The Alchemist, or the curious world of academic research. Painting on paper 56″ X 44″

There are fourteen artists in this exhibition whose work ranges from drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, digital print to installation.They represent a diverse cultural mix reflecting the international community that makes up UEL.

The show highlights a wealth of cultural and international perspectives, a well-travelled maturity and a broad range of considered and reflective working methodologies.  The artists are:

Gisel Azevedo, Martin Barrett, Matthew Chambers, Anna Daniels, Grenville Davey, Garry Doherty, Paul Manners, Kon Markogiannis, Peter Nevin, Patrick Oronsaye, Vassilis Pafilis, Hedley Roberts, Hideyuki Sawayanagi,Timothy Weston

The title for the exhibition is taken from Richard Sennett’s recently published book “The Craftsman”.In it he reflects on the current cultural agenda driven by business interests that want a flexible workforce, with transferable, yet shallow craft skills, a society where the competitive market and financial efficiency has driven out the human need to do a job well, a position that presupposes that motivation is based purely on money. In challenging this, Sennett makes the point that everyone can become expert and this is not a case of being gifted or even a genius, but a product of practice, trial and error and the combination of hand, head and eye.The common thread is a commitment or need to practice, a need that overrides immediate financial rewards in favour of ‘getting it right’.For the artists in this exhibition this is the overriding priority.Art is a vocation, a process rather than a product, and often a way of saying something that cannot be expressed adequately in words.

The UEL Professional Doctorate attracts a variety of artists. About a third of the current body of Professional Doctorate students are academics seeking to to strike a positive balance between their commitment to education and their desire for creative autonomy through this qualification. The majority of the remainder are artists with a substantial professional history behind them for whom the course offers both professional enhancement and the opportunity to work in an academic setting. And the last few are MA students for whom this is step on the road to becoming practicing artists. What they have in common is the their willingness to put themselves and their ideas and beliefs about their practice under intense critical scrutiny, and attempt to ground their work and methodologies squarely on well thought-out premises. The result is not a UEL house-style, but rather a number of artists who are strong in their individual practices.Perhaps this culture of doing things well and knowing what you are doing is one way on which the paradigm criticised by Sennett can start to be displaced.

Not strictly an exhibition but an interesting on-line collaborative drawing experiment using the MARCEL network. MARCEL is a high bandwidth internet connection that links a substantial (and growing) group of Art, Design and Media institutions around the globe. The event was very speculative and included members of staff and students on a variety of programmes within the Digital Arts and Visual Communications field.

Exhibition of large scale drawings worked directly onto the wall of the recently opened AVA (Architecture and The Visual Arts) Gallery on the Docklands Campus at the University of East London. I enlisted the help of two willing student collaborators who helped me draw up the images from an overhead projector. I was able to use the corner of the gallery to create an illusionistic space that defied the logic of the space in some ways.