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Tate is delighted to host a growing number of doctoral students engaged in research at Tate. As part of the collaborative element of their doctorates, the students work at Tate in a variety of ways, gaining professional experience and contributing their ideas and knowledge to Tate's programmes and projects.
Tate has up to five fully funded AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) studentships to allocate each year.
Proposals for new studentships are made jointly by a member of Tate staff and a member of academic staff at a UK university. The deadline for proposals is usually November for studentships to start in October of the following year. The scheme does not allow for applications directly from potential students.
Tate welcomes proposals to examine, or use as a starting point, any of the objects or artworks in our collection from any disciplinary perspective.
Applications are assessed by a panel with members drawn from universities and other cultural heritage organisations as well as Tate. The successful studentships are selected on their academic strengths and clear support for the organisation's objectives.
The studentships are then advertised in the spring by the university partner to recruit the right student.
Further information about Collaborative Doctoral Partnership studentships is available on the Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships website.
Below is a list of current award holders.
Current studentships
- Hazel Atashroo – Creative Communities in Art and Design in the 1980s
- Helena Bonett – Barbara Hepworth: Practice, Interpretation, Legacy
- Kat Braybrooke – Hacking the museum, together: peer-to-peer interactions at shared machine shops in UK cultural heritage institutions
- Amy Concannon – The 'Unnatural' Landscape: Visualisation of the Urban Scene 1800–50
- Amina Diab – Re-Displaying the Modern: A History of Art Practices, Artistic Networks and Institutions in Egypt 1939–2000
- Lina Džuverović – Hybrid Practices: Interdisciplinarity and Pop Art Sensibilities in Yugoslav Art in 1960s and 1970s
- Tom Ensom – Technical Narratives: Method, Purpose, Use and Value in the Technical Description and Analysis of Software-Based Art
- Acatia Finbow – The Value and Place of Performance Art Documentation in the Contemporary Art Museum
- Karen Di Franco – Forms, Strategies and Contexts of Publishing in Modern and Contemporary Art Practice (1960s to the present day)
- Janine Francois – In what ways does art in the museum context provide a safe space to ask difficult questions around culture and race?
- Inga Fraser – Towards Artists' Moving Image: Film and Cinematic Consciousness, Britain 1896–1966
- Sofia Gurevich – The Form and Content of the Early Soviet Book: A Study Through the Country's Publishing Industry Institutions of the 1920s and 1930s
- Amy Harris – Canonising British Sculpture: Sir Francis Chantrey and the Chantrey Bequest
- Alex Hodby – Tate Modern and the Expansion of 'New Institutionalism': New Developments in Art and Public Programming Practices
- Louisa Hood – Family Learning in Art Galleries
- Eleanor Jones – Beyond Bloomsbury: Queer/Race/Art
- Judith Lee – Modern British Oils: History, Formulation and Use
- Louisa Lee – Conceptual Art in Britain, 1964–1979
- Jonty Lees – Can we create a creative community?
- Cristina Locatelli – Digital Engagement Beyond the Gallery: Art Maps, A Case Study
- Marianne Mulvey – What is the queer potential of the public programme within the arts institution?
- Katy Norris – The Emancipation of Women Artists: Strategies of Promotion and Influence in the Edwardian Art World, 1880–1918
- Louisa Penfold – Investigating the Value of Experiential Learning and Play in the Design of Learning Spaces for Young Children at Tate
- Nicola Sim – Circuit: Investigating partnerships between visual arts and youth organisations
- Patricia Smithen – The Development and Impact of Artist Acrylic Paints in the United Kingdom
- Alison Wright – British Sporting and Animal Art, 1760–1840. A Critical History of its Production, Reception, Collection and Display
- Victoria Young – Art Museum Attendance and the Public Realm: The Agency of Visitor Information in Tate's Organisational Practices of Making the Art Museum's Audience
- Ioanna Zouli – The Use of Digital Video in the Visitor's Encounter with the Work of Art
Past studentships
- Thomas Ardill – Between God, Art and Mammon: Religious Painting as Public Spectacle in Britain c.1800–50
- Wendy Asquith – Haiti in Art: Creating and Curating in the Black Atlantic
- Bryony Bery – Replicas and Reconstructions: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Art
- Elena Crippa – From Making to Presentation: London Art Schools 1960–present
- Corinna Dean – Establishing Tate Modern Cultural Quarter
- Caroline Donnellan – Establishing Tate Modern: Vision and Patronage
- James Finch – David Sylvester: Art Writings
- Hayley Flynn – Landscape in Blake: Visionary Topographies
- Ayesha Ghanchi – A Critical Analysis of Artists' Engagement with Learning Programmes at Tate 1970–2010, as Documented in Tate's Education Archive
- Oliver Gilbert – The Sites of Cultural Production and Impact of British Art and Design Communities Associated with Pop 1956–1974
- Susannah Gilbert – Latin American Art in an International Context
- Sabina Gill – Fotografia Polska: Adventures in Polish Photography since the 1960s
- Cora Gilroy-Ware – The Classical Nude in Romantic Britain
- Caroline Good – The Making of a National Art History: British Writers on Art and the Narratives of Nation 1660–1735
- Sofia Gotti – Counterculture in Pop: South American Art in the 1960s
- Rob Knifton – Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde
- Ali MacGilp – The London Art Market and the Formation of a National Collection at Tate 1926–1950
- Isabella Maidment – Performance, Action, Event
- Marion Martin – J.M.W. Turner and German Romanticism
- Alex Massouras – The Emergence of the Emerging Artist in London, 1960–2010
- Antoinette McKane – Tate Liverpool as a Force for Social Renewal? A Critical Study of Tate Liverpool's Interpretation and Education Policies and Practices (1988–2008)
- Peter Moore – British Graphic Art, 1660–1735: An Atlantic Perspective
- Seph Rodney – Two Rooms: Locating the Meeting Place of the Visitor and the Museum
- Philippa Simpson – London Art Market, 1790–1815: The New Exhibition Culture and the Staging of the British School
- Rachel Rose Smith – The International Context of the Art of St Ives 1948–60
- Stephanie Straine – Drawing Strategies in the 1960s and 1970s
- Robert Sutton – Henry Moore: Sculpture and Media in Twentieth-Century Britain
- Stephen Vainker – Experiences and Engagement: An Investigation of Young Persons' Visits to ARTIST ROOMS on Tour
- Lynn Wray – Art, Process and Propaganda on the Political Left
Details of new awards, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), are advertised on this website and elsewhere in the spring of each year.
Studentship profiles
Hazel Atashroo
Creative Communities in Art and Design in the 1980s
University of Southampton
Supervised by Professor Jonathan Harris, University of Southampton, and Lindsey Fryer, Head of Learning, Tate Liverpool
October 2013 –
This doctorate is part of an ongoing AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award project based at the Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art and Design, University of Southampton, in partnership with Tate Liverpool, entitled: Creative Communities in Art and Design since the 1960s: Lessons for Socio-Economic Regeneration in a Globalised World.
Hazel Atashroo's doctoral research focuses on specific geographically situated 'creative communities' in the UK (using case studies in London, Liverpool and Manchester) during the 'long 1980s'. It examines the local, national and global community impacts of their visual cultural production and activities.
During the 1980s, community was a concept subject to contestation on many fronts, with the amplification of postmodernist discourses in various fields, the rise of neoliberal individualism, the fracturing of oppositional political groups along identity lines, and further socio-economic upheaval for communities in the move towards the UK's increasingly globalised economy. Institutional discourses relating to cultural heritage and the implementation of cultural 'regeneration' polices in specific cities will provide a counterpoint to an investigation into the community-based local production and social initiatives of artists and designers.
Through a qualitative, anthropological consideration of the agency of these artists and designers, and the impacts of their cultural production upon the broader social sphere, this research will focus on the creative practices of communities of the recent past to re-evaluate the efficacy of top-down cultural regeneration policies and will consider possible future generative strategies.
Helena Bonett
Barbara Hepworth: Practice, Interpretation, Legacy
Royal College of Art
Supervised by Dr Claire Pajaczkowska, Senior Research Tutor, School of Material, Royal College of Art, Dr Victoria Walsh, Head of Programme, Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art, and Dr Chris Stephens, Curator (Modern British Art) & Head of Displays, Tate Britain
October 2013 –
What might constitute an artist's legacy and how can it be traced? The sculptor Barbara Hepworth said in 1959, 'Sculpture communicates an immediate sense of life – you can feel the pulse of it'. Now almost forty years since Hepworth made her final sculptures, what kind of pulse can be felt? And what are the means with which we feel for this pulse?
This project explores both the embodied encounter with Hepworth's sculpture through exhibition but also the trace of her sculptural legacy as it resonates in culture today. Arguably the most significant sculptor of the twentieth century, Hepworth's work has been influential not only to later generations of sculptors (both in their recognition or rejection of her work) but has also formed part of the popular landscape.
Funded by the AHRC, this project is a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership between Tate and the Royal College of Art. Coinciding with conservation, archive, exhibition and learning projects focused on Hepworth at Tate, this practice-led project will generate a diverse range of public-facing outputs. Working across the RCA's Curating and Materials departments, the project will explore how the embodied encounter with the processes and materials of the sculptor might transform the curator's knowledge of their meaning through learning to carve, model and cast sculptures. Workshops, interviews and seminars will be held to explore how contemporary artists and audiences engage with Hepworth's sculpture and legacy.
This practice-led research integrates the studio experience of sculptural materials and processes with the cultural agency of the curatorial project and the work of interpretation. The triangulation of these three practices will provide both the process, method and the outcome of the research.
Kat Braybrooke
Hacking the museum, together: peer-to-peer interactions at shared machine shops in UK cultural heritage institutions
University of Sussex
Supervised by Dr Tim Jordan, Head of University of Sussex School of Media, Film and Music, Dr Caroline Bassett, Director of University of Sussex Humanities Lab, and Dr Rebecca Sinker, Curator, Tate Learning
September 2015 –
Funded by the University of Sussex Humanities Lab, this doctoral project is inspired by Braybrooke's 2011 ethnographic study of gender and identity concerns amongst 30 Millennial-aged F/LOSS (Free, Libre, Open Source) hackers across Europe for her MSc Digital Anthropology at UCL, which concluded that embodied, physical experience had become an essential element of human-machine interactions, even when engaging online. Braybrooke's doctoral project builds on these findings by examining the effects of hacking and making ontologies in the cultural heritage sector, exploring emergent relationships between actants (humans, machines and spaces) at shared machine shops (makerspaces, fab labs, digital hubs) in UK cultural heritage institutions. Tate's Digital Studio and its ground-breaking programmes will be primary case studies for this work.
Shared machine shops like the Tate's Digital Studio are open workshop sites which prioritise the sharing of materials and source code. Their historical practices and hackerspace origins have been inspired by decentralised peer-production and hands-on learning methods. The focus of this project is to look at the widespread cultural effects of these interactions for communities. What kinds of relationships are being crafted between actants (users, machines and facilitators) at these sites when they are situated within cultural heritage institutions? How might these sites be influenced by genealogical practices of hacking, making and museology? What happens when once-closed cultural artefacts are (re)produced digitally by participants using peer-production methods?
To explore these concepts, a qualitative critical making framework is proposed, combining S. Nascimento's action-oriented methods with the epistemological toolkits of B. Latour's actor-network theory and D. Haraway's post-humanist figurations. Taking inspiration from transdisciplinary, interventionist and hands-on community practices, this research aims to understand both the physical uniqueness of each site and the situated conditions of power, culture and embodiment that may perforate and reinforce its boundaries.
Amy Concannon
The 'Unnatural' Landscape: Visualisation of the Urban Scene 1800–50
University of Nottingham
Supervised by Nicholas Alfrey, Associate Professor in Art History, University of Nottingham, Steven Daniels, Professor of Cultural Geography, University of Nottingham, Dr David Blayney Brown, Curator (British Art 1790–1850), Tate
October 2013 –
Urban views account for a large proportion of Tate's collection of British landscapes from the period 1800–50. They include, for example, Linnell's Kensington Gravel Pits 1811–12, Constable's The Opening of Waterloo Bridge exhibited 1832 and Turner's London from Greenwich Park exhibited 1809, as well as drawings, watercolours and prints in the Turner Bequest, Oppé collection and the wider holdings. Yet substantial research into urban landscapes of this period has never been undertaken; indeed, recent studies of British landscape have focused predominantly on rural subject matter. This project aims to investigate representations of urban and suburban landscapes, and in doing so redress an imbalance in our understanding of the visual culture of landscape of the period.
This project will use the collection at Tate as a springboard to scrutinise artists' approach to urban subject matter during a time of unprecedented urbanisation in Britain. Cathedral cities might form one theme, of which the recently acquired Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows ?1829 by Constable is a prime example, while suburbs and hinterlands form another significant grouping, typifying a period in which the relations between urban and rural spaces were increasingly ambiguous. The category of topography will also be reappraised and the formation of Tate's holdings of urban views considered in relation to other institutions, especially those with specialist topographical or antiquarian interests. The reading of these images will be set firmly within the context of their production, drawing on contemporary debates about urbanisation, art criticism and theory.
The research will feed directly into the work of Tate, enhancing online entries for works studied, alongside displays and potential future exhibitions. It will renew focus on key figures in the collection such as Turner and Constable but, crucially, will also contextualise their work in relation to their contemporaries and the theme of the urban landscape.
Amina Diab
Re-Displaying the Modern: A History of Art Practices, Artistic Networks and Institutions in Egypt 1939–2000
University of York
Supervised by Dr Jo Applin, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art, University of York, and Morad Montazami, Research Curator, Middle East and North Africa, Tate
October 2015 –
This AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award focuses on the institutional history of modern art practices in Egypt between 1939 and 2000. The last decade has seen a renewed academic interest in modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art. Unlike previous scholarship that approached Middle Eastern art through a teleological prism, in which the trajectories of local art had always been considered as somehow essentially 'Islamic' – explicitly or not reinforcing Western-centered narratives – revisionist narratives consider local art as always socially constructed and therefore only intelligible within its particular local historical, social and political contexts. Similarly, this project follows a critical analysis of how different kinds of aesthetic expression, judgement and reception in the Egyptian art sphere articulate a distinct aesthetic language and artistic practice that is both unquestionably modern and yet deeply local. In such a way, the project re-evaluates the adoption and adaption of modernist paradigms.
This project maps out the development of galleries, festivals, biennials, publications and other platforms for artistic exchange in Egypt from 1939 to 2000. The state patronage of the arts is one angle this project pursues. One observes a number of similarities and consistencies in the articulation of cultural policies, under presidents Abdel Nasser and Mubarak. Rather than rethink the defunct Nasserist cultural machinery, the Mubarak regime decided to revive old Nasserist policies, notably the High Council of Culture. Alongside a growing number of privately owned galleries, artists continued to navigate state institutions such as biennials, youth salons and other state-run initiatives for support. By surveying artworks, art publications and conducting oral histories with artists, art critics and art professors in Egypt, this research will also examine the emergence and reception of new artistic styles and the development of aesthetic discourses that move beyond frameworks of the nation-state.
Lina Džuverović
Hybrid Practices: Interdisciplinarity and Pop Art Sensibilities in Yugoslav Art in 1960s and 1970s
Royal College of Art
David Crowley, Professor and Head of Programme Critical Writing in Art & Design, Royal College of Art and Jessica Morgan, Curator, Tate
October 2012 –
The thesis will investigate Pop art in the former Yugoslavia during the 1960s and 1970s, making explicit previously unexplored connections between Yugoslav art and global Pop. Analysing Yugoslav artists' engagement with Pop art's techniques, visual language and core preoccupations (consumerism, incorporation of popular culture into art, 'Americanisation' of culture, and kitsch), the thesis will offer a new reading of artistic practices in the country, which following the Tito-Stalin split of 1948 were profoundly different from those in the Soviet bloc.
It was a period of cross-pollination between film, music, TV and radio, the graphic and visual arts, and the influence of international film, the emergence of underground music communities, experimental film production, the vibrant artistic production around comic books and other mass-produced art on paper will be studied as these were often first sites of incorporation of Pop iconography. Primary sources will be studied, and there will also be a close reading of individual works by such artists as Bosch & Bosch, Dušan Otašević, Predrag Peđa Nešković, Slobodan Šijan, Vera Fischer, group OHO, Sanja Iveković, Boris Bućan, Tomislav Gotovac and Lojze Logar. The activities of artist-run spaces and other key sites, such as student cultural centres in Belgrade, Ljubljana and Zagreb, will also be examined, along with the role of key international exhibitions, such as the International Graphic Biennial in Ljubljana (founded in 1955), Zagreb's 'New Tendencies' exhibitions and events (1961–73), and the associated journal Bit International and Belgrade's 'April Meetings – Festivals of Expanded Media' (1972–77).
The thesis will also look at artistic practices in Yugoslavia in the wider context of Eastern European art as a whole, examining the influence of Pop Art on artists in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland and Bulgaria.
Tom Ensom
Technical Narratives: Method, Purpose, Use and Value in the Technical Description and Analysis of Software-Based Art
King's College London
Supervised by Dr Mark Hedges, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London and Professor Pip Laurenson, Head of Collection Care Research, Tate
October 2014 –
The term 'software-based art' refers to art where software is the primary artistic medium. Such works form complex systems, exhibiting a range of dependencies on changing hardware, software and technological environments. Such characteristics raise significant challenges for their long-term preservation, yet there is little consensus regarding preservation strategies, nor how a sense of what these works are like might be conveyed to people unable to visit Tate's galleries.
The technical and behavioural complexity of these artworks makes it essential to capture detailed technical information about the components of an artwork and the digital environments in which they are created, curated and stored. The central research question of this AHRC-funded Collaborative Partnership Award therefore concerns how to describe or represent a software-based artwork. This will be examined from various perspectives, ranging from that of a broad viewing audience, to a conservation specialist making decisions about the conservation and display of an artwork. The secondary research question will explore the notion of technical art history for software-based art. Technical art history is an evolving field that focuses on the material choices of the artist, how a work was made, and the relationship of these to the meaning, history and context of the work. So far these questions have mostly been examined in the context of artworks that use traditional artistic materials such as paint. This research project will reframe these questions and consider what kind of analogous studies of software-based art might be undertaken, using digital analytical techniques used instead of chemical and physical ones.
In approaching both of the key research questions, an emphasis is to be given to the novel application of analytical techniques (such as digital forensics) and principles from software engineering. This research represents the first detailed technical study of software-based art to be based on the application of such methods to the software and systems on which they were developed and displayed.
Acatia Finbow
The Value and Place of Performance Art Documentation in the Contemporary Art Museum
University of Exeter
Supervised by Professor Gabriella Giannachi, University of Exeter, and Dr Jennifer Mundy, Head of Collection Research, Tate
October 2014 –
As performance artworks are increasingly re-performed and re-exhibited at Tate and other contemporary art museums, the issues surrounding documentation are gaining more importance. While curators explore ways of integrating documentation into their exhibition-making, the value and place of primary and secondary documentation in the contemporary art museum increasingly require focused critical engagement.
Through a thorough investigation of the archive and collection materials, this AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award will take a comparative historical view of the issue of documentation and the collection of documents held at Tate. It will focus on a number of relevant case studies, including single performance events, larger performance exhibitions and curatorial programmes of performance works.
The thesis will also seek to engage critically with contemporary practices in order to suggest what their future impact may be. This will involve interviewing curators, artists and archivists involved in contemporary practices at Tate and the formulation of a case study from a workshop organised as part of a wider Tate research project. The aim of this analysis of historical and current documentation practice is to uncover changing value perceptions and their practical applications in the collection at Tate, reviewing their long-term impact on the use of primary and secondary documentation at Tate in order to ensure continued critical engagement.
Karen Di Franco
Forms, Strategies and Contexts of Publishing in Modern and Contemporary Art Practice (1960s to the present day)
University of Reading
Supervised by Dr Ruth Blacksell, Programme Director in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, the University of Reading and Maxine Miller, Library Collections Manager, Tate Britain
October 2015 –
This project explores the peripheral and perhaps more ephemeral items created through artists' publishing to narrate a more inclusive history of modern and contemporary art. Materials held within the library and archive collections at Tate will be brought together with artworks and specially produced artists' interviews, to draw out the relationships between them, and so better consider the effects that these works have had on practitioners and audiences in recent decades.
Artists' publishing is often considered – and held – separately within institutional collections. However, by considering the book as artwork, as object, and as a mode of dissemination and distribution, the project will emphasise the importance of publishing within contemporary practice, and provide the basis from which to explore a wide variety of themes, materials, and formats, whether analogue or digital. The library space will become a testing ground both for display and for discussion, with the works selected becoming part of a constellation of histories to be engaged and further extended by Karen Di Franco and others.
This research will also focus on the expansion of cataloguing, archiving and curatorial terms and contexts, to explore the gaps in art historical knowledge of past works (the works and connections between them) and the need to understand contemporary works, which are embedded within these terms and contexts.
Inga Fraser
Towards Artists' Moving Image: Film and Cinematic Consciousness, Britain 1896–1966
Royal College of Art
Supervised by Professor Barry Curtis, School of Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art, and Dr Andrew Wilson, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art and Archives at Tate.
October 2016 –
Focusing on the UK in the first half of the twentieth century, this research project focuses on instances when cinematic form, theory, technology, architecture, discourse, ephemera and ideology influenced traditional artistic media of painting, sculpture and printmaking alongside instances when artists worked both in commercial and avant-garde/ experimental film production. Tracing artists' engagement with cinema and associated moving image technology, it catalogues artists' films made and screened in the UK during the period and examines the archives of artists, collectives and art critics held at the Tate and elsewhere, as well as published accounts in journals and the national and local press.
The research questions this project seeks to address include: how British artists received cinema in its early years and subsequently; whether they sought to celebrate or denigrate the qualities of the moving image in traditional media; how the relation between cinematic, painterly, sculptural and performative modes of vision evolved during the period; what roles were assumed by artists within commercial cinema; what films were made by artists during the period; how moving image technology impacted upon artists' other material processes; how institutions helped or hindered artists' engagement with cinema; how far cinema engendered a space of diversity within art; and how via the conscious or unconscious assimilation of an notion of the cinematic, writers of the period developed of a new critical language for art.
Funded by the AHRC, this project is a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership between Tate (Curatorial, Conservation, Archive) and the Royal College of Art (Critical and Historical Studies) and aims to connect our current knowledge of artists' moving image to historical precedents that extend beyond experimental film of the 1960s to works in different media, made by a range artists working in quite different material and theoretical contexts, thereby opening up the possibility for a new genealogy of contemporary work.
Sofia Gurevich
The Form and Content of the Early Soviet Book: A Study Through the Country's Publishing Industry Institutions of the 1920s and 1930s
The Courtauld Institute of Art
Supervised by Dr Klara Kemp-Welch, Lecturer in 20th-century Modernism, The Courtauld Institute of Art and Dr Matthew Gale, Head of Displays, Tate Modern
October 2015 –
The focus of this AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award is the renowned David King Collection, comprising the vast array of printed media material from the early Soviet epoch, including propaganda posters, photographs, books, periodicals and related forms of ephemera. The research will also contribute to an exhibition planned at Tate Modern for October 2017, to coincide with the centenary of the October Revolution.
Sofia's research project is an inquiry into how Soviet artists, including those from outside the Constructivist camp, generally seen in Western scholarship as its exclusive innova-tors, have approached the topic of early Soviet book design.
The research will explore how the artists of varied theoretical and stylistic affiliations con-tributed to the issue of interrelation between form and content within the early Soviet book, in view of its multiple function as a tool of enlightenment, an instrument of agitation and a promoter of the Soviet regime's reputation abroad. The investigation will be carried out through a study of major institutions related to the country's burgeoning publishing industry. These will include the editorial processes within major publishing houses of Moscow and Petrograd/Leningrad, including The State Publishing House (Gosizdat), World Literature (Vsemirnaia literatura) and Academia; the international activity of the publishing branch of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS); and the teaching of graphic art and book design at The Higher Art and Technical Studios (VKhuTEMAS) and its successor, VKhuTEIN, both in Moscow and Leningrad.
One of the artists, whose work will be reassessed in light of this research, is Vladimir Fa-vorskii, a Soviet wood engraver, book artist and professor of the VKhUTEMAS's poly-graphic faculty, who has been almost entirely overlooked in Western scholarship, and whose book-related activity throughout the 1920s was in many ways a lot closer to that of the Constructivists, than has generally been considered.
Amy Harris
Canonising British Sculpture: Sir Francis Chantrey and the Chantrey Bequest
University of York
Supervised by Professor Jason Edwards, University of York, Dr Greg Sullivan, Curator of British Art 1750–1830, Tate, and Dr Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, Assistant Curator of British Art, 1850–1915, Tate
October 2014 –
This AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership between Tate and the University of York considers the status, characterisation and canonisation of British sculpture in the long nineteenth century. Sir Francis Chantrey has become the subject of increasing revisionary understanding in recent years, as a potential paterfamilias of a nineteenth-century British school of sculpture invested in British materials, themes and subjects. This project will consider the breadth of his influence, from his debut at the Royal Academy, through the influential characterisations of the artist and his peers as a nascent British school in the early 1830s, the consolidation of his reputation by Lady Chantrey following his death in 1841, to the formation of the Chantrey Bequest in 1977 and the arrival of that sculptural bequest at the National Gallery of British Art, now Tate Britain.
Through a series of object-focused case studies, the project will consider a range of sculptors who rejected and embraced the Anglo-Roman or Parisian avant-garde ambitions of their peers and predecessors, and the changing fortunes of British themes, materials and indigenous educational protocols across the long nineteenth century. It will additionally consider the acquisition, display and loans of specific objects by these sculptors for the Chantrey Bequest, and re-evaluate the collecting histories of British art institutions, the emergence of new patrons for sculpture and the characterisations of a British School. The research will enhance online entries for works studied and enrich knowledge of overlooked sculptors and their works in the national collection.
Alex Hodby
Tate Modern and the Expansion of 'New Institutionalism': New Developments in Art and Public Programming Practices
Goldsmiths, University of London
Supervised by Bernadette Buckley, Goldsmiths, University of London, and Dr Marko Daniel, Curator (Public Programmes), Tate
September 2007 –
Alex Hodby's research explores the implications of so-called 'new institutional' practices in art organisations and their programmes. Various approaches to art and its institutions will be addressed using debates in areas such as institutional critique, radical art history and critical curatorial practices. Social, political and economic influences on art institutions will be studied, as well as the reciprocal implications of 'new' programming strategies on these cultural forces. The roles of curator, artist and audience will be examined to help uncover the mechanisms of programming strategies. The implications of these strategies for the ongoing creation, negotiation, presentation and viewing of art will be considered.
Tate Modern is the main case study by which to test the ideas outlined above. Hodby will focus on specific projects and analyse data gathered from archives, events and interviews with staff to track the developments in their programming strategies. Her link with Tate Modern will enable her to look closely at past and current developments, as well as future aspirations, in this particular institution's practices, and reflect on contextual circumstances over the course of his research. Particular attention will be paid to the practice and strategies of the public programmes team, and consideration will be given to the bringing of exhibitions and public programmes into a common frame. Tate Modern's influence on programming practice will be addressed, enabling an examination of the potential for 'new institutional' practices to create new platforms for the exploration of ideas.
Louisa Hood
Family Learning in Art Galleries
The University of Exeter
Supervised by Professor Tim Coles, Dr Adrian Bailey, University of Exeter and Dr Emily Pringle, Head of Learning Practice and Policy Research, Tate
September 2015 –
Art galleries and collections have a reputation as conservative institutions in which art objects are viewed reverentially in an atmosphere that fosters quiet contemplation. This mode of experiencing art is popular with core visitors, such as 'art enthusiasts', less so with young audiences and families. The challenge for galleries seeking to engage with young people and families is to find ways of adapting their practice so that it is more closely aligned with the preferences of these visitors, without alienating existing audiences.
The aim of this research is to investigate current practices of family learning in order to gain insights into what is afforded by inter-generational engagement and learning in galleries and the potential for developing family audiences in art galleries. The project will produce new knowledge about family experiences, inter-generational pedagogy and co-production in gallery settings.
Understanding the audiences of the future is key to the resilience and sustainability of arts and cultural institutions moving forward. Hence the project also has potential to speak to important critical policy debates through some of the first work testing ideas of co-production in public services.
The project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and will include research conducted across all four of Tate's sites.
Eleanor Jones
Beyond Bloomsbury: Queer/Race/Art
King's College London
Supervised by Dr Clare Barlow, Tate Britain and Professor Mark Turner, King's College London
October 2015 –
This AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award focuses on the intersections between ethnicity, queerness and desire in British art c.1900 to 1940.
In recent years, scholarship on 'alternative modernisms' and 'colonial modernisms' has revised and challenged our received knowledge of this period. Questions of race and queer sexuality in the field of the visual arts, however, remain a comparatively unstudied area. The doctorate will address this gap through a series of case studies centred on artists, artistic networks and various forms of representation.
Drawing on material found in Tate's archive and collection, the thesis will concentrate on painters such as Duncan Grant and Edward Burra, photographers such as Angus McBean and Barbara Ker-Seymer, and artists' models such as Henry Thomas and Patrick Nelson. It will consider the often exploitative relationship between artist and sitter, especially in the context of race, and will question how queerness complicates this troubling dynamic. In particular, Eleanor Jones is interested in work which establishes a sense of kinship and community within the frame, and she seeks to explore how certain artistic practices facilitate depictions of solidarity, as opposed to alienation.
The research will feed directly into the work of Tate, enhancing displays and online entries, as well as contributing to a forthcoming exhibition. In examining the relationship between ethnicity and queer sexualities, alternative narratives emerge, allowing for a radical reassessment of British art during this period and beyond.
Judith Lee
Modern British Oils: History, Formulation and Use
Courtauld Institute of Art
Supervised by Professor Aviva Burnstock, Head of the Department of Conservation and Technology, Courtauld Institute of Art, and Dr Bronwyn Ormsby, Senior Conservation Scientist, Tate
October 2013 –
This AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership is concerned with an investigation into the relationship between changing formulations of artists' oil paints and the stability of modern oil paintings.
The project will be based upon a series of in-depth technical studies of oil paintings belonging to the Tate collection, which are presenting unique challenges to conservation, such as water sensitivity of paint surfaces. Modern oil paintings have also been associated with the appearance of a white-haze or 'bloom' on their surfaces, as well as a fascinating yet alarming phenomenon where sections of paint become liquid and start to drip. The precise causes of such issues are not yet fully understood, and various factors, in addition to the exact paint formulations used by artists, may be of importance, such as atmospheric pollution and other environmental factors.
Information obtained from such technical studies will be linked to a historical investigation of paint manufacture, with a particular focus on Winsor and Newton. This project benefits from access to the Winsor and Newton Archive held at the Hamilton Kerr Institute; a series of archival paint swatches held by Conservation Science at the Tate; and unpublished artist interviews held within the Tate's institutional records. In addition it is hoped that it will be possible to conduct further artist interviews focusing on the choice of materials, and that these interviews will be registered as part of the central database held by International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art.
Louisa Lee
Conceptual Art in Britain, 1964–1979
University of York
Supervised by Dr Jo Applin, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art, University of York, and Dr Andrew Wilson, Curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art, Tate
October 2014 –
This AHRC-funded doctoral award will examine the history of conceptual art in Britain from its genesis in the early 1960s through to the late 1970s, by which point the theorisation implicit within conceptual art fed into differently nuanced concerns. Despite international interest in conceptual art, there has been little research carried out into the specific history and conditions of conceptual art in Britain.
The research will investigate how conceptual art was displayed, collected and exhibited in this period with a particular focus on artists' books and magazines. In order to re-evaluate British conceptual art's position, it is necessary to examine it in relation to modes of distribution and exchange. International networks for conceptual art were enabled by a focus on ideas and concepts rather than objects, as well as advances in the technologies that supported both distribution and travel. The historical focus on conceptual art with relation to 'dematerialisation' has largely ignored the social contexts in which it was produced and received. It is also noticeable how absent women artists were in major exhibitions and publications from the period. These issues and unresolved areas will form the basis of this research and will contribute towards wider research into Tate's collection, culminating in an exhibition in 2016.
Jonty Lees
Can we create a creative community?
University of Southampton
Supervised by Professor Jonathan Harris, Birmingham City University, and Lindsey Fryer, Head of Learning, Tate Liverpool
October 2014 –
This is the third project in a series of four AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award partnerships between Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art and Design, University of Southampton and Tate Liverpool.
The practice-based research explores the potential for artist, organisation and audience to have interchangeable roles, and poses the question, 'What happens when the band members swap instruments?'.
This investigation seeks to understand and recognise the value non-experts offer in the creation of content and learning, and examines how the enhanced role of the audience impacts on the function of artists and galleries. Structured through a sequence of case studies, beginning with Tate Liverpool's newly formed Community Collective, the work will identify how this active audience aims to engage with the gallery in meaningful ways.
The research draws on improvisation as a technique to develop imagination and creativity and suggests 'doing' activates stimulus and direction. The Community Collective setting employs discussion and debate to advance ideas, pinpoint goals, solve problems and create meaning. It also establishes a social environment where co-operation, skill sharing and respect combine to construct a productive and inclusive setting.
Cristina Locatelli
Digital Engagement Beyond the Gallery: Art Maps, A Case Study
University of Exeter
Supervised by Gabriella Giannachi, Professor of Performance and New Media and Director of the Centre for Intermedia, Department of English, University of Exeter, and Dr Rebecca Sinker, Curator of Digital Learning, Tate
October 2012 –
Cristina Locatelli's research will explore the nature of participation and engagement at Tate and other national museums, analysing activities that use physical and digital media in conjunction with one another. The research focuses on identifying how user-generated knowledge may relate and add to canonical records of artworks in collections and archives.
Locatelli will investigate Art Maps, a digital application developed by Horizon and Tate, which explores artworks in relation to places, sites, landscapes and environments. Art Maps allows audiences to encounter, geotag and annotate artworks from Tate's collection outside the museum.
The research will examine how the application is used by different audiences, seeking to better understand the nature of their learning experience; whether they are keen to share it with others; and the resulting value of the collective knowledge to others and to Tate.
Marianne Mulvey
What is the queer potential of the public programme within the arts institution?
Royal College of Art
Supervised by Dr Ben Cranfield, Senior Tutor in Curatorial Theory and History, Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art, and Dr Marko Daniel, Curator (Public Programmes), Tate Modern
October 2016 –
In my PhD I am looking at public programming as a practice and theoretical field. Within all kinds of institutions – artistic, museological, scientific or academic – there are departments responsible for something called the 'public programme'. In this notional space a variety of events may take place that can involve socialising, learning, making and communing. In art institutions what constitutes the 'public programme' might be labelled as art, education or marketing. Where the public programme, or elements of it, appear in scholarship they have largely been treated as adjunctive to the exhibition. In practice the public programme is frequently under-funded and under-archived by institutions, making it a slippery object of study at best. At the same time, through socially engaged, performative, discursive and digital practices the public programme is fore-grounded as the conduit for new kinds of art and knowledge production.
My project utilises queer theory to open up the problems and opportunities thrown up by the overlapping discourses and practices that describe what a public programme might be, to break up the normative idea of a monolithic public and think about what the queer potential of the public programme within the arts institution might be.
Part of my project includes practice-based research in collaboration with three partner institutions: Tate, Open School East and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Through a set of collaborations with these institutions I will explore problems and opportunities thrown up by my initial literature review across museum and gallery education; the expanded curatorial; educational turn and new institutionalism; socially engaged art practice and critiques of 'community' and 'participation' from theatre studies, art theory and philosophy.
Katy Norris
The Emancipation of Women Artists: Strategies of Promotion and Influence in the Edwardian Art World, 1880–1918
University of Bristol
Supervised by Dr Grace Brockington, University of Bristol, and Dr Emma Chambers, Curator Modern British Art, Tate Britain
October 2016 –
The years between 1880 and 1918 were a period in which women artists exercised increasing authority. Formal art education became available to them, and art clubs, groups and societies began to admit them as members. The period also witnessed the growth of women-only arts organisations, while female artists found new creative outlets through their involvement in campaigns for suffrage and international movements. This AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award seeks to ascertain how, during an era when women continued to experience political disenfranchisement, they successfully navigated the systems of a male-dominated art world, exploiting the new professional opportunities that were available to them.
Since the early 1970s there has been an acknowledgement of the lack of knowledge about the careers and artistic production of women that has severely limited our ability to display and acquire their work. While previous literature on British art in the period 1880–1918 consists largely of biographies and surveys of male-dominated groups that present women as singular followers of men, this project aims to strengthen the position of women artists in art-historical discourse by situating their careers within the wider cultural networks of the day. Evidence for their inclusion in (and exclusion from) the art establishment will be sought in materials held in the Tate Archive, including those relating to exhibiting societies and galleries such as the Carfax Gallery, Goupil Galleries, New English Art Club, Camden Town Group, Bloomsbury Group and London Group. The project will address the significant gap in women's art in museum collections and aims to draw out new narratives about little known or under-recognised women artists who worked across a range of disciplines, thus contributing to a deeper and more inclusive understanding of the art world between 1880 and 1918.
Louisa Penfold
Investigating the Value of Experiential Learning and Play in the Design of Learning Spaces for Young Children at Tate
Supervised by Dr Emily Pringle, Head of Learning Practice, Research and Policy, Tate, and Professor Pat Thomson, School of Education, University of Nottingham
October 2014 –
This doctorate will explore the intersection between children, artists, curators and play and how this can be used to inform the design of learning environments for children.
Based within the Early Years & Family programme, this research will seek to investigate the qualities of environments that lead to successful creative experiences for children at Tate. Frameworks around the concepts of 'environment', 'childhood', 'play' and 'experience' will be theorised in regards to their cultural, social and spatial constructs within an art museum context.
Through adopting an action-research methodology, this research will consider the pedagogical philosophies, challenges and outcomes in the development and implementation of spaces developed especially for early years learning. The study will focus on how the artistic process of contemporary artists can be used as both a source of inspiration and a method for the co-construction of art and knowledge with children.
This research is funded by the University of Nottingham, Brisbane City Council, The Ian Potter Cultural Trust and the Graduate Women Queensland Fellowship Fund.
Nicola Sim
Circuit: Investigating partnerships between visual arts and youth organisations
University of Nottingham
Supervised by Dr Emily Pringle, Head of Learning Practice, Research and Policy, Tate, and Professor Pat Thomson, School of Education, University of Nottingham
October 2013 –
This AHRC-funded research explores the politics and performance of partnership between visual arts organisations and the youth sector, using Circuit, a four-year national programme, as the context for a multi-sited ethnographic study. Launched in 2013, Circuit connects 15–25 year olds to the arts in galleries and museums working in partnership with the youth and cultural sector. Led by Tate and funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, it seeks to provide opportunities for young people to steer their own learning and create cultural activity across art disciplines. Circuit involves Tate Modern and Tate Britain; Tate Liverpool; Tate St Ives and partners from the Plus Tate network: firstsite, Colchester; MOSTYN, Llandudno; Nottingham Contemporary; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; and Wysing Arts Centre and Kettle's Yard, Cambridgeshire.
The programme offers an unparalleled opportunity to understand how the category of 'youth' is constructed and portrayed through different organisational cultures and across different geographies. The research will consider the motivations, challenges and consequences of a partnership-based approach, focusing, for example, on negotiations of risk, authority and expertise in collaborative work. The study will deconstruct discourses around 'hard-to-reach' young participants, and examine the multiple ways in which exclusion may be reduced and reproduced through creative practices and partnerships.
The dynamics of cross art-form collaboration and the role of digital networks in supporting organisational partnerships will also feature as subjects of the fieldwork. By accumulating local knowledge and reflecting on the politics and cultural values of young people, as they appear in regional and national contexts, the research will aim to define what is at stake when the gallery goes out and invites in.
Patricia Smithen
The Development and Impact of Artist Acrylic Paints in the United Kingdom
Courtauld Institute of Art
Supervised by Professor Aviva Burnstock, Head of the Department of Conservation and Technology, Courtauld Institute of Art and Dr Bronwyn Ormsby, Senior Conservation Scientist, Tate
October 2015 –
In the 1960s a new acrylic dispersion paint product was made and marketed in the United Kingdom, which rapidly grew in popularity and was taken up by influential artists. While the history of the development of this painting medium in the US has been investigated, less is known about the production of acrylic dispersion paint in the United Kingdom and Europe, and how it was adopted and used by artists within the UK. This doctoral research project will investigate the development of artists' acrylic dispersion paint in the UK, its use by significant British artists and its ongoing legacy in the visual arts.
How and why did paint manufacturers in the United Kingdom produce and introduce acrylic emulsion paints into the fine art community and what was the impact of this new material on the production of artworks? How did acrylic paint become established as a key artistic medium following its launch in the United Kingdom and how has it remained relevant through to the 21st century? How have acrylic paints and their use by artists developed and changed following its initial launch?
The proposed approach is based on technical art history which draws together strands of information around artworks from direct examination and imaging of artworks, scientific analysis of the materials and structure, exploration of studio practices and into the social, economic, technological and philosophical context in which the art was produced. This interdisciplinary approach was championed by David Bomford as a method to examine the holistic influences on the production and subsequent changes of artwork. This direction can shed new light on artistic production and the proposed research is an opportunity to gather timely information at a point when many of the artists in question – including Peter Blake, Bridget Riley and David Hockney – remain able to evaluate the significance of this particular material on their own practices across their careers.
The initial focus will be on early developments and use by artists, centred on the years around 1963. Subsequent investigations will examine the market growth of acrylic paint products, influence on artistic styles and how acrylic dispersion paints have been adapted and continue to be a relevant and popular painting medium through to the early 21st century.
Alison Wright
British Sporting and Animal Art, 1760–1840. A Critical History of its Production, Reception, Collection and Display
University of East Anglia
Supervised by Dr Sarah Monks, University of East Anglia, and Dr Martin Myrone, Lead Curator Pre-1800 British Art, Tate Britain
October 2014 –
Despite the importance of sporting and animal art within the history of British art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and its significant presence within the national collection, it has received little scholarly attention as an art form. Apart from a few isolated key figures such as George Stubbs, Thomas Bewick and Edwin Landseer, the works of animal artists popular in their day, including James Ward, John Ferneley, Benjamin Marshall, Abraham Cooper and John Frederick Herring, have often been interpreted as little more than visual documents.
Taking the hundred or so representative works in Tate Britain as a starting point and looking further afield into other UK collections, this AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership will take a new look at the genre, critically re-evaluating it in the light of current methodological trends within the historiography of British art. Archival research will examine artistic practice, exhibition spaces, art collections, art criticism and print publishing to gain insight into the experience of artists working on animal subjects and the ways in which these pictures were understood by contemporaries and later collectors. The research will contribute to online information on the Tate's website with the potential to inform the future display of animal and sporting art and discussions about the place of these works in the national collection.
Victoria Young
Art Museum Attendance and the Public Realm: The Agency of Visitor Information in Tate's Organisational Practices of Making the Art Museum's Audience
London South Bank University
Supervised by Professor Andrew Dewdney, London South Bank University, and Dr Victoria Walsh, Head of Adult Programmes, Tate Britain
October 2010 –
In recent years the policy emphasis upon a socio-political instrumentality of audience development and its role in engaging audiences of broad social and cultural diversity has given way to a demand-led model, in which existing consumer or visitor needs are identified and met via strategic marketing. This adjustment towards a narrowed model of cultural consumption challenges the notion of the representational nature of existing audiences compared with the wider public realm.
Victoria Young's research aims to generate new knowledge and understandings of how art museums construct notions of audience and visitor experience. In particular, the research is interested in how practical notions of the cultural value of museum attendance and visitor interaction circulate within Tate through curatorial and gallery education practices, as mediated and framed by marketing. The research objective is to support new thinking about audience development based upon qualitative measures of visitor experience, with the core part of the research taking the form of an embedded organisational study.
Ioanna Zouli
Digital Tate: The Uses of Video in the Construction of Audiences
Supervised by Andrew Dewdney, Professor of Educational Development, London South Bank University, Victoria Walsh, Tate Research, and Jane Burton, Head of Content and Creative Director, Tate
October 2011 –
Ioanna Zouli's research seeks to investigate the hypothesis that the modes and practices through which museums embrace new media technologies are changing the way visitors engage with and experience the museum and its display of objects.
The research seeks to establish whether, and how, aesthetic experience as traditionally conceived is changing as a result of contemporary network culture and the use of digital technology. It also investigates how this relates to Tate's own understanding, strategy and deployment of new media in communication and educational design, and what kinds of correspondence there might be between the museum's and audiences' digital habits. The research is framed by the question of whether digital technology is rapidly bringing about a convergence between producers and consumers of cultural content.
The research seeks to produce new understandings about the use of digital video in the mediation of the experience of and value for the art museum and to draw upon the conceptual insights of the AHRC/DMI-funded Tate Encounters research programme (2007–10).
More specifically, this study's desired outcome is to contribute to knowledge via a new understanding of how digital video is deployed in Tate as a powerful medium, through which meaning is constructed and communicated in different contexts across the institution. It will draw attention to a narrative account of the working assumptions about the use of video as a medium across and within Tate's departments, as well as reflecting the institution's approach to digital technology.
The BMW Tate Live programme has been chosen as the core case study to observe Tate working with digital technologies. The project's observations and its development may illuminate the ways in which digital projects are delivered and how the institution perceives the concept of curating digital spaces and platforms. Moreover, the dissertation aims to explore how new audiences are created through Tate's video production and other media-based projects.
Past students
Thomas Ardill
Between God, Art and Mammon: Religious Painting as Public Spectacle in Britain c.1800–50
Courtauld Institute of Art
Supervised by David Solkin, Professor of the History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art, and Dr Martin Myrone, Lead Curator Pre-1800 British Art, Tate Britain
October 2011 –
This AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award explores the proliferation of religious paintings in the public exhibition spaces of London and other urban centres during the first half of the nineteenth century. The study of this neglected area will enrich our knowledge of some of the era's most ambitious paintings and deepen our understanding of a host of key players – artists, art institutions, audiences, patrons, and art entrepreneurs – in what was an increasingly commercial art world. A broader aim is to gain a new appreciation of the role of Christianity in British high visual culture at the beginning of the modern period.
The PhD will be structured around a series of focused case studies, mainly of pictures in the Tate collection, perhaps including: J.M.W. Turner, The Tenth Plague of Egypt (exhibited RA 1802) and The Deluge (exhibited Turner's Gallery 1805 [?] and RA 1813); Benjamin Robert Haydon, The Raising of Lazarus (exhibited The Egyptian Hall, London 1823); Joseph Severn, The Infant of the Apocalypse Saved from the Dragon (exhibited RA 1838); and Francis Danby, The Deluge (exhibited RA 1840), as well as works by John Martin and others.
This research will enrich our knowledge of some overlooked works in the national collection and promote interest and appreciation in them through associated publications or displays.
Wendy Asquith
Haiti in Art: Creating and Curating in the Black Atlantic
University of Liverpool
Supervised by Dr Dmitri van den Bersselaar and Professor Charles Forsdick, University of Liverpool, and Lindsey Fryer, Head of Learning, Tate Liverpool
September 2010 –
This AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award will explore how artists have engaged with Haiti as a key site in the 'Black Atlantic', taking Paul Gilroy's concept as a starting point for interpretation. Haiti has become a key site partly because of the historical significance of the Haitian Revolution and the subsequent history of Haiti as an independent state, and particularly because of the ways in which artists have both celebrated the Haitian Revolution and struggled with its legacies. The project will adopt a historical approach, taking as its point of departure the art of the Harlem Renaissance, but it will also trace Haiti in art to the present (both as a site imagined by artists elsewhere and as a site where contemporary artists produce art). In addition to the PhD, a web-based resource on the concept of the Black Atlantic will be developed as a legacy of the Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic exhibition, along with the interactive debating space Black Atlantic Resource Debate.
Bryony Bery
Replicas and Reconstructions: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Art
University College London
Supervised by Professor Briony Fer, University College London, and Dr Matthew Gale, Head of Displays, Tate Modern
September 2007 –
There are various reasons for replicating works, historic and current, ranging from making replicas where works were lost or have been destroyed, to artists' versions and editions, to works that need to be 'remade' each time they are installed. Where possible Bryony Bery will use as case studies works in Tate's collection or works that are relevant to Tate's programme of displays and exhibitions to think through the ethical issues: who makes replicas, when and why? What is their status in institutions and on the market?
Concentrating on art produced in America and Europe in the 1960s and exhibited at group shows such Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, 9 and Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, Bery will problematise finish in the context of fragile and ephemeral materials. This will allow her to consider the precariousness and ephemateriality of works and unravel the issues at stake when they are replicated. She will also consider the continual materiality of works and their repeatability, and the problematic nature of 'finishedness' and surface finish. The research will be technical and critical, arguing for the logic of a work, the logic of disintegration and the logic of replication.
Inherent Vice: The Replica and its Implications in Modern Sculpture, a workshop held at Tate Modern in October 2007, demonstrated the apparent desire and anxiety of replicating works, especially twentieth-century sculpture. Bery attended this workshop as part of the collaborative aspect of her doctoral project and co-edited the papers from this event that were published in the autumn 2007 issue (no.8) of Tate Research's online journal, Tate Papers. The collaboration allows her to use resources at Tate while also investigating works where issues surrounding replication may need resolving, be it acknowledged in signage or agreed with trustees, artists or estates.
Elena Crippa
When Art Schools Went Conceptual: The Development of Discursive Pedagogies and Practices in British Art Higher Education in the 1960s
The London Consortium
Supervised by Professor Nigel Llewellyn, Head of Research, Tate
November 2009 – April 2013
This PhD is part of a Leverhulme Trust-funded project at Tate entitled Art School Educated: Curriculum Development and Institutional Change in UK Art Schools, 1960–2010. Today, teaching in British art colleges and in fine art departments in universities mostly takes place through verbal exchanges and discursive formats, such as tutorials, seminars, group discussions and sessions of group criticism. Yet, until the post-war period, most teaching used to take place in the life room, where tutors would supervise and correct the work being made by the students, mostly drawing and painting from the model. When, how and why did such a pedagogical shift take place?
My dissertation seeks to unravel the complex and multifaceted history that, in the 1960s, saw art schools shift their focus from the teaching of art making to the creation of an environment that fosters discussion and critical reflection about the work produced by the students. It can be argued that such a shift redefined art schools as 'conceptual' in the sense that priority was given to conception over execution, while the experience of the work produced by students was to become inseparably bound to its framing discourse.
In order to articulate and ground my argument, I analyse a set of programmes which, in the 1960s, established new and influential art pedagogies: early and often radical examples that marked the shift towards discursive formats of teaching and learning, while fostering concept-driven approaches to making. These include Roy Ascott's Groundcourse at Ealing College of Art; the development of group criticism in the Sculpture Department of St. Martin's School of Art, London; the critical responses developed in the same department, when students started staging performances that addressed the critical discourse dominating the school at the time; and the Art Theory programme taught at Coventry College of Art by Art & Language, one of the most radical examples of discursive art pedagogy, which turned verbal discussion and writing into the very subject of the work.
Corinna Dean
Establishing Tate Modern Cultural Quarter
London School of Economics
Supervised by Professor Robert Tavernor, London School of Economics, and Donald Hyslop, Head of Regeneration and Community Partnerships, Tate
January 2007 –
Corinna Dean's research seeks to explore the impact of the Tate Modern cultural quarter on regenerating the area around Bankside in Southwark. She looks at the currency of the term 'cultural quarter' and examines its role in relation to the promotion of London as a world-class cultural city. When culture is competing on the same level as the economic prowess of a city, how does this affect the cultural narrative?
Much debate has centred on the role of the museum as cultural and urban regenerator, often leading to an oversimplification of events. In order to examine this late twentieth-century model of regeneration and to assess the extent of social and cultural regeneration Dean will examine the precedents. Culture plays a key role in the promotion of cities, but without strong programming and curatorial leadership the success of a building can be undermined.
Dean will explore Tate's role and its relationship to hegemonic practice in the context of concepts of display and public mandate. Between 1975, when the National Theatre was completed, and 1997, when the British Library was opened, no major cultural buildings were built in London (in contrast to the 'Grand Projects' of François Mitterand, which were all financed and directed by the French government). Here she will examine the significance of Tate's autonomy vis-à-vis government and its relationship to sponsors. Central to her research are the questions of whether and how Tate has introduced a new paradigm of contemporary culture, unique to the institution.
As part of the collaborative element of Dean's doctorate, Tate made available records relating to the creation of Tate Modern and allowed her to discuss my work with key figures in the Tate organisation.
Caroline Donnellan
Establishing Tate Modern: Vision and Patronage
London School of Economics
Supervised by Professor Robert Tavernor, London School of Economics, and Dr Victoria Walsh, Head of Adult Programmes, Tate
September 2006 –
Spectacular architecture has come to play a major role in museum design in the global arena. The converted Bankside Power Station building is a key feature in the success of Tate Modern. It is today the most visited museum of modern art in the world. Caroline Donnellan's research aims to provide an in-depth study of the cultural, economic and political aspects on how the gallery of modern art was established. An analysis will be undertaken on the governance, the artworks and the building which constitute Tate Modern. She aims to promote a better understanding of Tate Modern's building andcollection; to raise awareness of the relationship between landmark architecture, culture and art in a world capital; and to estimate the importance of Tate Modern locally and nationally.
Donnellan's work at Tate includes using its unique Library and Archive, drawing on TG 12: Tate Modern Project, 1986–2000 and TG 1/ 3: Minutes of Trustee's Meetings. She has also looked at the architectural competition submissions.
James Finch
David Sylvester: Art Writings
University of Kent
Supervised by Professor Martin Hammer, University of Kent, and Dr Jennifer Mundy, Head of Collection Research, Tate
October 2013 –
This AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership will contribute towards the Tate's new research initiative 'Art Writers in Britain'. Working with the archive of the art critic and curator David Sylvester (1924–2001), this project will explore the various contexts in which his art writing was produced and published.
Sylvester worked with a wide range of publications from newspapers to avant-garde periodicals. He wrote numerous catalogue essays and several monographs, and recorded a pioneering series of artist interviews. He wrote numerous catalogue essays and several monographs, edited the five-volume Magritte catalogue raisonné and pioneered the artist interview as both art-historical tool and a literary format.
This doctorate will consider the relationship between Sylvester's professional career, his published works and his thinking about art and art criticism, as evidenced in part in his archive, newly acquired and catalogued by Tate. In addition to analysing Sylvester's body of published works, the thesis will make extensive use of archival materials including interview transcripts, correspondence and unpublished manuscripts to provide a more comprehensive view of Sylvester's work than has previously been possible. In doing so it will also address broader questions about the relation between criticism and curation, the development and study of art criticism, the role of the archive in such study, and the definition and limits of 'art writing' itself.
Hayley Flynn
Landscape in Blake: Visionary Topographies
University of Nottingham
Supervised by Professor Nicholas Alfrey, University of Nottingham, and Dr David Blayney Brown, Curator, Tate Britain
October 2010 –
Hayley Flynn's research considers the application and meaning of landscape imagery in William Blake's visual art. In part, the project seeks to re-examine Blake's position within the history of British landscape painting. Though casual references to Blake have been made in various surveys of the genre – principally, as a precursor to the 'visionary' landscapes of Samuel Palmer – scholarship has traditionally been focussed on the artist's written prophecies or 'mythological system' and, in art-historical terms, on the expression of these ideas in his figurative art. Despite the fact that Blake has been repeatedly cited by other landscape artists as a genuine artistic influence, this important aspect of his work remains under the radar of most scholars and critics. The first half of the thesis considers the tension between these two traditions about Blake. It seeks to highlight Blake's legacy as a painter of landscape, from the time of his death in 1827 to the mid-twentieth century, when the discourse about Blake's prophetic output was firmly established.
The second part of the thesis is focused on three works by Blake, in which landscape is particularly prominent – the illustrations to Virgil's Eclogues, the illustrations to the Book of Job, and the illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy. All three series date from the 1820s and were commissioned as a result of Blake's friendship with the landscape painter John Linnell. This research examines the meaning, symbolism and sources for the coherent landscape settings Blake created for the series' and, as a result, the enduring theory that Blake's illustrations represent an expression of his mythological system is called into question.
Ayesha Ghanchi
A Critical Analysis of Artists' Engagement with Learning Programmes at Tate 1970–2010, as Documented in Tate's Education Archive
Goldsmiths, University of London
Supervised by Emily Pringle, Tate Learning, and Dennis Atkinson, Professor of Art in Education and Head of the Research Centre for Arts in Learning at the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London
October 2011 –
The doctorate will explore how the role of the artist educator at Tate has evolved between 1970 and 2010. It will look at the agency of the artists, the negotiation of their independent practice with Tate education practices, and the extent to which this negotiation has created a reciprocal influence between the artists and Tate Learning.
The research will examine the pedagogical tools used to engage audiences. In particular, the dissertation will examine how 'learning', 'interpretation', 'access' and 'inclusion' have been theorised throughout this period in relation to wider social and government policy contexts, as well as trends in art education practice.
In 1967 Tate employed its first full-time lecturer, offering a predominantly didactic programme of historically themed lectures. Tate now offers a vast range of multifaceted learning experiences, aiming to respond to multicultural contexts and technological advances. It seeks to provoke dialogue, increase visual literacy, and offer art encounters and transformative experiences. The current programme offers learning as an end in itself, for social purposes and to contribute to a holistic education. It invites people to question, understand, reframe and refute notions of self, others and the world.
Drawing on materials in Tate's archive and on interviews with Tate staff, the research aims to explore the role of artists as catalysts in the production of knowledge, and the cultures within Tate (and the wider education and art world) that have precipitated these cultures of learning.
Oliver Peterson Gilbert
The Sites of Cultural Production and Impact of British Art and Design Communities Associated with Pop 1956–1974
University of Southampton
Supervised by Professor Jonathan Harris, University of Southampton, and Lindsey Fryer, Head of Learning, Tate Liverpool
October 2012 –
Oliver Peterson Gilbert's research critically explores the geo-social fabric and the shifting field dynamics of communities of visual cultural producers between Liverpool and London, two key nodal points of the Sixties experience. Specifically, this research is interested in the social, cultural and, crucially, regenerative impacts of these cultural communities within their local, regional and international spheres, looking at the material and immaterial geographies of cultural production and reception. Stretching the Sixties' cultural-text to reach between 1956 and 1974, this research looks to Pop as an overarching ideology, informing society alongside fine art and graphic design. Beginning with the work of the Independent Group and culminating with the Glam movement of the 1970s, the thesis will critique the role of place, community and networks in the production of culture and its role in urban regeneration.
During his collaboration with Tate Liverpool, Oliver Gilbert's work centred on the 2013 exhibition, Glam! The Performance of Style where he used his doctoral research and background in cultural sociology to construct two installations of visual and material culture relating to the late Sixties and the early Seventies. These 'Glamscapes' served to articulate themes central to the show, while also expressing the networked distribution of action existent within, and fundamental to, the Glam aesthetic. Oliver also conducted research into the lasting public impacts of various Tate exhibitions and learning programmes with an emphasis on the qualitative personal histories, associated with exhibitions such as Glam! The Performance of Style.
Susannah Gilbert
Latin American Art in an International Context
University of Essex
Supervised by Professor Dawn Ades, University of Essex, and Tanya Barson, Curator, Tate
October 2008 –
In some Latin American countries conceptual art grew out of artists' responses to authoritarianism. Susannah Gilbert is particularly interested in Mail Art since the 1960s, the use of systems of circulation and exchange and the written word in art, and the relationship between Mail Artists from Latin America and those from the US and their links with Fluxus.
The artists who will feature in this analysis include Eugenio Dittborn, Paulo Bruscky, Luis Camnitzer and Mira Schendel. She will try to establish how this anti-art framework has been carried into the art of the 1990s and the present day. The preoccupation with non-art spaces and with mass media and circulation continues, with some artists attempting to challenge transnational capitalism.
Latin American Art collected in the UK in recent years has tended to reflect a social and political agenda, whereas cultural institutions had previously approached the field in an apolitical way. Gilbert aims to explore the sudden growth in collecting Latin American Art in Britain in the 1990s and, in particular, this focus on politically engaged art.
For the collaborative element of the doctorate Gilbert will contribute to research into Tate's Latin American collection through writing texts about individual works and, where possible, interviewing artists.
Sabina Gill
Fotografia Polska: Adventures in Polish Photography since the 1960s
University of Essex
Supervised by Professor Margaret Iversen, University of Essex, and Dr Simon Baker, Curator (Photography and International Art), Tate
October 2010 –
The Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko stated in 1986, 'Poland is marginalised less by lack of information about art in the West than by the lack of information about art in Poland in the West.' A glaring lack of information on Polish art still persist in literature and teaching, with developments in Eastern European photography largely sidelined by North American and European histories. Attempting to redress this imbalance, Sabina Gill aims to explore the photographic practice of key artists and groups working in Poland since the 1960s, and interrogate ways in which Polish photography may challenge the histories and critical frameworks that govern Western European and Anglo-American discourses.
The post-1960s period marked a tumultuous phase in Polish history, years in which Poland was rebuilt in the wake of war and transformed both materially and culturally under communism. State-sponsored 'official' photography prospered, but some artists channelled energy into underground art movements and regional amateur photography clubs. Art historian Piotr Piotrowski has suggested that 'post-war art history in Central-Eastern Europe should include more of a national or state perspective, rather than a universal one', as the difficulty of artistic exchange between European states caused art to develop independently within each country. Is it possible or desirable to define a Polish photographic style? Can art produced in Poland be understood as orientated toward the distribution of coded information, as critics have suggested, rather than the creation of a unique art object? Has this function changed in the work of contemporary Polish photographers? With the collapse of Communism in Poland in 1989 and the transition to a more democratic state, artists were afforded greater freedom and enjoyed opportunities to travel and study internationally. Can a photograph signify in the same way to artists working under Communism as it does to later generations of Polish artists? Does the photograph possess a different significance to a Western scholar returning to the work in 2010?
Cora Gilroy-Ware
The Classical Nude in Romantic Britain
University of York
Supervised by Professor Elizabeth Prettejohn, University of York, and Dr Martin Myrone, Curator, Tate Britain
October 2010 –
This thesis traces the shifting currency of Greco-Roman corporealities in British academic art during the period 1800–40. The 'classical nude' is defined as any unclothed or lightly draped figure in painting or sculpture whose appearance follows the templates provided by ancient Hellenic sculpture. This project does not centre on the human body. Rather, the classical nude is held as an abstract projection of that body, a fantasy of human physicality in which meaning is concentrated in contour, outline and surface.
In the years leading up to 1800, the classical nude possessed a political charge related to the utopian ideals of radical and republican politics, both in Britain and in France. For certain artists and politicians, the beauty of the classical nude embodied the apex of human potential, and thus became a symbol of egalitarian rights and the rhetoric of universal liberty. Yet, with the exception of the arguably anti-classical William Hogarth, the fine arts in Britain had virtually no history outside of aristocratic patronage and upper-class grand tourism.
Since the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768, casts of ancient statues had become the primary tool for academic artistic practice, making the classical nude a fundamentally institutional entity in an establishment under the auspices of the King. Classical culture itself remained largely the preserve of the ruling elite, both Whig and Tory, while patronage remained private and the Academy remained 'Royal'. It is in this dual function as radical icon and establishment cornerstone that the classical nude existed in British art at the beginning of this project. The Napoleonic Wars changed the geographical and material boundaries of British artistic production, and as the period advanced, the polemical uses and political meanings of the classical nude mutated. In sharp contrast to the ideological emblem it had been just decades earlier, the classical nude became seen as an evasion of depth, meaning and politics.
As part of the collaborative element of the degree, Cora Gilroy-Ware has prepared catalogue entries on a number of works in Tate's collection.
Caroline Good
The Making of a National Art History: British Writers on Art and the Narratives of Nation 1660–1735
University of York
Supervised by Professor Mark Hallett, University of York, and Professor Nigel Llewellyn, Head of Research, Tate
October 2009 –
This PhD is part of an AHRC-funded research project at Tate entitled Court, Country, City: British Art 1660–1735. Caroline Good's thesis focuses on the four decades following the 'Glorious Revolution' when the political, religious, and bureaucratic transformations that established the modern British state were effected. She will concentrate on the written accounts of British art that were produced in these years and aim to provide an intensively researched and historically specific perspective on the theory and early historiography of British art between 1660 and 1735.
The emergence of an idea of a 'British School' of art has been one of the more fruitful lines of inquiry within recent British art history. Encompassing vital issues of cultural hegemony, artistic identity, and the interpellation of art and politics, the genesis and historiography of the 'British School' have been placed at the centre of debates about British culture in the long eighteenth century.
To date, though, the discussion has focused on the era between the emergence of Willian Hogarth as a 'patriotic' painter and the early nineteenth century, with the ascent of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, and a powerful new idea of British national identity. As a result, accounts of British art which focus on this period have primarily looked to political milestones for their ordering principles. This traditional narrative, however truthful, corresponds to a Whiggish account of English political history. In re-examining the relationships between art, science, education, and politics in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the possibility of an alternative narrative framework for written accounts of British art during this period can begin to be developed.
Sofia Gotti
Counterculture in Pop: South American Art in the 1960s
University of the Arts, London
Dr Michael Asbury, University of the Arts, London, and Jessica Morgan, Curator, Tate
October 2012–
Sofia Gotti's research centres on redefining Pop art in South America through the prism of counterculture. Investigating Pop art from a South American perspective problematises canonical interpretations, which have tended to see Pop as a more or less exclusively Anglo-American phenomenon. It also invokes tensions between vernacular and imported culture.
In the 1960s Pop art was produced in many centres of production in the region, not as an Anglo-American derivative but as a native form of countercultural rhetoric. The thesis will explore how counterculture in Pop was used to renegotiate canonical labels. Artists in South America adopted Pop strategies that resisted hegemonic cultural models by immersing themselves in personal subject matter and styles that were often imbued with implicit or explicit political content.
The thesis will examine key examples of artistic practice in the region. It will look at, for example, the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (ITDT) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, one of the most important centres of artistic innovation on the continent, around which gravitated the Pop Group (including Marta Minujín, Dalila Puzzovio, Charlie Squirru, Ruben Santantonín, Edgardo Giménez, Juan Stoppani) and Arte de Los Medios (Art of the Media, comprising Roberto Jacoby, Raul Éscari, Eduardo Costa and theorist Oscar Masotta). The works produced by these groups shifted the boundaries between the commercial object, advertisements and the television programme. In Brazil such artists as Claudio Tozzi and Waldemar Cordeiro turned to a Pop aesthetic or imported mass-produced products to reflect upon, and sometimes resist, the cultural and political relationship with the United States. Peruvian artist Teresa Burga caricatured representations of the female body through the application of flat bright pigments in drawings and doll-like soft sculptures that sometimes incorporated domestic furniture. Similarly, Beatriz González set her glossy paintings within mass-produced furniture, aiming to dethrone hierarchical structures of culture in Colombia, parodying the widespread tendency to pander to imported (mostly European) culture.
Rob Knifton
Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde
University of Liverpool
Supervised by Professor Jim Aulich, University of Liverpool, and Dr Christoph Grunenberg, Tate
2005 –
Rob Knifton's thesis discusses the nature of the urban environment as evidenced in the practice of art galleries. Beginning with an extended analysis of the 2007 exhibition at Tate Liverpool, Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde, he will develop a theoretical framework around three key topics related to the city and museum: the application of narrative forms, equivalence of space, and archives of anamnesis and amnesia.
At Tate Liverpool Knifton researched and co-curated Centre of the Creative Universe alongside Tate Liverpool Director Christoph Grunenberg and Assistant Curator Darren Pih. He contributed to, and co-edited, the catalogue, published by Liverpool University Press. The exhibition examined perceptions of Liverpool from the perspective of a number of artists, including: Bernd and Hilla Becher, Yoko Ono, the Boyle Family, and Rineke Dijkstra. It also included a specially-commissioned work on Brian Epstein by Jeremy Deller and Paul Ryan. He also helped to establish and manage the Tate Liverpool Postgraduate Research Forum, which offers postgraduate students a platform for presenting their work.
Ali MacGilp
The London Art Market and the Formation of a National Collection at Tate 1926-1950
University of Reading
Supervised by Dr Anna Gruetzner Robins, University of Reading, and Robert Upstone, Curator (Modern British Art), Tate
September 2006 –
Ali MacGilp's thesis looks at the way the London art world functioned in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and Tate's position within that system. It examines the works that entered Tate's collection and the circumstances surrounding their acquisition. It also explores the important works that did not enter the collection, through lack of enterprise or the over-cautious attitude and conservative taste of Tate staff and Trustees.
It considers the structure of Tate as an institution, including its budget and function, and the relationships of its staff and Trustees with dealers, artists and collectors, mostly based in London. It was these social and professional networks, together with critics' judgements in the national press, which influenced purchases. The thesis examines the backgrounds and perspectives on art of the Tate Trustees and senior staff in order to ascertain the factors that contributed to the conservative nature of Tate's acquisition policy during this period.
The thesis uses Tate Trustee Board Minutes and correspondence alongside dealers' sales records, press cuttings and correspondence with artists. It locates works from Tate's collection by British artists Matthew Smith, Paul Nash and the British surrealists, and the European surrealists and modernist masters, back into the London art market of the time of their acquisition. The galleries focused on are Alex Reid & Lefevre, Arthur Tooth & Sons, Zwemmer Gallery, Mayor Gallery, Guggenheim Jeune and the London Gallery.
Isabella Maidment
Performance, Action, Event
Supervised by Briony Fer, Professor of Art History, University College London, and Catherine Wood, Curator of Contemporary Art and Performance, Tate
October 2011 –
Performance, Action, Event examines the art historical and curatorial issues arising at the interface between performance-orientated practice and the contemporary art museum. Made possible by an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, this research project will be anchored in case studies drawn from Tate's recent history and form an integral part of Tate's interdisciplinary research initiative, which is dedicated to examining performance and performativity as part of a broader investigation into the role of the modern art museum.
With particular focus on the re-presentation of live art, which can necessarily only exist in the present, this thesis seeks to reassess the imaginative potential of inherently ephemeral work – from the radical event-orientated gestures of the 1970s to interventionist strategies in contemporary artistic praxis. Artists to be studied include Francis Alÿs, Lygia Clark, Keren Cytter and Tino Seghal.
In the light of the provision of dedicated space for performance and live events with Tate Modern's forthcoming expansion, this project will examine the positing of performance-orientated work in the ritualistic space of the contemporary art museum and problematise the complex status of the art museum as both site and stage. What is at stake in the performative construction of meaning in this context and how might its broader societal implications be understood given the pivotal place occupied by performance in contemporary art today?
Marion Martin
Tragic Hope – Sentiment and Critique in the Art of J.M.W. Turner
University of Leicester
Supervised by Dr Matthew Potter, University of Leicester, and Dr David Blayney Brown, Curator (18th and 19th century British Art), Tate
September 2009 – September 2013
This thesis focuses on historical meanings in J.M.W. Turner's art. As a starting point, it examines the cultural backdrop and the mission of theorists at the Royal Academy, specifically Joshua Reynolds, to improve society. This mission owed much to a strand of thinking, aligned with the recently formed utopian concept of the bourgeois public: sentimentalism. Turner's art, the thesis proposes, pursued a utopian ideal throughout.
While landscape art around 1800 tended to be interpreted in contexts which abstracted art from societal significance, Turner's earliest composite works, exhibited in 1798 and 1799, guided their audience's understanding towards the moral effects of tragedy through their paratexts (a term from literary studies meaning the texts accompanying a published work, here the titles and texts appended by the artist to paintings at exhibitions).
In addition to these early works, the thesis studies three more groupings in Turner's œuvre. The first is a body of works exhibited around 1800, some with appended texts supposedly written by Turner himself, which refer to an artist persona and artistic mission. A further group is from the period when Turner's 'Fallacies of Hope' were in use. These paintings specifically promoted a pacifistic, anti-heroic ideal. The third are works relating to Venice. All of the groups, but particularly the last two, use paratexts to combine an educational mission with sharp criticism of reigning aesthetic and ethical approaches.
Alex Massouras
The Emergence of the Emerging Artist in London, 1960–2010
The London Consortium
Supervised by Professor Nigel Llewellyn, Head of Research, Tate
November 2009 –
This PhD is part of a Leverhulme Trust-funded project at Tate entitled Art School Educated: Curriculum Development and Institutional Change in UK Art Schools, 1960–2010. Alex Massouras's thesis investigates how pedagogical reforms in London's art schools have responded to and shaped changes in the identity of the artist since the first Coldstream Report. The research will focus on the metamorphosis of art schools into academic institutions, through the assimilation of art history and theory; their varying approaches to divisions among media disciplines; and their engagement with notions of professionalism and vocation. The conflict between institution and autonomy, or insider and outsider, will be explored in order to track shifts in the reception of young artists, and to contextualise the emerging artist phenomenon.
Antoinette McKane
Tate Liverpool as a Force for Social Renewal? A Critical Study of Tate Liverpool's Interpretation and Education Policies and Practices (1988–2008)
University of Liverpool's Centre for Architecture and Visual Arts (CAVA)
Supervised by Jonathan Harris, University of Liverpool, and Lindsey Fryer, Head of Learning, Tate
September 2007 –
Tate Liverpool was founded in 1988 on the premise that the new gallery would 'in no way be a poor relation of its London counterpart but would have the distinct identity of being a gallery dedicated to showing modern art and encouraging a new younger audience through an active education programme'. The aim of this project is to assess this claim historically in the context of the enlarging of the Tate family of galleries and the changing nature of the city of Liverpool.
Antoinette McKane's thesis charts the history of interpretation and education policy and practice at Tate Liverpool in relation to the mission of the institution as a whole, museum practice in general and the changing face of education, interpretation and artistic practice. This involves analysing and evaluating the work of Tate's Learning Department in relation to selected exhibitions at Tate Liverpool, examining the close links that have been made over the years with other cultural organisations, academic institutions and community organisations in Liverpool, and how the department has grown within the structure of the gallery over the past 20 years. The project treats Tate Liverpool as a case study in order to provide an original analysis of the changing mission of the museum in the city and to give insight into the changing nature of the interpretation of modern and contemporary art, highlighting the centrality of discourse and mediation in relation to this area of practice and exploring the interface between education and exhibitions.
The nature of the work undertaken at Tate can be divided into three categories: archival; documentary and observational. As an essentially historical study, this research makes use of the archival resources available at the Hyman Kreitman Reading Rooms at Tate Britain, where the development of Tate Liverpool and its educational provisions can be traced through the analysis of original gallery records. At Tate Liverpool, analysis of working documents is employed to chart the development, from initial concept to final evaluation, of the key exhibitions and events. Observational research includes attending planning and project meetings at Tate Liverpool and participating in outreach activities undertaken in collaboration with Tate Liverpool's external partners, such as HMP Altcourse. The advice and experience of Tate Liverpool's staff also helps to direct and inform the research through regular supervision and more formal interviews.
Peter Moore
British Graphic Art, 1660-1735: An Atlantic Perspective
University of York
Supervised by Professor Mark Hallett, University of York, and Dr Martin Myrone, Lead Curator, pre 1800 British Art, Tate
October 2009 – September 2013
This PhD is part of an AHRC-funded research project at Tate entitled Court, Country, City: British Art 1660–1735. Focusing on a wide-ranging body of graphic art produced between 1660 and 1735, Peter Moore's research explores the material, imaginative and personal links that helped tie Britain into an Atlantic economy during the period. As historians have come increasingly to recognise, North America and the Caribbean were a major focus of British overseas investment in these years, and colonisation in these regions had profound implications for the shaping of British cultural identity. The possibility of considering British art in an Atlantic context is especially provocative, given the assumptions which have traditionally been made about the development of a parochial or 'native' artistic tradition through these decades.
The scope of materials studied is necessarily broad, encompassing categories such as cartographic imagery and natural history engraving. Though such images have often remained absent from mainstream narratives of British graphic art (being seen more readily as illustrative forms of unmediated evidence), the thesis identifies the various ways in which they contributed to a more discernible 'fine art' tradition associated with the Atlantic world. Only by being filtered through a prescribed set of pictorial and artistic conventions, this research suggests, were representations of unfamiliar places, things and concepts, made legible to British viewers.
Seph Rodney
Two Rooms: Locating the Meeting Place of the Visitor and the Museum
Birkbeck, University of London
Supervised by Dr Gordon Fyfe, Birkbeck, University of London, and Dr Marko Daniel, Curator (Public Programmes), Tate Modern
September 2006 –
The subject of Seph Rodney's research is what is known about the visitor outside the majority of standard institutional logics. Certainly, a great deal is known about visitors to museums of modern and contemporary art. Demographic information is readily available, as is knowledge of habitual behaviour in the museum, motivations, ways of learning, who will not come and in general terms why. Given the competing interests of stakeholders within and without museums, the visitor is understood and treated, not according to the individual's needs, but according to the agendas that appear to coalesce in the room, at the moment and point of contact with art. Can an individual's contextualised experience — read through the prism of the space of the room, the history of a particular institution, the models of consumerism, standards of tourism, stated interests of curators, visitor services staff, and other museum professionals — shed light on what is at stake and for whom in the seemingly unadorned, simple act of viewing a work of art? This project seeks to test what certain museums and their staff say about their interest in the viewer against the actual experience of one person in different museums and different times in his life.
Tate Modern is used as a case study. Rodney looks at a particular room at the gallery it and derives information through a phenomenological reading. This is reviewed against the narratives told by museum staff about the nature of the museum, what its aims are, along with what kinds of visitors they say they would like to welcome to the museum, what they hope these visitors get from the experience and how they should behave while in the museum. It appears that different departments have somewhat different views of these aims and of the desired visitor types. Through unstructured interviews with staff members and close reading of the texts produced by Tate, Rodney aims to test certain hypotheses concerning the comprehension of the visitor and the uses to which this understanding is put by this institution.
Philippa Simpson
The London Art Market, 1790-1815: The New Exhibition Culture and the Staging of the British School
Courtauld Institute of Art
Supervised by Professor David Solkin, Courtauld Institute of Art, and Martin Myrone, Curator (18th & 19th century British Art), Tate
October 2005 –
Philippa Simpson research is focused on the flood of imports entering London during the French War period, and the exhibition culture this generated. As the consumption of Old Master paintings became an increasingly high profile business, and as the works entering London were of a far greater range and quality than previously seen, spaces for their display began to emerge as sites for the consideration of different national schools. Important sales, such as those of the Orleans Collection, formerly owned by a branch of the French royal family, provided the opportunity for inaugural exhibitions of Old Master art, and introduced new audiences to the spectacle of the display as distinct from the business of the sale.
Philippa Simpson's doctoral research formed part of the development of Tate Britain's Turner and the Masters exhibition which travelled to the Grand Palais, Paris, and the Museo Nacionel del Prado, Madrid. Since the start of her doctorate, she has been heavily involved with the curatorial administration of this project, and has offered support in many aspects of its organisation, including: loans, logistics, design, publicity, sponsorship and conservation, as well as research activities. She has acted as a point of contact between partner venues, as well as communicating with lenders and registrars. her work on the PhD has tessellated extremely closely with the life of the project, and each has been shaped by the other in a variety of ways. She has also been involved with staging a number of displays, includingHockney on Turner Watercolours, and Visionary Landscapes, and has written interpretative materials and catalogue texts for shows, including a Turner exhibition travelling to Russia. She was involved with the funding proposals for Tate's Imagine a Nation project, and developed a new display for the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain in 2009.
Rachel Rose Smith
The International Context of the Art of St Ives 1948–60
University of York
Supervised by Dr Michael White, Senior Lecturer in History of Art, University of York, and Dr Chris Stephens, Head of Displays, Tate Britain
October 2011 –
This AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award is intended to contribute towards a forthcoming exhibition at Tate St Ives in 2014, touring to the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima). The doctorate will contribute directly to the exhibition by establishing new connections and contexts surrounding the art created in St Ives between 1948 and 1960.
The research will focus on particular connections formed between the artists of St Ives and other leading exponents of international abstraction. It will consider the awareness these artists had of contemporary practices abroad – through publications, correspondences and visits to exhibitions – and investigate whether a sense of artistic exchange was an important factor for each artist's practice. The aim of this research is to demonstrate the vast networks of exchange, in which many of these artists played a vital role, and to question the tendency in the critical history of St Ives to describe its art in regional or national terms.
Stephanie Straine
Drawing Strategies in the 1960s and 1970s
University College London
Supervised by Professor Briony Fer, University College London, and Dr Mark Godfrey, Curator (Contemporary Art), Tate
September 2009 –
Stephanie Straine's thesis addresses and attempts to account for the survival of figurative, illusionistic and gestural forms of drawing in the 1960s and 1970s – an era dominated by the diagrammatic and anti-aesthetic concerns of conceptualism and the radical deconstruction of the traditional art object. This research project will complicate the well-established theorisation of drawing as process or prototype, opening up the field to works, such as those in the ARTIST ROOMS collection, which fail to fit this model.
While the diagrammatic and working drawings of the 1960s and 1970s have received much critical attention, the idea of the finished drawing has been routinely overlooked. In this conception of drawing, the flux of process or the preliminary nature of working something out is substituted for a considered study of the activity, materials and techniques of drawing. In the work of Vija Celmins, Ed Ruscha and Joseph Beuys, and perhaps even Ellen Gallagher, Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt (all featured in ARTIST ROOMS), drawing approaches a sensual, haptic quality that undercuts the received non-aestheticism of conceptual art. Straine's thesis will reconfigure this relatively unexamined strand of drawing practice in terms of the oddity of perfection, extremity of finish, and a sustained, almost pressurised, model of looking.
Robert Sutton
Henry Moore: Sculpture and Media in Twentieth-Century Britain
University of York
Supervised by Dr Michael White, University of York, and Professor Anne M. Wagner, The Henry Moore Foundation Research Curator, Tate
October 2010 –
This doctorate is part of an AHRC-funded research and curatorial project aimed at redisplaying and cataloguing Tate's extensive holdings of Henry Moore's work, with the intention of exploring the interface between twentieth-century visual cultures and Moore's material practice. Robert Sutton's approach to this project places translation at its centre, positing the artist's creativity as a translation of his experiences and his ideas and see the artist's role as that of interpreter or mediator.
Sutton intends to look at the multi-directional exchange between Moore's sculptures, his drawings of sculptures, and his drawings in advance of sculptures. Investigating Moore's changing relationship with both his own works and those of others, with special regard to the meaning intended – and to be found – in the resulting dialogues helps to contextualise his practice artistically. The materials he chose to use in both two and three dimensions become key in his translation of ideas, while the many media he responded to enable us to explore his cultural milieu and map cultural transformations across the twentieth century, notably the internationalisation of the art world and the growth of mass media. It enables us to approach Moore's 'big view' of sculpture as something necessarily global rather than something to be kept within the confines of British or European modernism.
Stephen Vainker
Experiences and Engagement: An Investigation of Young Persons' Visits to ARTIST ROOMS on Tour
University of Exeter
Supervised by Dr Adrian Bailey, University of Exeter, and Dr Emily Pringle, Head of Learning Practice, Research and Policy, Tate
2010 –
ARTIST ROOMS seeks to engage new, young audiences with contemporary art by touring round the UK the work of important post-war artists, including Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and Damien Hirst. Each room is devoted to the work of one particular artist, with the aim that audiences will be able to gain a deeper appreciation and understanding of that artist's work.
Stephen Vainker's research will look at how young people (aged 13–25) respond to ARTIST ROOMS. It will investigate whether, through being faced with a room of art reflecting a worldview that is not their own, their identities may be transformed. Semi-structured interviews will be used with young people in order to gain insights into the outcomes of the ARTIST ROOMS experience for self-reflection and personal transformation. Vainker's research will also examine the different types of young participants at ARTIST ROOMS exhibitions and events, and in their varied experiences. He will work with Tate, National Gallery of Scotland and partner galleries to identify the different categories of young people who visit, the different methods of engagement used by these young people, and the impact of the frequency and duration of young peoples' visits on their experience.
Lynn Wray
Art, Process and Propaganda on the Political Left
Liverpool John Moores University
Supervised by Dr Alison Rowley, Professor Juan Cruz, Liverpool John Moores University, and Dr Christoph Grunenberg, Director, Tate Liverpool
September 2009 –
Propaganda art has generally been conceptualised both in art exhibitions and academic literature as something utilised by totalitarian regimes during wartime. Lynn Wray's thesis aims to re-situate propaganda art as something that also takes place within a democratic context in peacetime by examining how artists have interpreted political ideology through their artistic practice in various emerging and established democratic nation states.
Within this broad theme Wray has chosen to examine the fundamental historic relationship between the visual arts and the global political left. This research project will demonstrate that the artistic visualisation of left-wing ideology cannot be reduced solely to the socialist realist model and is, in fact, characterised by aesthetic heterogeneity. Her research will elucidate this aesthetic dimension in a comparative analysis of materials, production processes and modes of display above and beyond any direct reference to historical and political events at the level of the narrative content or subject matter of the work. In charting this history her thesis aims to identify how the global decline in leftist politics has affected the production of propagandistic or politically engaged artworks in the recent past and in the present, and to provide a platform for debate about the future potential of artistic processes within politics.
During her collaboration with Tate Straine will be based at their Research Department, studying and researching works of art in order to write short texts on the ARTIST ROOMS drawings for publication on Tate Online. These texts will contribute to the interpretation and public awareness of these little-known drawings, the majority of which have been rarely studied or exhibited. By combining an academic thesis with the writing of accessible interpretative texts for the drawings, her collaborative PhD envisions a pluralistic approach to working with a permanent collection, the ultimate outcome being a significant scholarly reassessment of drawing's myriad strategies at this crucial juncture in the history of modern art.
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