14th and 15th February group tutorials with Jane Brake & Ben White.

5th March visit from the external examiner.

Film studies workshops in March with Dave Griffiths. Please sign up in studios for these or contact dave.griffiths@mmu.ac.uk and signal your interest.

7th February at 1.30 Cherry Tennesson and Nicola Dale in 101 all welcome.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015mvs4

if you don’t have iplayer you will need to download it.

If you are interested in industrial ruins or urban environments you will be interested in Tim Edensor’s work: http://www.sci-eng.mmu.ac.uk/british_industrial_ruins/

Tim Edensor’s book Industrial Ruins is in the MMU library

http://www.deirdre-nelson.com/

and courtesy of Pete K. http://www.geleff.info/

Monday Meeting 1.30 PROMPT in room 101. We will have a practice presentation and Q&A with Ben White who is joining us as a part time tutor this term. We will also have brief notices from students (please contact me about these). I want to keep this meeting short and focused because we all have lots to do this week.

Monday pop-up reading group in studios 3.30 pm until 4.30 pm.  We will read a short text together as a group and then discuss possibilities for future reading sessions. No preparation necessary.

There will be tutorials with me and with Ben over the next few weeks. Please check details with me at the meeting on Monday.

Thursday 26th January: Trip to Birmingham (see separate post about this) meet at Piccadilly by the departures board at 9.45 (or see other meeting points in my post). All welcome.

Friday film club at 12 noon in room 101. Programme this week TBC. All welcome.

Lunchtime knitting session starting at 12 noon in the studios this Monday 23rd January.

This is an informal workshop led by Jane with help from Brigid, Hazel and Jason. We will start with casting on and learning how to do a knit stitch. If you have more advanced projects you need help with you are welcome to join in too.

If you have wool and knitting needles please bring them with you. Even if you dont have wool and/or needles do come along anyway and we will provide as many/much as we can.

All welcome.

All Welcome. Bring your lunch.

Travel Details

10.07 departs from Manchester Piccadilly for Birmingham New Street.

Meet by the departures board at 9.45 or on the train itself after that.

11.31 arrives in Birmingham New Street.

12 noon meet at Birmingham Museum: the Gas Hall entrance

The train fare is apparently around £21 if you buy it on the day with a student rail card. A cheaper option would be to get the megabus. It costs £8 and takes 2 hours and leaves from Shudehill. Please check details but I think you will need to get the 9.30 coach to get there to meet us at the Museum at 12 noon.

Tuesday Talks at The Whitworth Art Gallery
11.00am – 12.30pm, free, no booking necessary
The Tuesday Talks series invites leading artists, thinkers and curators to explore the driving forces, influences and sources of inspiration within contemporary art. The series is programmed by Professor Pavel Büchler and is supported by the Manchester Metropolitan University.

17 January
Andrew Nairne
Appointed the Director of Kettle’s Yard in August last year, Andrew Nairne actually started his career in Kettle’s Yard in the 1980s. Prior to returning to KY, he was the Executive Director, Arts for Arts Council England from 2008 to 2011, was Director of Dundee Contemporary Arts and Modern Art Oxford and worked at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow. As a curator and gallery director Nairne has worked with artists at the forefront of the contemporary visual arts including Miroslaw Balka, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Daniel Buren and Olafur Eliasson.

24 January
Christine Borland
Newly appointed as the BALTIC Professor of Contemporary Art at Northumbria University, Christine Borland’s practice negotiates territories in art, ethics, medical humanities and bio-politics. She gathers her source material as a result of research time spent in medical and forensic institutions, observing and participating in their practices. Borland’s work has been shown internationally in numerous museums and large-scale exhibitions including the Lyon Biennial, Manifesta 2, Venice Biennale and Münster Skulpturen Projekte 3. She studied at The Glasgow School of Art and University of Ulster, Belfast and was shortlisted for the 1997 Turner Prize.

31 January
Richard Wilson
Richard Wilson is one of Britain’s most renowned sculptors. He is internationally celebrated for his interventions in architectural space, which draw heavily on the worlds of engineering and construction. Wilson has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally for over thirty years and was nominated for the Turner Prize on two occasions. Wilson’s seminal installation 20:50, a sea of reflective sump oil, which is permanently installed in the Saatchi Collection, was described as ‘one of the masterpieces of the modern age’. A recent work is Turning the Place Over in Liverpool, a vast ovoid section of a building’s façade that rotates three dimensionally on a spindle.

7 February
Cornelia Parker
Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997, Cornelia Parker is perhaps best-known for a number of large-scale installations including Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, and The Maybe, a collaboration with actress Tilda Swinton, who appeared sleeping inside a vitrine at the Serpentine Gallery. Fascinated with processes in the world that mimic cartoon ‘deaths’ – steamrollering, shooting full of holes, falling from cliffs and explosions, Parker’s work triggers cultural metaphors and personal associations, transforming the most ordinary objects into something compelling and extraordinary.

14 February
Georgina Starr
Georgina Starr works with a very broad range of materials and techniques, including video, performance, sound, sculpture and even musicals. She uses incidents from her past, present and future, mixing fact, fantasy and fiction. One series of works concerned a parallel universe full of doppelgängers, including Starr herself. Her works often originate from a chance event or a half-recalled memory. Arecent work, I am a Record draws on everything Starr has ever recorded (on audio) since she began hearing voices aged 5 years old. The range of this archive covers: the rumbling of a broken radiator which she thought was speaking to her, re-enactments of secretly recorded stranger’s conversation, field recordings, singing voices, paranormal telephony, family dinner conversations, spirit messages and interviews with psychics and movie stars.

Final Journal Hand In

Thursday 31^st May, Friday 1^st June, Wednesday 6^th June, Thursday 7^th June & Friday 8^th June

Final Assessment Presentations

Monday 11^th June

Internal Moderation

Tuesday 12^th June

External Visit

Friday 15^th June

Degree Show TBC