Research in Fine Art
Research in Fine Art at Newcastle includes practice-based and theoretical research in Fine Art, Art History, Curatorship and Digital Media.
We are proud of the international profiles of our staff, who have created cutting-edge exhibitions, events, installations, videos, films and publications, a selection of which can be seen on this link. Many of our research students have exhibited their work internationally too. Our projects have been acclaimed in Britain, across Europe, Asia and America. Over the last six years our permanent staff has been joined by five prestigious AHRC Fellows, Lipman Trust Resident Artists and a Henry Moore Fellow, as well as leading artists from across Europe. Our research students, who complete this truly international profile, are engaged on a wide range of exciting projects. We support our students in seeking external funding for their study, and many currently hold awards from the AHRC or are funded by other agencies. Information about our Research Degrees is available here.
Our research strategy is fundamentally rooted in evolving Fine Art practice. Building on our distinguished history of studio-based activity, (the first British works of Pop Art were made in our studios by Richard Hamilton) today we respect equally the value, importance and distinctiveness of individual practices as well as collaborative and interdisciplinary work. Alongside work in painting, sculpture and printmaking we actively promote visual art generated at the nexus of established and new practices, technologies and methodologies as well as cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Central to this is our work with CultureLab. This bold initiative situates a unique world class state-of-the-art digital infrastructure at the heart of the university and opens up novel media terrain at the interface of the arts and sciences and new forms of knowledge transfer in partnership with the creative industries and wider community.
It is important to us to promote work that reaches a wide and public audience, and research at the interface between Universities and professional practice sharing knowledge across all of these domains.
Research themes
These broad areas of interest were framed to reflect and embrace the range of research in visual art across the school and CultureLab, stressing the connectivity of the different areas of our research. Their introduction represents an experiment in grouping research projects that might previously have been mapped onto more traditional subject divisions Fine Art, Art History and Curating within more open-ended headings that promote thinking across the wide range of visual art activities that we promote.
The themes embrace practice-based research – which is at the root of much of our activity as well as theoretical and historical research. They provide a framework to articulate research developed both within the intellectual environments of specific disciplines and individual practices, but also cross-disciplinary and collaborative projects. They aim to encourage intellectual and practical exchange between academic staff, our visiting artists and students. They are intended to be inclusive and permeable, with much work crossing their boundaries.
Cross-Disciplinary Research
Across all of these themes, we are concerned with generating research that extends traditional Visual Art practice through the exchange of specialist knowledge with other subject areas. We aspire to enrich research territory with work that tests established boundaries and methodologies.
A few examples of projects illustrate this aim: Brigitte Jurack’s Still Waters Run Deep involves visualising and communicating complex scientific data relating to the physical landscape. Jayne Wallace’s Interactive Jewellery aims to develop jewellery that ‘responds’ in real time to remote triggers as various as the level of pollution in the environment or a fellow wearer caressing their own piece of jewellery, causing the original to ‘flutter’ in response. Vee Pollock’s work, collaborating with geographers at Glasgow analyses new approaches to commissioned public art projects, Andrew Burton’s large-scale commissioned work Cook’s Earth was a focus of researchers at Durham evaluating – for the first time – the public benefit of art in the healing environment.