Fine Art Research Unit (FARU) Talk No.2: Introducing AA2A Artists Amy Wilson and Iris Athanasiadi

Events — Public Talk Microsoft Teams
27 October 2021, 14:00

The AA2A project is a national set of schemes, providing visual artists and designer makers with the opportunity to undertake a period of research or realise a project, using workshop and supporting facilities in fine art and design departments of Higher and Further Education institutions in the UK. We are delighted to have artists Amy Wilson and Iris Athanasiadi working with us during 2021/22.

In this talk the artists will give us an insight into their work and the projects they will be working on using the new Future Lab and other facilities at ARU. Working across ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, drawing and digital media,

Amy Wilson’s practice engages with our shifting relationship to materiality, representation and reproduction. She researches processes of mass-production and digitisation, utilising this knowledge to make, and unmake, objects and images. She often works with objects and images that depict animals or the natural, depictions that offer a contrary, often inconsistent meeting of nature and artifice. Amy J Wilson grew up in Kilburn, NW London, and has been based in SE London since 2016. After graduating from an MFA in Fine Art Media at the Slade in 2019, where she was the recipient of the Felix Slade Scholarship, she has continued to practice as a visual artist alongside working as a freelance arts educator, technician and researcher; she currently works as an Engagement and Support Officer helping arts organisations. She was recently selected as one of the 2021 winners of the OMNI Colour Artist Award. Upcoming projects include Artist Residencies at Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, and Arboretum Arts, Derby, in 2022. Starting from the body as the first space we experience,

Iris Athanasiadi‘s practice methodology considers movement as a space-crafting activity; an ephemeral space formed by connecting our movement traces as we navigate the world. Her work focuses on the common threads between movement and architecture, mindfulness and bodily awareness, and multisensory experiences. Her purpose is to create experiences that enhance the body’s sensory awareness and facilitate a poetic exchange between the body and the world, challenging the ocularcentric culture of the western world. She is interested in the dynamic and qualitative essence of space and our felt experience of it before we intellectually understand it; how the body inhabits performative space and how its spatiality affects the nature and construct of it. Iris Athanasiadi is a London-based architect, choreographer, and performer. She holds an MArch from Technical University of Crete and an MFA in Choreography from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance as a Leverhulme Choreography scholar. She is currently working on an inclusive and accessible architectural installation as a multisensory experience to be completed in 2022.

Amy J Wilson: Platelet I, 2020, Bone China place with ceramic decals; Iris Athanasiadi: Mountain of Mine, still from multisensoryinstallation, 2021.
Amy J Wilson: Platelet I, 2020, Bone China place with ceramic decals; Iris Athanasiadi: Mountain of Mine, still from multisensoryinstallation, 2021.

Event contact: veronique.chance@aru.ac.uk

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