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Andrew Stahl
Andrew Stahl

We were very sad to hear yesterday that Andrew Stahl has died after a long illness. Andrew was a much-loved artist, teacher, and colleague. He was a student at the Slade and worked here since 1991 and held the role of Head of Undergraduate Painting for many years. Andrew ran the Transcultural Artist Network, a residency programme at the Slade from 2008 until recently, giving artists and Slade students the opportunity to learn from each other.

He will be sadly missed by all of us at the Slade. We send our thoughts and condolences to his wife, daughters, son, and friends.

Photo of Eilen Itzel Mena
Eilen Itzel Mena, 2024

Photo credit: Avila Santo

Congratulations to Eilen Itzel Mena who has been awarded the Adrian Carruthers Award 2024!

The Adrian Carruthers Award is a partnership between Acme and the Slade, generously supported by the Adrian Carruthers Memorial Fund in memory of Adrian, a Slade student who died young. This award was instigated by Adrian Carruthers’ family with the goal of providing a bridge between college and professional practice for MA/MFA graduates from Slade School of Fine Art. The award includes a bursary, rent-free studio space (from January the following year) and mentoring programme tailored specifically to the graduate’s practice.

Thank you to Charlie Coffey from Acme and artist Emma Hart who were part of the selection panel.

Left: painting by Ross Head. Right: Fan Bangyu and their work, The New Angel Series—If I Can't Hold You to Sleep, The Long Night Is a Waste
Almacantar Award, 2024

Left: work by Ross Head. Right: Fan Bangyu 范 邦宇 with their work The New Angel Series—If I Can't Hold You to Sleep, The Long Night Is a Waste

Congratulations to recent graduates Ross Head and Fan Bangyu 范 邦宇  who have received the 2024 Almacantar Studio Prize and an Almacantar Award respectively.

Ross Head
"The ways that desire is performed and expressed is central to my practice. Through my compositions, I create a world for intimate moments and gestures that explore queerness, masculinity, gender and body image. The handling of paint has its own narrative potential - the thick textures, colour-filled space, and delicate marks are all active in the stories being created. I avidly collect images and draw upon film stills, archival imagery and sports photography. The archive becomes a site for imagining - in the process of painting, scenes become less specific to time and place and allude more toward an alternative reality. Drawing on the relationship that homosexuality and other non-normative identities have with modern and contemporary architecture, my paintings contain an element of fantasy and celebrate theatricality."

Fan Bangyu on If I Can't Hold You to Sleep, The Long Night Is a Waste, The New Angel Series 2024
“……it is the combination of the materials and my identity. I appropriately rooted my daily politics as a descendant of the working class and a gender-fluid sexual minority. It responds to and affirms those who are excluded by subject and structure, yet these subjects and structures rely on the existence and boundary definitions of these marginalised bodies (abjection to define themselves in turn. I attempt to construct a heterogeneous space through non-linear literary metaphors, a scene full of intricate details, using this constructivist approach to abstract a suspended view. I emphasise the distance of viewing, the distance between the work and the viewer. Through re-contextualisation, with underlying narrative elements such as love, desire, indulgence, fetish, symmetry, and rituals, these works develop new narratives while serving as moments of nostalgia and imagination……”

Installation view of Problems to Play by Cat Madden.
Problems to Play (still), Cat Madden, 2024, Materials: chalkballs, pigment, polystyrene, sandpaper, glue sticks, resistance bands, card, disco ball motor, sugar paper, Lokta paper, graphite, tinfoil, marbles, wood offcuts, balls of thread, drafts of MFA Critical Studies essay, fruit and vegetable nettings, photographs, text, concrete rocks.

©Cat Madden

Congratulations to final year graduate student Cat Madden who has been awarded the 2024 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment (image) for her work 'Problems to Play'. Cat was shortlisted along with Bowen Zhang also a final year graduate student - a wonderful achievement for both.

Cat Madden: Problems to Play
‘I intuitively explore the in-betweenness of things, problems, play, and transformation through installation, object-making, and drawing. ‘Not knowing’ is a space for creative experimentation, problem solving, and discovery.
Drawing is my touch, the traces of accidents, my writing, the experience of searching, of figuring things out, of getting confused.
My process is play – the seriousness of play, the joy of play, the learning from play.
In everyday materials I seek wonder. I fuse things that don’t ‘belong’, I use things that may not last, and I place things you might (nearly) step on.’

Photograph of Dryden Goodwin's 'Breathe' artwork on show in conference hall at Austrian World Summit
Dryden Goodwin's 'Breathe' on show at Austrian World Summit, June 2024

Photo ©Dryden Goodwin

Dryden Goodwin was at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Austrian World Summit in Vienna last week showing his on-going project ‘Breathe’, alongside Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah CBE, from The Ella Roberta Foundation and 'Breathe' producer Lucy Wood Invisible Dust. Drawings from ‘Breathe’ (featuring Rosamund) looked over the mainstage for the 500+ delegates. Speakers included some of the world’s leading climate figures such as Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the UN, and John Podesta, senior advisor to US president Joe Biden for international climate policy.

Talking about the experience Dryden Goodwin said:  
"Making these hundreds of pencil studies, I’m drawing myself into a heightened sense of another person’s experience. The showing of ‘Breathe’ hopes, through the act of drawing, to create vital empathy for the injustices of air pollution.....It was an honour to meet the incredible Arnold Schwarzenegger and to hear more about how he and many others are bringing about real change, while urging the world’s most powerful and influential to do the same - through actions over talk alone. It was a pleasure working with the great team at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Climate Initiative at this galvanizing, inspiring, and hope-filled summit." 

The Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Austrian World Summit powerful theme was “Be Useful: Tools For A Healthy Planet”.

Logo for Education Awards
Logo for Education Awards

Many congratulations to Sabrina Mumtaz Hasan, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Equality Diversity and Inclusion at the Slade, who has won this year's Provost Education Award for Enhancing Belonging.

This is so well-deserved, Sabrina has done so much to foster a welcoming and inclusive environment for students and staff at the Slade.

A list of all UCL Education Award nominees and winners can be found on the UCL website:  There is currently an exhibition showcasing all nominees for the UCL Education Awards in the North Cloisters, UCL.

Photo of Liz Farrell, Jo Bruton, Venus Farrell, Lily Petch and Stephanie Kingston
Lily Petch wins Mick Farrell Photography Award 2024, 2024

From left to right Liz Farrell, Jo Bruton, Venus Farrell, Lily Petch and Stephanie Kingston

The winner of the Michael Farrell Award for Photography 2024 is Lily Petch.

The award is given by the family of Mick Farrell to an Undergraduate Final Year student working with Photography. The winner for the Michael Farrell Award for Photography was selected at the Private View last week. Mick (Michael) passed away in 2015 and was our Photography technician at the Slade. He was trained as a sculptor, his wife Jo Bruton who teaches Painting at Chelsea set up the Award in his memory. Jo and Venus were accompanied by family friends Steph Kingston (a former Slade painting student) and Mick’s mum Liz.

Photograph: From left to right Liz Farrell, Jo Bruton, Venus Farrell, Lily Petch and Stephanie Kingston

Hands holding collaged portrait.
Slade Continuing Professional Development day, 2024

Photo: Rebecca Loweth

The Slade collaborated with UCL Access and Widening Participation to host a continuing professional development course for art teachers from widening participation schools. Course leader, artist Rebecca Loweth, guided the teachers through various art workshops exploring the importance of process and experimentation, as well as ways to inspire and engage their own students to make art and pursue a creative career.

The teachers sat in on portfolio reviews with Slade tutors and heard from Slade alumni on life after art school. The course was an important opportunity for teachers to discuss the issues facing contemporary art teaching and the value of art education for society. We wish to continue to engage with art teachers and work together to promote art education.

Photo of Winnie Soon at their Unerasable Characters Series installation.
Winnie Soon, Unerasable Characters Series

Photo credit: tom mesic

Meet Dr Winnie Soon, who will be leading our new BA in Art and Technology, which starts autumn 2025.

  1. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your practice?
    I was born and raised in Hong Kong. I did my PhD and worked at Aarhus University in Denmark for around 8 years before moving to London in 2022. As an artist, coder and researcher, I am interested in the intersection of art and technology with the focus on wider power asymmetries. My scholarly and artistic practice engages with themes such as Free and Open Source Culture, Coding Otherwise, artistic/technical manuals, digital censorship and minor technology
    Artistically, I have received the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica (Artificial Intelligence and Life Art Category), the Expanded Media Award for Network Culture at Stuttgarter Filmwinter — Festival for Expanded Media, WRO 2019 Media Art Biennale Award, and the 26th and 17th ifva awards (Special Mention and Silver award), where artworks have been exhibited internationally. I am also actively providing and maintaining two ongoing software art projects: net.art generator (w/ Cornelia Sollfrank and Gerrit Ché Boelz) and Queer Motto API (w/ Helen Pritchard & Cristina Cochior). My practice is manifested in the form of scholarly written materials, code poetry, workshops, artist books and manuals, software and installation that is seen in bookshops, galleries & museums, festivals and distributed networks.

  2. What is your role and what does it involve?
    I am currently an Associate Professor at Slade, working on the new BA Art and Technology programme. This involves directing and developing the new programme and its modules, as well as teaching and research.

  3. What led you to pursue a career in this field?
    I have been always interested in technology specially building a computer from parts, and internet art in the 90s (the era where I needed to use command line interface, instead of graphical user interface to interact with machines). My first job after my undergraduate studies was a programmer and then I worked in a few industry jobs in the field of telecommunications. I was part of the launching of the first surveillance mobile application in Asia, and at that point I started to think about what that means to society in terms of the consumption and production of technology. Then I did my first Master in Media Cultures in Hong Kong and went to the UK to pursue my masters degree in Digital Art and Technology, where I was fortunate enough to get introduced to the field of Software Studies (or Computational Culture) that brought me to think about the politics of technology. Since then, I started to develop my academic and artistic career in this area as a way for me to understand, reflect, and critique technology. I see art is a powerful device for me to think and work otherwise beyond solutionism, engaging with the materiality of technology and connecting with people to explore and experiment with different socio-technical relations.
    After working in art and tech for more than two decades, I have become more aware of issues of race, gender, class, as well as the centralisation of power. I hope there will be more women, non-binary and queer people who feel more comfortable in working with technologies in order to challenge existing dominant norms of technology and imagine socio-technical relations otherwise.

  4. What is your next project (your own research)?
    I have received a grant from Open Book Futures with Prof Geoff Cox from London South Bank University to develop a book about "ServPub" via computational publishing. Servpub itself is a platform for research and practice around autonomous networks, affective infrastructures and experimental publishing through artistic and feminist methods. This project works with artists, designers, academics, technologists, activists and grassroot communities to explore alternatives of infrastructure. If you are interested, you can see how we use our homebrew platform to produce a peer-reviewed newspaper collaboratively.
    We want to develop a self-hosted and self-organised sustainable resource and workflow for book production that challenges normative open publishing paradigms. The resulting publication will be both a critical account of the process of production and at the same time provide. detailed documentation that allows others/publishers to produce/fork their own versions.

  5. What advice would you give to anyone thinking about applying for the BA Art and Technology?
    It is very exciting to work in art and technology, not only to see its limitations and potentials, but also as a way to understand and reflect how we consume and produce technology in digital culture. Since technology is changing everyday, you need to be self-initiated, adaptable and curious to (un)learn. Moreover, you also need to be open to changes, cope with frustrations, and sometimes comfortable with the trouble of not knowing. This programme is for artists who are interested to think otherwise beyond just the use of technology as neutral tools, challenging ways of working with technology, and potentially contributing to the society by making changes and shaping the future of art and technology.

Colour & Poetry: A Symposium VI celebrates International Colour Day, World Poetry Day on 21 March and World Pigment Day on 22 March.

We are pleased to welcome poets/poet-artists George Szirtes, Sharon Morris, Sean Borodale, Chris Kirubi, Mataio Austin Dean, Brece Honeycutt and Benjamin Arthur Brown, who will be reading from their work at the event on 21 and 22 March. For the full programme, see the Colour & Poetry: A Symposium VI event page.

Sharon Morris: 

Born in west Wales, Sharon Morris is a visual artist, poet and theorist, fascinated by the relation between words and images. Her first collection of poems, False Spring, Enitharmon Press, 2007, was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh prize for a first collection, and anthologised in The Forward book of Poetry, 2008; Rome: A Collection of the Poetry of Place, 2008. A further collection, Gospel Oak, was published by Enitharmon Press in 2013. An artist’s book of poetry and images, The Moon is Shining on my Mother, commissioned by the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, for the exhibition The Moon and a Smile, and published by Enitharmon Editions, 2017. Readings of poems from these collections are available on The Archive of Now

Amroth Rocks
Sharon Morris, Amroth Rocks

George Szirtes:

George Szirtes was born in Hungary in 1948 and came to Britain as a refugee in 1956. His first collection, The Slant Door, was joint-winner of the Faber Prize in 1979. Since then he has published many books and his other prizes include the T S Eliot Prize for Reel in 2005 His most recent collection is Mapping the Delta (Bloodaxe). He has been awarded various international prizes for his own poetry as well as for his translations of Hungarian poetry and fiction, including the Man Booker International translator’s prize for his translations of László Krasznahorkai. He has written three books for children, most recently How to be a Tiger (2017). His memoir of his mother, The Photographer at Sixteen (2019), is published by MacLehose Press. His most recent book is Fresh Out of the Sky (2021).

Chris Kirubi

Chris Kirubi is a poet-artist based in London. Their debut collecting WILDPLASSEN is forthcoming in October this year with the87press. In 2018 they slipped a zine titled Those Institutions Should Belong to Us inside Rehana Zaman’s Tongues published by PSS. They are a Lecturer in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Wildplassen

Sean Borodale

Sean Borodale was born in London and works as a poet and artist. His first collection of poetry, Bee Journal, was shortlisted for the 2012 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. Subsequent collections include: Human Work (Jonathan Cape, 2015), Asylum (Jonathan Cape, 2018)and Inmates (Jonathan Cape, 2020).  He currently teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Steinwerk (staged screenprint, score for voice in 6 acts) Marylebone Theatre 2-8 Mar 2023
Steinwerk (staged screenprint, score for voice in 6 acts) Marylebone Theatre 2-8 Mar 2023


Mataio Austin Dean:

Mataio Austin Dean’s practice extends across visual art, poetry, music, and activism. He creates images, often intaglio prints, which explore England and Guyana’s darkly intertwined histories, throwing light upon moments of resistance whilst unearthing stories of coloniality and rebellion embedded in English landscape and architecture. Through performance, he probes the relationship between printmaking and orality, interrogating the temporality and political potency of images, symbols, and sigils. English and Guyanese oral cultures are at the heart of Austin Dean’s work; reimagining, writing and performing folksong and poetry breathes life into the printed image, corporealising the past whilst confronting the present. Austin Dean’s practice is research-driven, exploring Marxism as a framework for emancipatory praxis. Recently, he has worked with cartographic and diagrammatic methodologies, and hyper-local historical research, linking sites in London and the South of England to macro-systems of settler-colonialism, enslavement, ‘new’ imperialism, and financialised capitalism. In this work, etchings function as nodes, at which, histories, symbols, and residues of labour coalesce and collude as sigils which intercede for the dead and the hidden labour of the past, present, and future.

My Grandfather Carried the Sacks of Flour
Mataio Austin Dean, My Grandfather Carried the Sacks of Flour, 2020

Brece Honeycutt

Brece Honeycutt is a multi-media artist, uses research as a material for her history and nature based works. Her installations have been placed in university campuses, historic houses, inner-city parks and in office buildings, libraries, urban markets and galleries. Honeycutt holds a B.A. in Art History from Skidmore College and an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University.

colour considerations, 2023

Brece Honeycutt, colour considerations, 2023, natural dyes on silk, wool and cotton, linen thread, 28 ½” x 25” Natural dye culls colors from the landscape. color considerations is constructed from ‘test’ swatches from many dye baths and sewn together to make a spectrum. Dyes:  goldenrod, annatto, coreopsis, oak, onion skin, weld, acorn cap, madder, sappanwood, logwood, black walnut, indigo, shagbark hickory, butternut.

Benjamin Arthur Brown

Benjamin Arthur Brown is an artist, writer and curator born in Essex, living and work in London. He attended the Slade School of Fine Art. Working across sculpture, writing and sound, with frequent deviations into other media. Brown’s work often concerns itself with the intersection between reality and the surreal; how objects can become totems – capsules for narratives both fictional and not – and how our bodies and imagination are webbed together in a network of conspicuous consumption which acts both as expansive and conversely restrictive.

Degree Show Documentation 2023
Degree Show Documentation 2023, 2023, film still from 16mm film footage

©the artist/Slade School of Fine Art

For the second year running, the Slade’s initiative of providing students with 16mm film during the Degree Show installation period results in a unique time capsule of exhibiting graduates preparing to present their work to the public.

This year’s participants were Uday Banerjee (Undergraduate Fine Art Media), Roman Sheppard Dawson (Graduate Fine Art Media), Lujain Mansour (Undergraduate Fine Art Media), Lily Petch (Undergraduate Fine Art Media) and Lianqi Yao (Graduate Fine Art Media). They captured a multi-faceted representation of student efforts at the Slade, from the hanging of paintings to the finishing of sculptures.

The initiative was supported by Kodak and the Slade Material Research Project.

To read more about this project and watch the video, see our Slade Degree Show 2023 documentation page.

Poster for Paper Safari, Lisa Milroy, One Off Contemporary Art, Kenya, 23 March - 21 April, image contains many photos and drawings of cosmetics, vegetables, flowers, dresses and shoes.
Poster for Paper Safari, Lisa Milroy, One Off Contemporary Art, Kenya, 2024

Lisa Milroy has a solo show, Paper Safari, at One Off Contemporary Art Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya, from 23 March to 21 April 2024. 

Colour & Poetry: A Symposium V publication launch
Colour & Poetry: A Symposium V publication launch, 2024

13 February, PM/AM Gallery, London

Photo credit: Grace Hailstone

The Colour & Poetry: A Symposium V publication launch took place on Tuesday 13 February at the PM/AM Gallery, London. The publication documents the fifth year of Colour & Poetry: A Symposium V, which took place on the 21–22 March 2023. The cover Colour & Poetry (Palatino) was designed by Lesley Sharpe and the publication was edited by Jo Volley, Symposium Director.

Booking for Colour & Poetry: A Symposium VI, which takes place online on 21–22 March 2024, is now open via Eventbrite.

The launch was supported by Winsor & Newton.


Colour & Poetry supporters
Black and white photograph of hand with writing printed on it.
Publicity image for Spineless Wonders: In Touch, 2024

This latest in the Spineless Wonders series of events looks at small press and artists’ publications through the theme of touch. Artists, makers, academics and librarians will consider the book as a tactile object, asking how artists’ publications themselves invite and explore the sense of touch. 

This online event takes place on Friday 15 March, 11am–5pm. Free, reserve your place via Eventbrite.

For more details about the event see the Spineless Wonders: In Touch event page.

Colour & Poetry: A Symposium VI, 21st - 22nd March 2024, is a cross- and inter-disciplinary two-day virtual event held by the Slade School of Fine Art, in celebration of International Colour Day, World Poetry Day and World Pigment Day. The symposium hosts a range of speakers representing the arts and humanities, science, and industry, drawing upon knowledge from within and outside of the UCL community.

This years confirmed speakers include:
Mataio Austin Dean / Miranda Lynn Barnes & Stephen Paul Wren / Sean Borodale / Jane Bustin / Mark Cann / Egidja Čiricaitė / Sara Choudhrey / Rose Davey / David Dobson / Duncan Greig / Lavinia Harrington / Brece Honeycutt / Andy Leak / Alexandra Loske / Sharon Morris / Stephanie Nebbia / Vanessa Otero / Andy Pankhurst / Poetry Shed / Sarah Pettitt / Vaishali Prazmari / Rachel Reynolds & Jo Volley / Robert Rivers / Rose Shuckbrugh / Kimberly Selvaggi / Ruth Siddall / Henrietta Simson / Kirsty Sinclair Dootson/ Paul Smith / Jessie Stevenson / George Szirtes / Estelle Thompson/ Piers Veness /Edward Winters / Yannis Ziogas

Free, book via Eventbrite.

For full details, see the Colour & Poetry: A Symposium VI event page.

Photograph of Sutapa Biswas, sitting on a low wooden platform, with roses laid out on either side of her.
Lumen: The Ghosts She Summons, 2021, Sutapa Biswas, 2021, C-type print on Fuji Maxima paper, 85.8 x 129 cm

© Sutapa Biswas. All Rights Reserved DACS 2024

Invisible Murmurs: Mapping Invisibility and Belonging in Contemporary British Art, featuring Sutapa Biswas, Sophia Hinton-Lever, Svetlana Sequeira Costa, Dr Nuria Querol and Linsey Young, takes place on Friday 16 February, 11am - 4:30pm.

Venue: Institute of Advanced Studies, Room G11, IAS Common Ground, South Wing, UCL

The event is chaired by Bindu Mehra, Artist and PhD researcher, Professor Kristen Kreider, Head of Doctoral programme, UCL and Dr Marquard Smith, Associate Professor IOE - Culture, Communication & Media, UCL.

There will be a round-table discussion and Q&A session after the presentations.

For more information, see the Invisible Murmurs event page.

Mary Evans receiving A Personal Gesture from Carly Everaert
Mary Evans receiving A Personal Gesture from Carly Everaert, December 2023

Photo credit: Jos Nyreen

The Slade School of Fine Art is pleased to announce that its Director, Mary Evans, has been invited to participate in “A Personal Gesture”, an art project initiated by Dutch artist Rini Hurkmans. The project involves a sculpture based on a detail from Michelangelo’s Pietà in Saint Paul’s Basilica in Rome, which is passed from person to person as a symbol of empathy and connection.

The sculpture, which is a reproduction of the hand of the Virgin Mary reaching out to the viewer, was created by Hurkmans in 2020 as a response to the global pandemic and the social distancing measures that followed. The intention of the project is to pass A Personal Gesture from individual to individual, allowing them to reflect on the gesture and its meaning in different situations and contexts. The project also aims to create a dialogue about how we exist in relation to one another, especially in times of crisis and isolation.

Mary Evans received A Personal Gesture from Dutch lecturer, researcher and costume designer Carly Everaert on 4 December, and the piece will be kept in the Director's Office for a six month period, before passing it on to another person of her choice. During this time, she will document her experience and thoughts on the gesture.

For more information, visit the project website.

MANIFEST: Art & Policy, Bloc Sheffield
MANIFEST: Art & Policy, Bloc Sheffield, Dryden Goodwin, 2023

©Dryden Goodwin

Slade Prof. Dryden Goodwin  is one of the three artists exhibiting in 'MANIFEST: Art & Policy’ at Bloc Projects, Sheffield. Following his residency exploring ‘What role can artists play in policymaking?’ - a new initiative following in the footsteps of the historical Artists Placement Group inquiring into the potentiality of art in Policy Spaces. Other artists in the exhibition are Christopher Samuel and Semiconductor.

The exhibition is open until 16 December 2023.

MANIFEST is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to evaluate artistic approaches and effects relevant for policy, and how artists can work with policymakers to channel those dimensions to improve the process of policymaking.

The residencies and exhibition are curated and produced by SRG Bennett, co-head of Policy Lab within the civil service, a team which seeks to radically improve policy through design, innovation and people-centred approaches.

Photos: Dryden Goodwin from ‘A Day With Mark’ and ‘Sphere(s) of Influence’ 

Congratulations to alumnus Jesse Darling, winner of this year's Turner Prize. He graduated with a MFA in Fine Art in 2014.

Darling was nominated for his solo exhibitions, Enclosures at Camden Art Centre and No Medals, No Ribbons at Modern Art Oxford. The exhibition of shortlisted artists' work is at Towner Eastbourne until 14 April 2024.

Read about his win in The Guardian.