The Artist Talks programme, curated by Lancaster Arts and Lancaster University's Fine Art Department, invites artists, thinkers and curators to explore an aspect of their practice in a lunch-hour.
On Thursday 23 February, we're joined by four MA students from the Royal College of Art, including Lancaster University Fine Art alumni Joel Chan.
Jack Catling | jackcatling.co.uk
Jack Catling is an artist working mainly through the mediums of performance and installation. Through his practice he aims to bring about an atmospheric shift in ontological value, opening up a space for wonders to occur. Catling draws from his background in illusion, his interest in the value and perpetuity of symbols and a shady past built from various fictions. Jack Catling is also a founding member of the performance group: The Parlour Collective.
His MA Thesis, titled Wonder and Liminality, explored the psychology and structure of the magic trick, and its translation into the experience of Art.
Joel Chan | joelchan.co.uk
Joel Chan’s practice is an investigation of portraiture and self-portraiture, narration and documentary, the authentic and the imaginary, and the boundaries between fictions and realities. He sees his practice as a form of play and aims to experiment and play with the world, and everything and everyone in it: a kind of play which involves wide ranging mediums including pouring hot metal, altering electronics, and performance.
His MA Thesis, titled The Artist and the Diver: The Death of God and the Birth of Art in the Fullness of Time, took the form of a fictional story set sometime in the future when art, as a kind of secular religious power, might give rise to extremism.
Rufus Noonan
For the past three year's Rufus Noonan has been asking questions to thousands of online workers from within North America. The many databases of material manifested from this practice are formed mainly of text, audio and video files, which then create both digital and physical artworks. The volume, form, texture and mass of the inordinate amount of accumulated data created feels like tar, clay, colour and paint. It is within this approach to the data's materiality where his works begin to take shape.
His MA Thesis, titled Time, Meaning and Experience: Jean-François Lyotard and Arte Povera, focused on Lyotard's philosophical text, Time Today, and a landmark show he curated called 'Les Immaterial' at the Pompidou Centre, Paris (1985), comparing and contrasting the works of various Arte Povera artists with Lyotard's text and exhibition.
David Stearn | davidstearn.blogspot.co.uk
David Stearn’s has a practice that is focused on developing a performance based relationship between material, context and the adaptation of a situation, predominantly in the form of interventions/unannounced events. By focusing on making simple gestures using sound, mechanical objects, industrial machines and industrial materials, the practice attempts to cause actions of disruption within a given context or site and alter specific functions through a process of reverse engineering.
His MA thesis was titled What am I to do with this? Sculpting in the Name of Sculpture, and was an exploration of personal experience in relation to the futurist manifesto and the effects of materiality, performance, humour and the macabre on audiences and producers of sculpture.
