WSA Staff Seminar Series - John Gillett Seminar

In this seminar, Lecturer in Fine Art and Acting Programme Leader John Gillett will reflect on his work as a curator, and on the links between curatorship, other creative practices, and the taught and research programmes of Winchester School of Art.

He will compare his experiences of the global video project, The Seven Billionth Citizen, a collaboration with the ESRC Centre for Population Change, with those of Modes of Address, the continuing collaboration with psychologists in the Centre for Visual Cognition. Modes of Address is designed to test the nature of the relationship between pictorial art and the viewer, and eventually to subject the work of contemporary artists to the project’s eye-tracking experiments, feeding the results back into studio practice.

The development of the two projects highlights some of the opportunities and challenges of collaboration with other (scientific) disciplines; the viability of integrating individual creative practice into projects with generalised theoretical research aims; the merits and practicalities of a ‘division of labour’ within collaborative (and multidisciplinary) projects; and the very different types of multidisciplinary engagement which flow from formalist investigations and issues-based practice.

The discussion will conclude by proposing new, transformative curatorial strategies for creative inclusion.