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.

Franziska Schenk

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art

Franziska Schenk is an artist and researcher with an MA in Fine Art (with Distinction) and First Class Honours degrees in Fine Art (Birmingham City University), and in Art Education (Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt). A well-qualified, experienced Lecturer in Fine Art at Birmingham City University and Honorary Research Associate at the University of Birmingham.

She is initiator of, and principal investigator on, funded art and science projects focusing on the conversion of nature’s iridescent colour to the painter’s palette – thereby introducing flow, dynamism, transience and an evolutionary element into painting.

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.

John Wigley

Associate Professor Academic

John Wigley is a graduate of the Sculpture School of the Royal College of Art and scholar of the British School of Rome, with interests in film and object making, exploring temporality and ‘still lives’. He has exhibited in the UK, Europe and USA. 

He is a working artist, a maker and assembler of objects. He is interested in both the role of an artist and the intellectual and physical space required to develop and sustain a practice. 

He teaches into the undergraduate BA (Hons) Fine Art course on the first and second year Establishing and Developing Practice modules, as well as the final year Professional Portfolio module. He is also module leader for two new modules: Collaborative Project and Collaborative Practice. They introduce interdisciplinary practice, where the cross-course sharing of knowledge and skills ensure that students have the experience of working effectively in ‘mixed’ teams. It involves some innovative learning and teaching, including the use of online teaching platforms.  

Dr Linda Stupart

Lecturer in Fine Art

Linda Stupart is an artist, writer, and educator from Cape Town, South Africa. They completed their PhD at Goldsmiths in 2016, with a project engaged in new considerations of objectification and abjection. 

They are interested in the possibilities for writing and making discrete grounded encounters with different kinds of bodies (of knowledge, objects, affect as well as corporeal bodies) as a way to think through less alienated ways of living and thinking together. This comes out of encounters with feminist art, postcolonial, ecological, queer and affect theory, as well as embodied and object-based critical institutional encounters. 

Their current work consists of writing, performance, curation, sculpture, drawing, and installation and engages with science fiction, environmental crises, magic, language, desire, and revenge.

Cathy Wade

Course Leader MA Arts and Education Practices

Cathy is an artist, writer and academic whose work is concerned with how art can be created and distributed in collaborative partnerships and through the creation of commons. Her work seeks to understand the experience of contemporary conditions through social practice and is realised as digital video, print, installation, public art, publication, text, drawing, performance and participatory works.

Steve Bulcock

Deputy Head of Institute of Creative Arts (Art)

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.

Mona Casey

Course Leader: MA Fine Art

Mona Casey is MA Fine Art Course Director and Birmingham School of Art International Lead. She is also module leader for the MA programme Models and Methods of Curatorial Practice.

Mona was born in Ireland and currently lives in the UK, where she works as a curator, artist and researcher.

Mona directs and has initiated a range of projects including; ARTICLE, which collaborates with curators to explore artist-led curatorial models in exhibition making, co-developed ‘The Museum of [ ] Objects’ an alternative, temporal model for a Museum collection, which arose out of a framework, developed at mac Birmingham, and was co-founder and curator of COLONY an artist-led exhibition space based in Birmingham, which operated for a four-year period and represented artists at ZOO Art Fair at the Royal Academy. Between 2006 – 2011 she was co-director/steering group member of The Event, a bi-annual presentation of artist-led galleries and projects. She also collaborated as artist duo, Casey & McAree, who were represented by The Agency Gallery in London.

Currently Mona is working with Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s Pre-Raphaelite collection as part of a commission by mac Birmingham. She is also collaborating on a project titled – Silent Stage, based in Lithuania which investigates the site of the exhibition as a staged environment.

Jennifer Wright

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art

Jennifer Wright is an artist and Senior Lecturer, with an extensive history of visiting and examining Fine Art courses in England and Holland. Trained as a painter, but now working in a range of handcrafted and digital mediums Jennifer has exhibited both in the UK and internationally since graduating from the M.A. Fine Art course at Birmingham.

Jennifer has developed an expanded art practice that has included site-specific installation addressing design and pattern in domestic interiors. She was co-founder and co-curator of The Pattern Lab, an artist collective researching the history and application of pattern in art and design with a focus on textiles and concern for working with archives of different kinds. In particular, this research addresses how such processes are used in or shape contemporary domestic environments. Her work involves using a variety of media, investigating how various processes translate images or information differently. Research into contemporary technology has also lead to an investigation of mediums and media from the past, continuing her interest in archival material and developing her interest in media archaeology.

Jennifer has works in collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum London and The Whitworth Museum and Art Gallery Manchester.

Dr Susan May

Senior Lecturer, History of Art and Design

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.

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.

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.