Index – a growing listing of people associated with Art and Mind and with GV Art: Susan Aldworth • Andrew Carnie • Rita Carter • Robert Devcic • Kate Dicker • Geoffrey Harrison • Annabel Huxley • Garry Kennard • Dr Marius Kwint • Professor Rob Kesseler • Professor Martin Kemp • Ruth Padel • Govinda Sah • Elaine Snell •
Garry Kennard is a painter, writer and founding director of Art and Mind. He has exhibited his paintings in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Winchester and at Petworth House as artist in residence at the 2009 Petworth Festival. His paintings are in many private collections in UK, France and the United States, and in the collection of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. A fascination with how the brain reacts to works of art has lead Kennard to research, write and lecture on these topics. With Rita Carter and Annabel Huxley he devised and directed the unique Art and Mind Festivals which attracted leading artists and scientists to explore what light the brain sciences can throw on contemporary culture. In 2013 GV Art published a book of his writing and paintings called ‘Essays and Images’. Kennard has an interest in mountaineering and has climbed in the Alps and Africa, as well as leading his own expeditions to the Nepalese Himalayas.
Robert Devcic is the founder and Director of GV Art Gallery, London. Since 2005, he has been working as a collaborator to curate art and science experiences by working with versatile artists whose creativity is sparked by scientists and interdisciplinary dialogues.
GV Art has become the UK’s leading contemporary art gallery which aims to explore and acknowledge the interrelationship between art and science, and how the areas cross over and inform one another. The gallery curates exhibitions and events that stimulate a dialogue focused on how modern society interprets and understands the advances in both areas and how an overlap in the technological and the creative, the medical and the historical are paving the way for new aesthetic sensibilities to develop.
http://ritacarter.co.uk/index.htm
Rita Carter is an award-winning science and medical writer who specialises in books about the human mind and brain.
Her 1998 title, ‘Mapping the Mind’ was the first layman’s guide to the (then) emerging field of neuroscience. It received exceptional praise from both academic and literary critics and was short-listed for the 1999 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book prize (now Aventis). To date it has sold more than 100,000 copies and has been translated into 14 languages.
‘Exploring Consciousness’ integrated the science and philosophy of this famously “hard problem” in a way that made it, uniquely, accessible to people with no relevant academic background. It, too, received very strong reviews, and was the second-best seller of 2002/3 for its US publisher.
As well as writing books Rita contributes to a wide range of newspapers and magazines. Before specialising in science Carter worked for six years as a TV news presenter (Thames TV) and radio host/producer. She continues to appear and be heard regularly on TV and radio as a medical/science commentator, and gives frequent talks and lectures throughout Europe and the US.
Rita has an honourary doctorate for her contribution to the communication of brain science from Leuven University.
Annabel Huxley is an independent Communications Consultant in the arts and sciences, with a focus on cultural and scientific discourse. With Garry Kennard and Rita Carter she was a founding member of Garry’s team delivering the Art and Mind Festivals in Winchester, 2004-2009. For more than 20 years she has devised and delivered a wide range of public events, also organising marketing and gathering national PR; working with groups or individuals to conceive, deliver and promote book launches, seminars, conferences, exhibitions, readings and lectures
Ruth Padel is a poet, writer and conservationist, author of Darwin – Life in Poems (a compressed biography in lyric verse of her great great grandfather Charles Darwin), Where the Serpent Lives, a novel about field zoology and wildlife crime, and The Mara Crossing, poetry and prose on animal and human migration . She is a Teaching Fellow in Poetry at King’s College London and sits on the Council of the Zoological Society of London.
He was trained in Natural Sciences and Art History at Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute, London. Between 1981-1990 he was Professor of the History of Art in St. Andrews and served as a Trustee of the National Galleries of Scotland.
Books include, The Science of Art. Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (Yale), and The Human Animal in Western Art and Science (Chicago). He has published extensively on Leonardo da Vinci, including the prize-winning Leonardo da Vinci. The marvellous works of nature and man.
He has curated and co-curated a series of exhibitions on Leonardo and other themes, including Spectacular Bodies at the Hayward Gallery in London and Leonardo da Vinci. Experience, Experiment, Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2006 and Seduced. Sex and Art from Antiquity to Now, Barbican Art Gallery London, 2007.
He was a regular writer for Nature, published as Visualisations and developed as Seen and Unseen (both Oxford) in which his concept of “structural intuitions” is explored.
His most recent book is Christ to Coke. How image becomes icon (Oxford), which looks at 11 representatives of types of icons across a wide range of public imagery.
Elaine Snell, Public Relations and Communications Consultant, specialises in medicine, science and health. She works independently for a variety of academic organisations and scientific societies in the UK, Europe and USA. Prior to establishing her own business, Snell Communications, in 1996 she was head of PR at the British Heart Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.
Snell Communications promotes science, medicine and health, making it accessible to non-specialist audiences. They produce events and launches, run the press office for national or international congresses and publicise research results. They provide guidance to scientists and doctors on communicating to the public, and manage ethical and sensitive issues.
Organisations Snell Communications has worked for recently include the Wellcome Trust, the European Dana Alliance for the Brain, the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies, Imperial College London and the British Society for Immunology. Elaine is on the Advisory Board of the Cheltenham Science Festival.
Elaine Snell is also Chief Operating Officer for the British Neuroscience Association – www.bna.org.uk
Andrew Carnie is an artist and academic. He is currently part of the teaching team in Fine Arts at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, England. He studied chemistry and painting at Warren Wilson College, North Carolina, then zoology and psychology at Durham University, before starting and finishing a degree in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London. He completed his Masters degree in the Painting School, at the Royal College of Art. In 2003 he was the Picker Fellow at Kingston University.
Andrew keeps two blogs one specifically for the art science work that he undertakes at http://scienceandart–andrew-carnie.blogspot.com/ and one for the exhibitions he is in see http://andrewcarnieexhibtionsandstuff.blogspot.com/
Carnie’s artistic practice often involves a meaningful interaction with scientists in different fields as an early stage in the development of his work. There are also other works that are self-generated and develop from pertinent ideas outside science. The work is often time-based in nature, involving 35 mm slide projection using dissolve systems or video projection onto complex screen configurations. In a darkened space, layered images appear and disappear on suspended screens; the developing display absorbs the viewer into an expanded sense of space and time through the slowly unfolding narratives that evolve before them.
Recent work involves working with a Heart transplant team in Toronto Canada about the Hybrid Body and can work generated from the project can be seen at http://andrewcarnie.org.uk/archive/index.html
An archive of older work can be seen at http://andrewcarnie.org.uk
Andrew Carnie is represented by GV Art gallery, London www.gvart.co.uk
Susan Aldworth lives and works in London. She studied philosophy at Nottingham University and printmaking at Sir John Cass in London. She is Senior Research Associate at Swansea Metropolitan University and a part time lecturer at Norwich University of the Arts. Aldworth is currently Artist in Residence at the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University where she developed and curated the acclaimed exhibition Reassembling the Self at Hatton Gallery and Vane in 2012.
Aldworth’s work in a variety of media including print, film and installations, has long focussed on the relationship between the physical brain and the conscious mind. She explores science, philosophy, physiology and imagination to consider the fragility of identity at the centre of the mind/body relationship.
Aldworth’s practice has included exhibitions, residencies and commissions nationally and internationally. Her work is held in many public and private collections including the V&A, the British Museum, The Wellcome Collection Library in the UK and Williams College Museum of Contemporary Art in USA. Working as an artist-in-residence in a medical or scientific setting is central to Aldworth’s practice to explore the different personal, medical and scientific narratives around human identity.
Three portraits of people with epilepsy were shown as Susan Aldworth: The Portrait Anatomised at the National Portrait Gallery, London from 7 March – 1 September 2013.
Aldworth is a regular broadcaster on BBC radio including The Portrait Anatomised (Radio 3 2011) The Print Master (2012) about working with Stanley Jones at the Curwen Studio which can be heard on BBC Radio 4 iplayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b019fwvx
Susan Aldworth is represented by GV Art gallery, London www.gvart.co.uk
Kate Dicker is a self-employed artist, illustrator and part-time tutor. She received a post graduate diploma in History of Art & Design of the Modern Period from the Winchester School of Art and a BA Hons in Graphic Design Illustration from the Camberwell College of Arts, London. She has had exhibitions in Winchester and London.
Kate Dicker has taught at Portsmouth University, Southampton Institute and the Camberwell College of Arts. She has produced commissioned work for Bendicks of Mayfair, London, Michael Joseph Publishers Winchester Health Authority Arts Project, amongst others.
Rob Kesseler is a visual artist who works at the interface between art, design and science and currently holds the Chair in Arts, Design & Science at the University of the Arts London. A former NESTA Fellow at Kew and Research Fellow at the Gulbenkian Science Institute, Portugal, he has collaborated extensively with botanical scientists and molecular biologists in an exploration of the living world at a microscopic level.
Reflecting the way the way in which the natural world migrates into many aspects of our daily lives his spectacular images reveal a hidden world lying beyond the scope of the human eye. Employing a variety of imaging processes and styles, from digital photography and scanning electron micrography to spontaneous ink drawing; he has evolved a sophisticated coordination of hand, eye and intuition. His work reveals a hidden world lying beyond the scope of the human eye producing work that lies somewhere between science and symbolism, in which the many complexities of representing life are concentrated into mesmeric visual images and objects. He exhibits internationally and has published an award winning series of books on Pollen, Seeds and Fruit. In 2010 A monograph of his work, Rob Kesseler Up Close was published by Papadakis.
Geoffrey Harrison is a figurative artist, living and working in central London.
Using traditional drawn and painted media and employing biological and anatomical imagery, his work incorporates ideas of body as vessel for ‘self’ and the problematic boundaries of this in contrast to the ‘other’. His images reference and draw metaphor from the body and biological systems to form impossible yet somehow plausible constructs. These paradoxical processes have indistinct boundaries which blur distinctions between constituent parts and encourage consideration the human organism as a complex sum of many merging systems. The body expressed as exemplary self-sufficient unit, compromised by our complex relationships and myriad dependencies.
Geoffrey was Artist in Residence at Barts Pathology Museum in 2012/13 and is currently working on a Leverhulme Trust-funded residency at the Royal Veterinary College.
His work has been exhibited in Japan and the UK in various group and solo shows and is in private collections nationally and worldwide.
Govinda Sah ‘Azad’ was born in 1974, in Rajbiraj, Nepal. He moved to in India and worked as a sign board and wall painter in Delhi. In 1995, he returned to Kathmandu and joined the Fine Art College. He had a successful solo exhibition in 1999. In 2000, Govinda began a nation-wide cycle tour to spread the awareness of peace through art under title The 21st Century is the Century of Art and Peace. During the three month tour, he held several art shows, workshops, and gave lectures in schools and to community groups. Govinda then held solo exhibitions in Mumbai, India, and Dhaka, Bangladesh and returned to Nepal to graduate with a BA in Fine Art in 2003.
He joined the MA Fine Art course in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2006. He acquired sponsorship and moved to the UK to study. Govinda obtained a MA in Fine Art from Wimbledon College of Art in 2008. Govinda has held numerous solo art exhibitions and group shows internationally. He has also co-ordinated a number of art workshops under the sponsorship of the UN and Bangladesh Embassy in Nepal. Some of his exhibitions have been sponsored and organised by the British Council in Nepal and Egypt’s Ambassador to Nepal. Govinda Sah’s works can be found in private collections worldwide.
http://www.port.ac.uk/departments/academic/adm/staff/title,82848,en.html
Marius Kwint is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture, School of Art, Design and Media, University of Portsmouth
Marius Kwint joined the University of Portsmouth in 2008. He graduated in the new interdisciplinary Cultural History degree at Aberdeen University in 1988, before taking his doctorate in History at Oxford University. His previous lecturing posts have been at Southampton Institute (now Solent) and Oxford Universities, and he has held research fellowships at the Houghton Library, Harvard University and at the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum, London