meghan Salisbury, 2024, 190 x 190 cm, oil on canvas

©Meghan Salisbury

Congratulations to recent BA graduate Meghan Salisbury who has won the Bloomsbury Festival New Wave Art Prize 2024. A show of her work, alongside two of the shortlisted artists, including current Slade Graduate Painting student Mengmeng Zhang, is on show until 27 October at City Lit Gallery, 1-10 Keeley Street, London WC2B 4BA.

For further information see the Bloomsbury Festival website.

 

Andrew Stahl
Andrew Stahl

We were very sad to hear yesterday that Andrew Stahl has died after a long illness. Andrew was a much-loved artist, teacher, and colleague. He was a student at the Slade and worked here since 1991 and held the role of Head of Undergraduate Painting for many years. Andrew ran the Transcultural Artist Network, a residency programme at the Slade from 2008 until recently, giving artists and Slade students the opportunity to learn from each other.

He will be sadly missed by all of us at the Slade. We send our thoughts and condolences to his wife, daughters, son, and friends.

Photo of Eilen Itzel Mena
Eilen Itzel Mena, 2024

Photo credit: Avila Santo

Congratulations to Eilen Itzel Mena who has been awarded the Adrian Carruthers Award 2024!

The Adrian Carruthers Award is a partnership between Acme and the Slade, generously supported by the Adrian Carruthers Memorial Fund in memory of Adrian, a Slade student who died young. This award was instigated by Adrian Carruthers’ family with the goal of providing a bridge between college and professional practice for MA/MFA graduates from Slade School of Fine Art. The award includes a bursary, rent-free studio space (from January the following year) and mentoring programme tailored specifically to the graduate’s practice.

Thank you to Charlie Coffey from Acme and artist Emma Hart who were part of the selection panel.

Left: painting by Ross Head. Right: Fan Bangyu and their work, The New Angel Series—If I Can't Hold You to Sleep, The Long Night Is a Waste
Almacantar Award, 2024

Left: work by Ross Head. Right: Fan Bangyu 范 邦宇 with their work The New Angel Series—If I Can't Hold You to Sleep, The Long Night Is a Waste

Congratulations to recent graduates Ross Head and Fan Bangyu 范 邦宇  who have received the 2024 Almacantar Studio Prize and an Almacantar Award respectively.

Ross Head
"The ways that desire is performed and expressed is central to my practice. Through my compositions, I create a world for intimate moments and gestures that explore queerness, masculinity, gender and body image. The handling of paint has its own narrative potential - the thick textures, colour-filled space, and delicate marks are all active in the stories being created. I avidly collect images and draw upon film stills, archival imagery and sports photography. The archive becomes a site for imagining - in the process of painting, scenes become less specific to time and place and allude more toward an alternative reality. Drawing on the relationship that homosexuality and other non-normative identities have with modern and contemporary architecture, my paintings contain an element of fantasy and celebrate theatricality."

Fan Bangyu on If I Can't Hold You to Sleep, The Long Night Is a Waste, The New Angel Series 2024
“……it is the combination of the materials and my identity. I appropriately rooted my daily politics as a descendant of the working class and a gender-fluid sexual minority. It responds to and affirms those who are excluded by subject and structure, yet these subjects and structures rely on the existence and boundary definitions of these marginalised bodies (abjection to define themselves in turn. I attempt to construct a heterogeneous space through non-linear literary metaphors, a scene full of intricate details, using this constructivist approach to abstract a suspended view. I emphasise the distance of viewing, the distance between the work and the viewer. Through re-contextualisation, with underlying narrative elements such as love, desire, indulgence, fetish, symmetry, and rituals, these works develop new narratives while serving as moments of nostalgia and imagination……”

Installation view of Problems to Play by Cat Madden.
Problems to Play (still), Cat Madden, 2024, Materials: chalkballs, pigment, polystyrene, sandpaper, glue sticks, resistance bands, card, disco ball motor, sugar paper, Lokta paper, graphite, tinfoil, marbles, wood offcuts, balls of thread, drafts of MFA Critical Studies essay, fruit and vegetable nettings, photographs, text, concrete rocks.

©Cat Madden

Congratulations to final year graduate student Cat Madden who has been awarded the 2024 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment (image) for her work 'Problems to Play'. Cat was shortlisted along with Bowen Zhang also a final year graduate student - a wonderful achievement for both.

Cat Madden: Problems to Play
‘I intuitively explore the in-betweenness of things, problems, play, and transformation through installation, object-making, and drawing. ‘Not knowing’ is a space for creative experimentation, problem solving, and discovery.
Drawing is my touch, the traces of accidents, my writing, the experience of searching, of figuring things out, of getting confused.
My process is play – the seriousness of play, the joy of play, the learning from play.
In everyday materials I seek wonder. I fuse things that don’t ‘belong’, I use things that may not last, and I place things you might (nearly) step on.’

Photograph of Dryden Goodwin's 'Breathe' artwork on show in conference hall at Austrian World Summit
Dryden Goodwin's 'Breathe' on show at Austrian World Summit, June 2024

Photo ©Dryden Goodwin

Dryden Goodwin was at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Austrian World Summit in Vienna last week showing his on-going project ‘Breathe’, alongside Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah CBE, from The Ella Roberta Foundation and 'Breathe' producer Lucy Wood Invisible Dust. Drawings from ‘Breathe’ (featuring Rosamund) looked over the mainstage for the 500+ delegates. Speakers included some of the world’s leading climate figures such as Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the UN, and John Podesta, senior advisor to US president Joe Biden for international climate policy.

Talking about the experience Dryden Goodwin said:  
"Making these hundreds of pencil studies, I’m drawing myself into a heightened sense of another person’s experience. The showing of ‘Breathe’ hopes, through the act of drawing, to create vital empathy for the injustices of air pollution.....It was an honour to meet the incredible Arnold Schwarzenegger and to hear more about how he and many others are bringing about real change, while urging the world’s most powerful and influential to do the same - through actions over talk alone. It was a pleasure working with the great team at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Climate Initiative at this galvanizing, inspiring, and hope-filled summit." 

The Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Austrian World Summit powerful theme was “Be Useful: Tools For A Healthy Planet”.

Logo for Education Awards
Logo for Education Awards

Many congratulations to Sabrina Mumtaz Hasan, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Equality Diversity and Inclusion at the Slade, who has won this year's Provost Education Award for Enhancing Belonging.

This is so well-deserved, Sabrina has done so much to foster a welcoming and inclusive environment for students and staff at the Slade.

A list of all UCL Education Award nominees and winners can be found on the UCL website:  There is currently an exhibition showcasing all nominees for the UCL Education Awards in the North Cloisters, UCL.

Photo of Liz Farrell, Jo Bruton, Venus Farrell, Lily Petch and Stephanie Kingston
Lily Petch wins Mick Farrell Photography Award 2024, 2024

From left to right Liz Farrell, Jo Bruton, Venus Farrell, Lily Petch and Stephanie Kingston

The winner of the Michael Farrell Award for Photography 2024 is Lily Petch.

The award is given by the family of Mick Farrell to an Undergraduate Final Year student working with Photography. The winner for the Michael Farrell Award for Photography was selected at the Private View last week. Mick (Michael) passed away in 2015 and was our Photography technician at the Slade. He was trained as a sculptor, his wife Jo Bruton who teaches Painting at Chelsea set up the Award in his memory. Jo and Venus were accompanied by family friends Steph Kingston (a former Slade painting student) and Mick’s mum Liz.

Photograph: From left to right Liz Farrell, Jo Bruton, Venus Farrell, Lily Petch and Stephanie Kingston

Hands holding collaged portrait.
Slade Continuing Professional Development day, 2024

Photo: Rebecca Loweth

The Slade collaborated with UCL Access and Widening Participation to host a continuing professional development course for art teachers from widening participation schools. Course leader, artist Rebecca Loweth, guided the teachers through various art workshops exploring the importance of process and experimentation, as well as ways to inspire and engage their own students to make art and pursue a creative career.

The teachers sat in on portfolio reviews with Slade tutors and heard from Slade alumni on life after art school. The course was an important opportunity for teachers to discuss the issues facing contemporary art teaching and the value of art education for society. We wish to continue to engage with art teachers and work together to promote art education.

Photo of Winnie Soon at their Unerasable Characters Series installation.
Winnie Soon, Unerasable Characters Series

Photo credit: tom mesic

Meet Dr Winnie Soon, who will be leading our new BA in Art and Technology, which starts autumn 2025.

  1. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your practice?
    I was born and raised in Hong Kong. I did my PhD and worked at Aarhus University in Denmark for around 8 years before moving to London in 2022. As an artist, coder and researcher, I am interested in the intersection of art and technology with the focus on wider power asymmetries. My scholarly and artistic practice engages with themes such as Free and Open Source Culture, Coding Otherwise, artistic/technical manuals, digital censorship and minor technology
    Artistically, I have received the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica (Artificial Intelligence and Life Art Category), the Expanded Media Award for Network Culture at Stuttgarter Filmwinter — Festival for Expanded Media, WRO 2019 Media Art Biennale Award, and the 26th and 17th ifva awards (Special Mention and Silver award), where artworks have been exhibited internationally. I am also actively providing and maintaining two ongoing software art projects: net.art generator (w/ Cornelia Sollfrank and Gerrit Ché Boelz) and Queer Motto API (w/ Helen Pritchard & Cristina Cochior). My practice is manifested in the form of scholarly written materials, code poetry, workshops, artist books and manuals, software and installation that is seen in bookshops, galleries & museums, festivals and distributed networks.

  2. What is your role and what does it involve?
    I am currently an Associate Professor at Slade, working on the new BA Art and Technology programme. This involves directing and developing the new programme and its modules, as well as teaching and research.

  3. What led you to pursue a career in this field?
    I have been always interested in technology specially building a computer from parts, and internet art in the 90s (the era where I needed to use command line interface, instead of graphical user interface to interact with machines). My first job after my undergraduate studies was a programmer and then I worked in a few industry jobs in the field of telecommunications. I was part of the launching of the first surveillance mobile application in Asia, and at that point I started to think about what that means to society in terms of the consumption and production of technology. Then I did my first Master in Media Cultures in Hong Kong and went to the UK to pursue my masters degree in Digital Art and Technology, where I was fortunate enough to get introduced to the field of Software Studies (or Computational Culture) that brought me to think about the politics of technology. Since then, I started to develop my academic and artistic career in this area as a way for me to understand, reflect, and critique technology. I see art is a powerful device for me to think and work otherwise beyond solutionism, engaging with the materiality of technology and connecting with people to explore and experiment with different socio-technical relations.
    After working in art and tech for more than two decades, I have become more aware of issues of race, gender, class, as well as the centralisation of power. I hope there will be more women, non-binary and queer people who feel more comfortable in working with technologies in order to challenge existing dominant norms of technology and imagine socio-technical relations otherwise.

  4. What is your next project (your own research)?
    I have received a grant from Open Book Futures with Prof Geoff Cox from London South Bank University to develop a book about "ServPub" via computational publishing. Servpub itself is a platform for research and practice around autonomous networks, affective infrastructures and experimental publishing through artistic and feminist methods. This project works with artists, designers, academics, technologists, activists and grassroot communities to explore alternatives of infrastructure. If you are interested, you can see how we use our homebrew platform to produce a peer-reviewed newspaper collaboratively.
    We want to develop a self-hosted and self-organised sustainable resource and workflow for book production that challenges normative open publishing paradigms. The resulting publication will be both a critical account of the process of production and at the same time provide. detailed documentation that allows others/publishers to produce/fork their own versions.

  5. What advice would you give to anyone thinking about applying for the BA Art and Technology?
    It is very exciting to work in art and technology, not only to see its limitations and potentials, but also as a way to understand and reflect how we consume and produce technology in digital culture. Since technology is changing everyday, you need to be self-initiated, adaptable and curious to (un)learn. Moreover, you also need to be open to changes, cope with frustrations, and sometimes comfortable with the trouble of not knowing. This programme is for artists who are interested to think otherwise beyond just the use of technology as neutral tools, challenging ways of working with technology, and potentially contributing to the society by making changes and shaping the future of art and technology.

Colour & Poetry: A Symposium VI celebrates International Colour Day, World Poetry Day on 21 March and World Pigment Day on 22 March.

We are pleased to welcome poets/poet-artists George Szirtes, Sharon Morris, Sean Borodale, Chris Kirubi, Mataio Austin Dean, Brece Honeycutt and Benjamin Arthur Brown, who will be reading from their work at the event on 21 and 22 March. For the full programme, see the Colour & Poetry: A Symposium VI event page.

Sharon Morris: 

Born in west Wales, Sharon Morris is a visual artist, poet and theorist, fascinated by the relation between words and images. Her first collection of poems, False Spring, Enitharmon Press, 2007, was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh prize for a first collection, and anthologised in The Forward book of Poetry, 2008; Rome: A Collection of the Poetry of Place, 2008. A further collection, Gospel Oak, was published by Enitharmon Press in 2013. An artist’s book of poetry and images, The Moon is Shining on my Mother, commissioned by the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, for the exhibition The Moon and a Smile, and published by Enitharmon Editions, 2017. Readings of poems from these collections are available on The Archive of Now

Amroth Rocks
Sharon Morris, Amroth Rocks

George Szirtes:

George Szirtes was born in Hungary in 1948 and came to Britain as a refugee in 1956. His first collection, The Slant Door, was joint-winner of the Faber Prize in 1979. Since then he has published many books and his other prizes include the T S Eliot Prize for Reel in 2005 His most recent collection is Mapping the Delta (Bloodaxe). He has been awarded various international prizes for his own poetry as well as for his translations of Hungarian poetry and fiction, including the Man Booker International translator’s prize for his translations of László Krasznahorkai. He has written three books for children, most recently How to be a Tiger (2017). His memoir of his mother, The Photographer at Sixteen (2019), is published by MacLehose Press. His most recent book is Fresh Out of the Sky (2021).

Chris Kirubi

Chris Kirubi is a poet-artist based in London. Their debut collecting WILDPLASSEN is forthcoming in October this year with the87press. In 2018 they slipped a zine titled Those Institutions Should Belong to Us inside Rehana Zaman’s Tongues published by PSS. They are a Lecturer in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Wildplassen

Sean Borodale

Sean Borodale was born in London and works as a poet and artist. His first collection of poetry, Bee Journal, was shortlisted for the 2012 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. Subsequent collections include: Human Work (Jonathan Cape, 2015), Asylum (Jonathan Cape, 2018)and Inmates (Jonathan Cape, 2020).  He currently teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Steinwerk (staged screenprint, score for voice in 6 acts) Marylebone Theatre 2-8 Mar 2023
Steinwerk (staged screenprint, score for voice in 6 acts) Marylebone Theatre 2-8 Mar 2023


Mataio Austin Dean:

Mataio Austin Dean’s practice extends across visual art, poetry, music, and activism. He creates images, often intaglio prints, which explore England and Guyana’s darkly intertwined histories, throwing light upon moments of resistance whilst unearthing stories of coloniality and rebellion embedded in English landscape and architecture. Through performance, he probes the relationship between printmaking and orality, interrogating the temporality and political potency of images, symbols, and sigils. English and Guyanese oral cultures are at the heart of Austin Dean’s work; reimagining, writing and performing folksong and poetry breathes life into the printed image, corporealising the past whilst confronting the present. Austin Dean’s practice is research-driven, exploring Marxism as a framework for emancipatory praxis. Recently, he has worked with cartographic and diagrammatic methodologies, and hyper-local historical research, linking sites in London and the South of England to macro-systems of settler-colonialism, enslavement, ‘new’ imperialism, and financialised capitalism. In this work, etchings function as nodes, at which, histories, symbols, and residues of labour coalesce and collude as sigils which intercede for the dead and the hidden labour of the past, present, and future.

My Grandfather Carried the Sacks of Flour
Mataio Austin Dean, My Grandfather Carried the Sacks of Flour, 2020

Brece Honeycutt

Brece Honeycutt is a multi-media artist, uses research as a material for her history and nature based works. Her installations have been placed in university campuses, historic houses, inner-city parks and in office buildings, libraries, urban markets and galleries. Honeycutt holds a B.A. in Art History from Skidmore College and an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University.

colour considerations, 2023

Brece Honeycutt, colour considerations, 2023, natural dyes on silk, wool and cotton, linen thread, 28 ½” x 25” Natural dye culls colors from the landscape. color considerations is constructed from ‘test’ swatches from many dye baths and sewn together to make a spectrum. Dyes:  goldenrod, annatto, coreopsis, oak, onion skin, weld, acorn cap, madder, sappanwood, logwood, black walnut, indigo, shagbark hickory, butternut.

Benjamin Arthur Brown

Benjamin Arthur Brown is an artist, writer and curator born in Essex, living and work in London. He attended the Slade School of Fine Art. Working across sculpture, writing and sound, with frequent deviations into other media. Brown’s work often concerns itself with the intersection between reality and the surreal; how objects can become totems – capsules for narratives both fictional and not – and how our bodies and imagination are webbed together in a network of conspicuous consumption which acts both as expansive and conversely restrictive.

Degree Show Documentation 2023
Degree Show Documentation 2023, 2023, film still from 16mm film footage

©the artist/Slade School of Fine Art

For the second year running, the Slade’s initiative of providing students with 16mm film during the Degree Show installation period results in a unique time capsule of exhibiting graduates preparing to present their work to the public.

This year’s participants were Uday Banerjee (Undergraduate Fine Art Media), Roman Sheppard Dawson (Graduate Fine Art Media), Lujain Mansour (Undergraduate Fine Art Media), Lily Petch (Undergraduate Fine Art Media) and Lianqi Yao (Graduate Fine Art Media). They captured a multi-faceted representation of student efforts at the Slade, from the hanging of paintings to the finishing of sculptures.

The initiative was supported by Kodak and the Slade Material Research Project.

To read more about this project and watch the video, see our Slade Degree Show 2023 documentation page.

Poster for Paper Safari, Lisa Milroy, One Off Contemporary Art, Kenya, 23 March - 21 April, image contains many photos and drawings of cosmetics, vegetables, flowers, dresses and shoes.
Poster for Paper Safari, Lisa Milroy, One Off Contemporary Art, Kenya, 2024

Lisa Milroy has a solo show, Paper Safari, at One Off Contemporary Art Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya, from 23 March to 21 April 2024. 

Colour & Poetry: A Symposium V publication launch
Colour & Poetry: A Symposium V publication launch, 2024

13 February, PM/AM Gallery, London

Photo credit: Grace Hailstone

The Colour & Poetry: A Symposium V publication launch took place on Tuesday 13 February at the PM/AM Gallery, London. The publication documents the fifth year of Colour & Poetry: A Symposium V, which took place on the 21–22 March 2023. The cover Colour & Poetry (Palatino) was designed by Lesley Sharpe and the publication was edited by Jo Volley, Symposium Director.

Booking for Colour & Poetry: A Symposium VI, which takes place online on 21–22 March 2024, is now open via Eventbrite.

The launch was supported by Winsor & Newton.


Colour & Poetry supporters