Fine Art staff profiles

Studio staff

Giles Bailey

Senior Lecturer

Since 2005 I have been working with performance as a central element of my practice and engaging with the international development of work in this field.

Although I have produced work to be performed myself (often as a solo), increasingly, I work with others and shape projects around an interest in the way material or experience is shared performatively through social and personal relationships. Via this approach, I have put emphasis on performance as a cooperative tool to navigate and present ideas with groups of individuals.

This is informed by looking to collaborative structures used in other performance disciplines such as experimental theatre, dance and musical composition.

Neil Bromwich

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art

I work between contemporary sculpture, participatory performance events, and socially engaged practice. My work explores the role art can play as an active agent in society. Read more about Neil

Irene Brown

Professor of Contemporary Art Practice

I am a sculptor and site–specific installationist.  My research and practice is engaged with wonder, focusing on the history and philosophy of science, specifically cabinets of curiosity (wonder cabinets), investigating the threshold between aesthetic and scientific realms.

I work directly in response to place, usually a museum or heritage site, using a broad range of media including sculpture, video, virtual reality and augmented reality. 

I supervise PhD students on a range of topics related to installation and welcome inquiries from prospective PhD applicants interested in my fields of specialism. 

Andrew Burton

Professor of Fine Art

My research situations sculpture and installation and in relation to landscape, historic sites and architecture. I lead a team researching the commissioning and consumption of contemporary art in heritage places which explores how and why heritage organisations commission contemporary art, and what the benefits are for artists, audiences and other stakeholders. 

In my artistic practice, I take an experimental approach to materials and processes, using materials traditionally associated with sculpture and combining them with other materials and methods of making that embody impermanence. 

I have supervised, and continue to supervise PhD students on a range of topics ranging from the use of concrete in contemporary sculpture to the relationship between landscape, archaeology and contemporary sculpture. I welcome inquiries from prospective PhD applicants interested in my fields of specialism. 

Briony Carlin

Lecturer in Contemporary Art Curation

My research seeks to understand how specific encounters with art objects and other cultural products shape the meanings we come to associate with them. It questions, what are the social settings, emotional textures, rules and regulations that permeate these encounters? And, what role do art objects themselves play in structuring the places we encounter them, and inviting certain responses?

Angel Cohn Castle

Lecturer in Fine Art

I'm an artist working in moving image and performance, alongside curation and producing. My work often features music and song, and explore monstrosity, history and sites of performance, and the reimagining of live cabaret with moving image.

My latest project, created in collaboration with Davide Bugarin, is Sore Throat, (or Magang Lalamunan in Tagalog). The work is an interactive film that explores the impact of sound overheard through walls and how this has impacted queer people and queer spaces in the Philippines, where the interpretation of sounds is informed by monstrous mythology and the distortions of colonisation and gentrification.

Jo Coupe

Lecturer in Fine Art

My research encompasses objects, installation, photographs, moving image, collage and more recently sound and performance, which together interrogate what 'liveness' might mean within the context of sculpture.

My work is underpinned by a fascination with the interconnected processes of decay and the narrative and metaphorical potential that these processes represent. It seeks to undermine what we consider to be solid and stable and reveal not only invisible forces and unseen patterns but also the fluid and shifting nature of all materials.

Katie Cuddon

Reader in Fine Art

I have been making sculptures, mostly with clay, for nearly 20 years. My work develops expressively and instinctively in a studio practice that explores psychological representations of the human body and the intimate interpenetration of art and life.

Pummelled, kneaded, masticated, clay is sometimes combined with found elements, ready-mades or items that have been created with a material other than clay, and the sculptures are nearly always painted rather than glazed. Fired clay, a material symbolic of time, stretching back towards the distant past and forwards to the future, meets with materials that are ‘of the now’, introducing an element of paradox. Paradox is characteristic of my work which sits awkwardly between definitions, or, as the American poet Martha Ronk described the work, evokes an “enigmatic and specific” temperament.

Theresa Easton

Lecturer in Fine Art (Printmaking)

I'm a printmaker with a background in community art using printmaking, artists books, zines and broadsides.

Printmaking provides a platform for me to focus on social history, using archives, working with libraries and museums to fulfil projects. As an artist with a socially engaged practice, I enjoy a collaborative approach to making artwork and developing ideas alongside participants.

Community participation and political activism feature is a driving force in my work.

Nick Fox

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Deputy Head of Fine Art

Central to my painting practice is my fascination with narratives of desire. Often subversive, and made in combination with objects, drawings and context specific installation, the work takes the form of drawing and painting, installation, and intricately laboured Objet d’art.

My practice is informed by disparate and sometimes contradictory reference points and layers of meaning.

My recent projects include Unveiled, with Francis Picabia, Jerwood Contemporary Painters and the touring solo exhibitions Phantasieblume and Nightsong. I'm currently Artist in Residence at the National Glass Centre, Sunderland.

Richard Grayson

Research Fellow

My work as artist and curator broadly investigates ways language and narrative are used to make sense of the world around us, and how narratives in turn generate worlds of their own. Subjective personal readings and constructions of the world and ways that these might achieve social political and cultural expression is the central focus of my work.

Catrin Huber

Professor in Fine Art

I work with painting, wall painting, drawing, textiles, collage, installation and more recently sound and film. I often develop work in dialogue with specific places, exploring their contexts and histories, and their architectural features and idiosyncrasies.

While working across a range of media, I'm interested in how paintings can define or subvert places, how they set-up relations between actual and fictional spaces, while conjuring unexpected relations between materiality and representation. Colour, materials, and emotions loom large and bring sensory and psychological intensity.

For Screaming / Dreaming I, for example, re-imagined the Antikensammlung in the Kunsthalle zu Kiel as a space to weave together new and old stories, colliding contemporary artworks, ancient statues, women from Greek tragedy, and the architecture of the Antikensammlung. For AHRC-funded Expanded Interiors I brought contemporary, site-responsive installations to two Roman houses in Herculaneum and Pompeii.

Uta Kögelsberger

Professor of Practice

I think of my practice as a multi tentacled beast that develops in discrete but interconnecting strands, each brining their own agency of a conversations.

It is often collaborative and brings myriad people from different disciplines together to set out to articulate social, political and ecological concerns through video installation, photography, sound and sculpture.

The work often positions itself in the public realm as a form of intervention and includes directly activist elements to set about making a difference beyond the visual arts.

Rachel Maclean

Artist and NUAcT Research Fellow

I make satirical video art and film that comments on the troubling and frequently absurd nature of contemporary existence. Working largely in green-screen, I restage myths and fairytales in hyper-saturated near futures, touching on issues of national identity, class and gender. On the surface, my work can appear saccharine and inviting, however, this belies a darker, more unsettling interior.

Christian Mieves

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art

I'm a painter and cultural theorist. My artistic and academic work has focused on questioning the nature of visibility and exploring some of the ways in which images become susceptible to erosion, using strategies of visual disruption to critique established theories of representation. 

My publications include the book Wonder in Contemporary Artistic Practice (Routledge, 2017), co-edited with Irene Brown, and edited special issues of Journal of Visual Art Practice 17(2-3) in 2018 and 9(3) in 2010. My publications also include artist interviews with Dana Schutz (Turps Banana, 2014) and David Schutter (Journal of Contemporary Painting, 2018). 

Tom Schofield

Reader in Digital Arts and Cultures

I'm an artist, designer, and researcher whose practice and research explore themes of power, justice and exploitation in socio-technical arrangements. My work often explores alternative or reimagined histories and futures of technologies by remaking them under the influence of ideas from fiction or magic.

Most recently I've been developing adversarial attacks against AI vision using parody as the main critical vehicle.  I teach creative and critical technology practices at Culture Lab, Newcastle University, UK and frequently work with young children in speculative approaches to contemporary technology design.

Erika Servin-Gonzalez

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art / Printmaking Technician

My research is concerned with translating the concept of Mexican popular culture from historical symbols into contemporary narratives. 

This practice-based research is concerned with exploring the relationship between images used in Mexican popular culture and the political and social aspects contained within them.

As well as producing my own artwork I am interested in exploring the potential of printmaking to engage with communities, and the relationship between visual art and the development of a social, political and/or personal voice.

Petra Szemán

Lecturer in Fine Art: Moving Image

My practice focuses on the murky borderlands along the arbitrary line separating 'real' and 'fictional', and the kind of lives and experiences that are possible there.

My research is informed by queer theory, Japanese subcultures, fandom particularly in the context of trans-cultural exchange and collaborative creativity, and the radical potential of animation. I'm always about to talking about animation, Thomas Lamarre and/or trains.

I am now based between NE England and Japan, mostly engaging in artistic activities. I'm the co-author/editor of WEEB THEORY, a book about the overlapping area between artists’ moving image, games and anime (published by Banner Repeater, London 2023).

Wolfgang Weileder

Professor of Contemporary Sculpture

My artistic practice is primarily concerned with the examination and critical deconstruction of architecture, public spaces and the interactions we have with the urban environment.

My works are investigations into the relationship between time and space, the interface between permanence and transience, and how these can be explored to question our understanding of the landscape, both built and natural.

My work engages with the world through large-scale, temporary site-specific installation and sculpture; temporal recordings of spaces and environments through photography; film, performance and sound installation.

Jane Wilson

Professor of Fine Art

I've been working as an artist duo in collaboration with my twin sister Louise Wilson for over two decades. Graduating in the 1989 with a joint degree show in Dundee and Newcastle then as postgraduate in a working collaboration from Goldsmiths College in 1992.

Recent work and exhibitions include a new body of photographic work made during an artist residency in Korea during summer 2018. Exhibitions include In Focus: Jane and Louise Wilson’s Sealander, J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2017) Divided We Stand, Busan Biennial, Korea (2018) and Jane and Louise Wilson: Stasi City, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2018-19).

Louise Wilson

Professor of Fine Art

I've been working as an artist duo in collaboration with my twin sister Jane Wilson for over two decades. Graduating in the 1989 with a joint degree show in Dundee and Newcastle then as postgraduate in a working collaboration from Goldsmiths College in 1992.

Recent work and exhibitions include a new body of photographic work made during an artist residency in Korea during summer 2018. Exhibitions include In Focus: Jane and Louise Wilson’s Sealander, J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2017) Divided We Stand, Busan Biennial, Korea (2018) and Jane and Louise Wilson: Stasi City, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2018-19).

Art History staff

Fiona Anderson

Senior Lecturer in Art History

I'm a Senior Lecturer in Art History. I have a PhD in American Studies from King’s College London (KCL) and a BA and MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art. My research and teaching explores LGBTQ+ and feminist art and art history from the 1970s to the present, mostly in Europe and the USA.

I am particularly interested in art and art history in the context of the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis, how ephemeral queer cultures might be archived or otherwise preserved through art and writing, and the relationship between art and music.

Richard Clay

Most of my published research has focused on aspects of iconoclasm’s histories, but I’ve also written about:

• contemporary jewellery as sculpture
• Matthew Boulton and mass produced art of the 1790s
• graffiti’s roles in armed conflict
• cross-sector collaboration
• the roles of the digital in cultural collections’ display spaces

Most of my films are freely available online and my BBC Radio 4 documentary, Two Minutes to Midnight, is accessible via the BBC website. I’ve also led and worked on a wide range of externally funded projects.

Katarzyna Falęcka

Lecturer in Art History

I specialise in modern and contemporary art from Northern Africa and its diasporas, with a particular focus on questions of archives, memory and gender.

My first monograph Photographic Afterlives: Art, Archives and the Algerian War of Independence is currently under contract with Manchester University Press. The book explores the work of contemporary artists who engage with the photographic archives of Algerian decolonisation against the background of ongoing restitution discussions, as well as a surge in independent archiving projects in Algeria.

Prospective PhD students working on modern and contemporary art, colonialism, archives, gender, memory, transregional cultural exchanges, and photography are welcome to submit a research proposal.

Edward Juler

Senior Lecturer

I lecture on Art History in the Fine Art Department. My expertise is in Anglo-French modernism, and how modern art was shaped by science and medicine in the period 1900-1950. My current research explores colour and emotion in early 20th century French art, with a focus on the work of Matisse, Kupka, Delaunay and Bonnard.

I have published on British sculpture, biocentric modernism, Surrealism and the work of Karl Blossfeldt. In 2021, I co-edited the volume Post-Specimen Encounters between Art, Science and Curating (Intellect Books). This book examines how scientific and medical objects in museums and other collections can act as inspiration to contemporary art practice, curating and aesthetics. My articles have been published by, among others, History of Photography, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews and the Tate.

I welcome enquiries from prospective Art History PhD students on these topics: European artistic modernism, Surrealism studies and art-science relations c.1900-1950.

Stephen Moonie

Senior Lecturer

I specialise in the art and theory of the post-war United States, with a particular interest in the critical discourse of modernism in the 1950s and 1960s. More broadly, I'm interested in art writing and contemporary painting.

Previously, I taught at the Department of History of Art at the University of Warwick. I completed my MA (Hons) at the University of St Andrews, and completed my MA and Ph.D. at the University of Essex.

Olga Smith

NUAcT Fellow - Culture and Creative Arts

I am an art historian specializing in contemporary art. My research interests evolved over time to include interchanges between art and intellectual ideas, trans-national identity, cultural memory and, most recently, ecology.

My current research is broadly concerned with the role of visual culture in shaping a cultural response to current environmental crises, and is specifically directed at analysing the representations of landscapes through an ecocritical framework.

I am affiliated with New International Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca' Foscari University, Venice, and Environmental Humanities Network at the University of Warwick, which I helped to establish. I am the co-founder of Ph, an AHRC-funded network of scholars and artists working with photography, which collaborated on projects such as Either/And.

This has been one of the projects that I developed with an aim of engaging wider audiences, alongside curatorial and public programme events developed in partnership with museums, galleries and arts organisations including the Photographers’ Gallery, National Media Museum, and Paris Photo. I am on the editorial board of Focales journal (France) and write for art press.

Harry Weeks

Lecturer in Art History

I am a Lecturer in Art History in the Fine Art department at Newcastle University, specialising in the politics of contemporary art production, and histories of socially engaged art practice. 

My current research examines artists' second jobs and their impact on art production. This was supported by a Terra Foundation Travel Grant in 2023 to conduct archival work on Los Angeles-based feminist collective The Waitresses.

Prior to joining Newcastle University, I was Teaching Fellow in Contemporary Visual Cultures at Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh (2016-19) and IASH Postdoctoral Fellow, also at The University of Edinburgh (2015-16)

Technical staff

Mark Burns

Casting and Studio Technician

My main responsibilities include running the casting workshop facilities, supporting students in making installations and studio projects, and managing exhibition Fine Art spaces.

James Davoll

Technical Manager

My practice explores specific landscapes asking questions of their contemporary role, relevance and our emotive response to them. I'm seeking to investigate our complex and contradictory relationship with the natural world. 

Mick Hedley

Technician

I work with all things digital. I focus on Audio and Video using Adobe suite software. My own interest included Audio electronics and Electronic Music composition. 

Stephen Rowarth

Technician

My main responsibility is the Metal workshop. I also look after the kilns and ceramic equipment and support sculpture / 3D projects in a wide range of media. Teaching specialist skills and techniques such as CNC plasma cutting.

Joseph Sallis

Woodwork Technician

I run the wood workshop in Fine Art and supports students in all their woodworking needs. I demonstrate woodworking skills, techniques and processes to students and induct them in the safe use of tools and machinery.

Amongst the varied and unusual projects students undertake in the workshop, the most common are; canvas stretcher making, framing, plinth and box making, wood carving and relief work, wood bending, furniture design and making, projection screens and other work that facilitates art making and exhibitions.

I studied in performance art and graduated with a BA in Visual Performance from Dartington College. I've performed internationally, using performative actions to temporally liberate the body from hegemonic constrictions.

I've been a designer and maker of experimental musical instruments for 30 years. In recent years I've led students and graduates in an experimental music group, Drone Ensemble which uses unique, self-made instruments in extended improvised performances.

Jade Sweeting

Fine Art Technician

My main responsibilities in the department are providing print making support and analogue B&W darkroom techniques for students. My primary interests as an artist range from printmaking to analogue photography. 

Professional Services staff

Nigel Villalard

Clerical Assistant

I'm the Clerical Assistant for Fine Art in the School of Arts and Cultures.