Esther Windsor

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and Art and Design

Birmingham School of Art

Email:: esther.windsor@bcu.ac.uk

Esther is a curator, artist, and writer and has curated at Camerawork Gallery and Darkroom, the ICA, The Photographers’ Gallery, and The Royal British Society of Sculptors. Esther established two art school galleries, the waiting room, University of Wolverhampton and mirror, London College of Printing at London Institute (now LCC at UAL). She was director at Hull Time Based Arts and Co-directed, with Dallas Seitz, an artist-led space 1000 000 mph, London. Esther has taught across Fine Theory and Practice for over 20 years, most recently on MFA & MA Art and Space with Cullinan and Richards at Kingston University before coming to Birmingham School of Art in 2017.

Esther studied her BA at Goldsmiths where, after having Dick Hebdige and Valerie Walkerdine as lecturers, she became interested in subcultures, class, and gender. She did her MA in Photographic Studies while working at Camerawork Gallery, and Darkroom, directed by Barbara Hunt, with Stuart Hall as a board member. On her MA she had Oliver Richon and Helen Chadwick as tutors, which led her to study at The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and on an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies with Darian Leader, Parveen Adams and Slavoj Žižek, and to attend a long-term lecture programme of Mark Cousins at the Architectural Association, London.

Esther's research and practice emerges from this background and from a Practice-based Fine Art PhD at Kingston University, This included text works, photography, expanded sculpture, and a novel about characters in a contemporary art world on the therapist’s couch. Her research looks at political subjectivities, gender & sexuality, re-activated psychoanalytic texts, fiction, and the exhibition as artwork. She considers relationships of learning and art production as part of her practice. She has volunteered and worked at The Anna Freud Centre London on a steering group for child mental health services and in community parenting projects. Esther has lived in Tokyo, New York, and now London.

Current Activity

Areas of Expertise

Qualifications

Teaching

Research

Postgraduate Supervision

Joanna Fursman (completed)

Chasing Pedagogy. Searching for a new school portrait via pedagogic art practice and the imaging of education

Joanna’s research examines where the pedagogic turn in contemporary art practice proposes different potentials and possibilities of school. Joanna examines different forms and configurations of school through key contemporary and historical art practice, where production and relations with others perform new pedagogical interactions. Research combines pedagogic, co-operative methodologies with photographic image making, exploring where contemporary art practice makes distinct forms of pedagogy visible. She intends to expose how school can be performed as unique, complex, public/not-public sites; where its effects move outwards to inform and shape cultural and societal production.

Co supervisor: Dr Sian Vaughan

Emily Scarrott

Nurturing The Unfertilised Egg: Towards the Absurd Heroine

Emily's performance art praxis considers a feminist reading of absurdist theory, demonstrated through nurturing acts towards an unfertilised egg. In practicing ongoing care towards her egg for the duration of this research project, Emily challenges a state-prescribed ‘meaning’ of her egg-making body based on biologically reproductive values.

Absurdism is traditionally communicated with cis-male examples, whereas this research argues that the experiences of women, trans and non-binary people are far more appropriate. Exploration of Emily's relationship with her egg culminates in repetitive manifestos, experimental speculative fictions, performance and rapid response making.

Co supervisors: Dr Linda Stupart and Dr Gemma Commane

Roo Dhissou (M4C)

Cultural Dysphoria: Exploring British Asian Female Identities Through Arts Practices

Cultural Dysphoria can be understood as the dissonance between the social expectations of an individual’s cultural performance or identity, and their desired embodiment of that culture, or uncertainty about where they fit into existing cultural categories. Roo's research will examine this firstly as a conceptual model, exploring the nature of being to understand difference through cultural experience; secondly, as a material model, embodying experience of dissonance using the phenomenon of Cultural Dysphoria. The research will draw upon Roo's own practice as an established artist, using sculpture, performance and film building upon previous research and the autoethnographic approaches.

Co Supervisors: Professor Rajinder Dudrah and Professor Anthony Downey

Sally Butcher (M4C)

How is infertility visualised and verbalised within contemporary online spaces, articulating new embodied infertile subjectivities? How can art practice re-present narratives of creative care around the dis-eased female body through reimagining (in)fertile experience?

Sally's research is concerned with expanding understandings of (In)fertility beyond the medical. Linking language and corporeality, it explores embodied experiences that occur through contemporary, (“patient”-led) im/material online and digital encounters of infertility, to reveal emotional invisible stories and silent conversations. It draws on feminist notions of affectivity in "becoming" maternal within these self-care labours, queering time (its diseased chronicity), and fertile identities, though new alternative subjectivities.

This mobilises the sensory through making with performative photography, data/text visualisation, and participatory bio-art methods, to investigate a narrative of creative care within Art & Health, building on historical feminist practice around lived experience.

Co supervisors: Dr Gemma Commane and Dr Cathy Herbrand De Montfort University, Reader in Medical Sociology

Esther is interested in supervising PhD’s in Contemporary Fine Art practice including:

Sculpture, Photography, Fiction, Film, Feminisms, Exhibition as Practice, Praxis, Autoethnography, Curatorial projects, 90’s British Art, Artist Led Spaces and Subcultures, Alternative Family and Fertility, Queer Studies, Subjectivities, Council Housing Architecture & Histories, Social Anthropology, Art and Health, Archives, Identity & Ethnicity, Psychoanalysis British School (Winnicott, Klein) and Lacanian.

Publications

Academic Activism in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities collaborative paper with BCU Cultural Theory Research Cluster. Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education (PTHE) Special Issue 2022

Elemental Passions: conference paper for The Missing Mother. Bolton University April 2021
Planned inclusion in subsequent publication with Demeter press (US)

Ugly Beast Novel (details forthcoming)

Personal and Political: catalogue essay - Bob and Roberta Smith: Von Bartha Garage, Basel (2014)

Domesticated SE Barnet at Five Years (London: Five Years Publications 2014) pp. 23-24

Bob and Roberta Smith essay for Von Bartha Year Book at Basel Art Fair (2014)

(Im)possible School Book: As Found with Five Years for Tanks Summer School, Tate Modern (2013)

Drinking and Smoking for Heather sparks artists book for SFMOMA bookshop, CA, USA (2012)

Social life of objects catalogue essay for Dallas Seitz, at Castlefield gallery, Manchester (2010)
https://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/event/the-social-lives-of-objects/
http://estherwindsor.com/ugly_beast_pages/castlefield.html

On top of the bed Sarah Dobai catalogue essay for film: Short Story Piece at 1000 000mph and Chelsea School of Art (2005)
http://sarahdobai.co.uk/pages/42/Works/Films/Short_Story_Piece/page:5
http://estherwindsor.com/million_show_pages/million_dobai.html

Citibank Prize Catalogue essay for The Photographers Gallery (2000)
https://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2000/02/10/26551.html
http://estherwindsor.com/citibank_page/citibank.html

Turner Prize Beauty BANK tabloid (1996)

Conference papers

Elemental Passions: conference paper for The Missing Mother. Bolton University April 2021

A staged Event: Women’s Art Practice and Thinking: Dorich House Museum 2018 Contemporary Art Research Centre’s Centre for Useless Splendor Kingston University.
https://www.dorichhousemuseum.org.uk/2018/04/07/womens-art-practice-and-thinking-a-staged-event-wednesday-2nd-may-2018/

Practice as Research: How do we reconcile action with the need to review? Symposium at University of Gloucestershire 2018
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/practice-as-research-how-do-we-reconcile-action-with-the-need-to-review-tickets-44084059609#

Your Place or My Place. Paper for Urban Encounters conference Photography, Memory and Archive. Goldsmiths in partnership with Tate Modern 2016
https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=10260

Curated Exhibitions

Your Tongue In My Mouth. Terry Atkinson, John Akomfrah: The Stuart Hall Project, Ellen Cantor, Peter Harris, Alexis Hunter, Sarah Jones, Karen Knorr, Janette Parris, Bob and Roberta Smith, Heather Sparks, Jo Spence. Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University. 2014
http://www.stanleypickergallery.org/your-tongue-in-my-mouth1/

1000 000 MPH project space London 2005-2007

Solo Exhibitions

Ellen Cantor; Cedric Christie, Kiss Your Own Arse Cos I’m Not Sorry Anymore; Arnaud Des Jardin, Crooked Pearls; Tobi Deeson, May to September; Sarah Dobai, Short Story Piece; Freee, Protest is Beautiful; Jet, Love to Love you; David Kefford, Unbecoming; Jessica Voorsanger; Walker and Bromich, Seige Weapons of Love.

Group Exhibitions

Pimps and Hookers: Simon Bedwell, David Burrows and Simon O‘ Sullivan, Cedric Christie, Cullinan and Richards (Art Lab), Adam Dant, Anat Ben David, Freee, Liz Price. Salon: Iain Mckell, Sarah Baker, Arnaud Desjardin, Stephen Jones and ‘Vague papers’
http://estherwindsor.com/thumbnail_pages/million_mph_thumbs.html

Radio

‘Motherhood Power and Love’ on resonance 104.4fm. Live radio discussion, 8 March 2011, with Dr Lisa Baraitser, senior lecturer in Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, author: Maternal Encounters: Anouchka Grose Lacanian psychoanalyst and author of 'No more silly love songs: a realists guide to romance'; Mo Thorp, Director of Fine Art, and Subjectivity & Feminisms research group at Chelsea School of Art. Chaired by Esther Windsor. http://www.enemiesofgoodart.org/resonance-fmenemies-of-good-art-international-womens-day-special/

A Labour of Love: Motherhood as Emotional Capital. Part 1 Sociology and Media on resonance 104.4fm. Live radio discussion, 23 November 2011, with Dr Tracey Jensen at Newcastle University, “Watching with my hands over my eyes”: Shame and irritation in ambivalent encounters with ‘Bad Mothers’ in Radical Psychology; Dr Rachel Thompson who is Professor of Social Research at Faculty of Health and Social Care, The Open University and published ‘Making Modern Mothers’. Chaired by Esther Windsor. http://www.enemiesofgoodart.org/a-labour-of-love-motherhood-as-emotional-capital-part-1/

A Labour of Love: Motherhood as Emotional Capital. Part 2 Psychoanalysis and politics on resonance 104.4fm. Live radio discussion, 7 December 2011, with Bice Benvenuto Italian psychoanalyst & author: “Concerning the Rites of Psychoanalysis”.
http://www.enemiesofgoodart.org/a-labour-of-love-motherhood-as-emotional-capital-part-2-psychoanalysis-and-politics/