Rebecca Court

Head of Undergraduate Studies

Rebecca Court works across a range of disciplines including performance, installation, photography, printmaking and sculpture. Her practice challenges the role and potential of the physical presence of the viewer in the exhibition space in the construct of staged participation and acknowledged/ unacknowledged co-collaborative production. She is Head of Postgraduate Taught Programmes at Birmingham School of Art.

Stuart Whipps

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and Art and Design

Stuart Whipps is an artist based in Birmingham, UK. He often makes work about things he doesn’t understand and doesn’t know how to do. Recently this includes restoring a 1979 Mini with the assistance of former British Leyland workers, training to make geological thin sections at the University of Birmingham, and propagating Begonias at West Dean in Sussex.

He has exhibited his work across the UK and internationally and is the recipient of a number of awards. He works predominantly with photography and video with occasional forays into sculpture.

Selected solo exhibitions include:

•          ‘If Wishes Were Thrushes, Beggars Would Eat Birds’, DCA, Dundee, 2020
•          ‘Reflections on the Death of a Procupine [sic], UH Arts, Hatfield, 2019
•          ‘Isle of Slingers’ Spike Island, Bristol, 2016
•          ‘PCS’, Ithuba Arts Gallery, Johannesburg, 2015
•          ‘Birth Sprins, Death Falls’, Flat Time House, London, 2013
•          ‘Why Contribute to The Spread of Ugliness?’, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2011

Selected group exhibitions include:

•          ‘Things Things Say’ Fabra i Coats: Contemporary Art Centre of Barcelona, 2020
•          ‘The Lie of The Land’ MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 2019
•          ‘British Art Show 8’, 2015 - 2017.
•          ‘4.543 Billion. The Matter of Matter’ CAPC, Bordeaux, 2017
•          ‘Relatively Absolute’, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire, 2013.
•          ‘East International’, Norwich, 2009.

In 2005 he won the Observer Hodge Photography Prize and in 2009 he was the joint recipient of the East International prize.

Steve Bulcock

Head of Undergraduate Studies

Steve Bulcock works across a range of digital media including animation, motion graphics and digital drawing systems. He is Head of Undergraduate Studies at Birmingham School of Art. His research interests are concerned with challenging the notions and expectations people have in relation to their interactions with digital technology. Recent work has involved collaborations with artist Sean O’Keeffe as part of an interdisciplinary research programme at Vivid in Birmingham, which also toured the UK with the Jerwood Drawing Prize exhibition.

He is currently studying for his PhD, which seeks to investigate notions of the algorithmic surface, computer interface design and authorship in the creative drawing process.

Gareth Proskourine-Barnett

Lecturer and Level 4 Co-ordinator

Gareth Proskourine-Barnett is an artist, researcher and lecturer. His multi-disciplinary practice investigates our relationship to place, documenting landscapes and environments altered by human intervention. Since graduating with an MA in Communication Design from Central Saint Martins in 2011 he has worked on a range of self-initiated and commissioned projects, taken part in artist residencies and delivered workshops internationally. Alongside his personal practice Gareth collaborates with other designers and writers on publishing projects under the name Tombstone Press. His work has been exhibited at museums and galleries in the UK, Russia, India, Thailand and the USA. Gareth has given guest lectures about his work at institutes including the Royal College of Art, Brighton University of the Arts and Silpakorn University in Bangkok. 

Gareth is currently working towards a PhD at the Royal Collage of Art in the department of Critical and Historical Studies. His practice-led research looks to cyberspace to provide a territory in which the ruins of Brutalist Architecture can be excavated and (re)imagined to (re)claim and (re)locate the utopian ambition of past gestures.

Lee Hewett

Lecturer in Fine Art and Art and Design

Lee is an artist, designer, researcher and lecturer who works across a range of disciplines including sculpture, books/publications, web technologies, photography and moving image. Lee has worked on a range of funded research projects, edited journals and also has teaching experience covering a broad range of levels and subject areas including Fine Art, Art and Design and MA modules. He is currently undertaking a practice-led PhD at the Royal College of Art.

Demitrios Kargotis

Course Leader: MA Art and Design Interdisciplinary Practices

Demitrios Kargotis works as part of the design action group Dash n’ Dem. Since 2010, their wide-ranging participatory projects centre on popular education and critical and creative citizenship participation. The open-ended, collaborative structure of their practice explores how co-creation can act as a form of activism that empowers different audiences to confront and reimagine reality. 

Dash n’ Dem make work that aims to make politics more assessable and engaging. For instance, providing a group of teenagers at the South London Gallery with a David Cameron lookalike to take over and create their own party political broadcast in the run up to the 2015 UK general election. Or, revisiting an 80’s post-punk compilation cassette Dump it on Parliament produced in opposition to a proposed nuclear waste dump in Bedfordshire, inviting emerging bands today to develop cover versions and write new songs of protest. 

Demitrios is also a founding member of Post Workers Theatre (PWT), a collective of designers and artists who produce projects that consider what politically engaged performance could be, utilising democratic forms of production to co-author creative outcomes with a variety of community and educational groups. Their creative goal is to reconsider the history and function of worker’s theatre of the past, and the current conditions for workers today through political, technological and social lenses. The aim is produce projects that can highlight future facing issues of social equality and alternative ways to discuss important issues.

Dr. Lisa Metherell

Senior Lecturer in Art and Design

Lisa holds a B.Soc.Sci. in Media, Culture and Society, an M.A. in Fine Art and a Ph.D. in Art and Design. Lisa is an artist and lecturer specialising in the relationship between practice and theory within Art and Design.  Her funded research through art practice PhD: ‘Glittering Orientations: Towards a non-figurative queer art practice’, was completed in April 2014.   Lisa is currently directing her attention to what slips by exploring (dis)orientation and how we might experience provisional embodiments through encounters with non-representational art. Her work is particularly informed by the tensions between queer theory and phenomenology and how what we 'know' might be usefully troubled by what we 'feel'. Other interests include fabulation, secret languages, vulnerability and critical design. She also writes about werewolves.

Alis Oldfield

Lecturer

Alis Oldfield is an artist whose practice is inherently multidisciplinary, using varying means to immerse the viewer in constructed worlds. Focussing on willing suspensions of disbelief, her work plays with the fictions we create for ourselves. Revealing their own construction, these worlds cultivate friction between fiction and reality – examining the edges of belief.

Jo Newman

Course Leader: Foundation

As a practitioner she understands the urgency to ‘make’ and the excitement and frustration that comes with this. Jo has chosen to lead the Visual Arts and Communication Foundation Course so that she can introduce students to an environment where ‘making’ can be positively productive and can facilitate learning through creative exploration, providing a bedrock for future study. As an educator she teaches with both academic rigour and humour. Jo designs projects which aim to challenge students to stretch their understanding of art and design and she has admiration for the courage and curiosity of student perseverance.

Andrew Gillespie

Lecturer in Fine Art

Andrew Gillespie is contemporary artist based in Birmingham. He is interested in the collision of surfaces, structures and materials. He regularly translates familiar imagery and objects through printmaking and casting, exploiting the shift in status and content that occurs with each gesture. He makes composed constellations of works that often conjure a specific landscape, personal experience or public context. 

Selected recent exhibitions include:

• Some Kinda Love, Gallery Celine, 2018 (solo)
• Anti-Scrape, The New Art Gallery Walsall, 2017 (solo)
• Sinkhole, Outpost, Norwich, 2017 (solo)
• Mask, Hunter Whitfield, London, 2016, (group)
• The Staircase of the Staircase, The Sunday Painter, London, 2015 (group)
• CO, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, 2014 (with Tom Godfrey) 

Andrew also organises Recent Activity, a curatorial project in Birmingham.

Esther Windsor

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and Art and Design

Esther has taught in Fine Art Theory and Practice for fifteen years. She is a curator, artist and writer and has curated at Camerawork Gallery and Darkroom, The Photographers’ Gallery, the ICA and The Royal British Society of Sculptors. Esther established two art school galleries, the waiting room, University of Wolverhampton and mirror, LCP London. She was director at Hull Time Based Arts and Co-directed, with Dallas Seitz, an artist led space 1000 000 mph, London. Her research looks at political subjectivities, femininity, re activated psychoanalytic texts and the exhibition as art work.