A Symposium VI • Slade School of Fine Art

10.00 World Pigment Day’s 4th Anniversary – Welcome with Jo Volley & Ruth Siddall, founders

10.05 The revival of colours from the past – Stephanie Nebbia & Pierre Sanchez

Many beautiful colours from the artists palette were either toxic or fugitive or difficult to procure. The arrival of synthetic alternatives working with the archives from Winsor & Newton, offers new versions of Tyrian Purple, George Field’s Orange, Cinnabar Green, Mineral Grey, Ultramarine ash and Ostwald’s Grey. Providing beautiful contributions to the artists palette. Stephanie Nebbia is an artist, curator and resident artist Global Fine Art Collective, Colart. Pierre Sanchez, is Ingénieur chimiste, I&D, Colart.

10.20 JV/RR/MI/XXIV – Rachel Reynolds & Jo Volley

Rachel is a postgraduate conservation student at the IoA. She is the current Conservator in Residence at the Slade and a ceramics conservation intern at the British Museum. Her areas of interest include the conservation of modern and contemporary art as well as collaborative relationships between conservators and artists.
Jo Volley is an artist, Director, Colour & Poetry and Artist in Residence UCL IoA, Conservation Dept.

10.40 Mental Images in Painting and in Poetry – Dr Edward Winters

Edward Winters studied painting at the Slade, before writing his PhD in philosophy at UCL. His latest book is Architectural Aesthetics, Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. He is a writer and artist.

11.00 In conversation with Rilke’s Book of Hours – Lavinia Harrington 

Lavinia is an Italian-British artist, presently studying at the Slade School of Fine Art (Painting MFA, 2022-2024. Lavinia has worked in arts education for over a decade and graduated from Oxford University in History of Art (BA Hons.), completing her MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

11.10 Reading – Rose Shuckburgh

Rose Shuckburgh’s practise encompasses painting, printmaking and poetry, cataloguing a personal relationship to the natural world. She depicts significant forms as vessels of feeling, placed within a charged stillness.  Her practise catalogues an emotional relationship to land, using colour to capture the sensation of forms she encounters in the natural landscape.

11.20 Poetry Reading – Chris Kirubi

Chris Kirubi is a poet and artist whose work presses at mutable and promiscuous dalliances of language and image. Their debut collection titled Wildplassen is forthcoming with the87press. Chris is also a lecturer at the Slade.

11.40 The colour spectrum of pollen: a talk inspired by a conversation with Kim Selvaggi – Daren Caruana 

Daren Caruana is Professor of Physical Chemistry at UCL Chemistry. His research is mainly focused on interaction of electric charge and chemistry in various forms. In 2020-21 he was Slade Scientist in Residence.

12.00 Engaging feeling: the ‘tactile imagination’ and the landscape image Dr Henrietta Simson

Henrietta Simson completed an MA in painting (2007), and a practice-related PhD (2017) at the Slade. Her doctoral thesis explored landscape through medieval and early Renaissance visual forms, the materiality of the image, and Renaissance perspective’s role in the history of representational image-making. She is currently researching the spiritual and material implications of caves, mines and wilderness in contemporary and medieval landscapes.

12.20 Ochres & British Folklore – Lucy Mayes

Lucy Mayes is a pigment maker from the South of England. Her colours are made from waste streams and Anthropocene debris. She teaches pigment making and hopes to re-orientate our connections to colour; through the creation of intimate relationships with matter formed through embodied making & processing of raw materials into colour.

12.40  Ask the Conservator – Kimberly Selvaggi

This is an opportunity to ask questions related to good painting practice.  Questions will  be taken through the chat. Kimberly Selvaggi is currently the Artist-in-Residence at the Centre for Integrative Anatomy (CIA), UCL. She was previously the Scientist-in-Residence (2022-23) and the first Conservator-in-Residence (2020-22) at the Slade School of Fine Art. Kim will be doing her PhD at the Slade, commencing Fall 2024, focusing on dyes, paints and pigments and their use in art as well as in conservation.

14.00 Colour as perception, colour as reality, color as projection – Yannis Ziogas

Yannis Ziogas is a painter exploring areas of visual expression. He is Professor at the Department of Fine and Applied Arts of the University of Western Macedonia and organizes the walking process Visual March to Prespa.

14.20 River Paper: algae, aquatic plants and paper-making – Robert Rivers & Izzy Bishop

Robert Rivers is an artist who is currently exploring the links between landscape and paper-making. He studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford, (2002 – 2005) and later completed an MFA at the Slade School of Art, UCL, (2011 – 2013). He was Honorary Research Fellow for the Material Research Project at the Slade (2021-2023).
Izzy Bishop is an ecologist who researches the ways rivers respond to pollution and environmental change. She completed her PhD in Physical Geography at UCL in 2018 and now works as a lecturer in the People and Nature Lab at UCL East.

14.40 Reading Sean Borodale

Sean Borodale is an artist and poet. His debut collection Bee Journal was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize and Costa Book Award. Other collections include the much-praised Inmates, Asylum and Human Work. He is currently Hon Research Fellow in Print.

15.00 Colour and Spatiality: Adolphe Appia’s theatre designs, Albers’ Squares, Murals and Installations – Piers Veness

Piers Veness (Portsmouth, 1974) is an abstract geometric painter whose work is informed by the minimalism and spatiality of artists such as Josef Albers, Mark Rothko, and the groundbreaking theatre designer Adolphe Appia. Fascinated by the suggestive power of line as communicative language, Veness’ work considers the monumental and its connection with the passing of time. Veness received an MA in Theatre Design at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and a BA Fine Art at the University of Northampton.

15.20 In search of memories, materials and Munch – Latifah A Stranack

Latifah A Stranack is a Slade graduate who paints landscapes and the women she imagines in them as goddesses, symbolising and celebrating womanhood. She creates her heroines to explore her memories, mythology, and contemporary issues in the modern world.

15.40 Seeing Red in Technicolor: Materials, Techniques and Politics in Colour Film – Dr Kirsty Sinclair Dootson

Kirsty Sinclair Dootson is a Lecturer in Film and Media at UCL. Her work explores the politics of making images in colour. Her first book The Rainbow’s Gravity: Colour, Materiality and British Modernity (PMC/Yale, 2023) considers how new colour media technologies transformed the way Britain saw itself and its Empire from the nineteenth century. Her research on dyeing film strips, making colour cosmetics, and grinding pigments has been published variously in Screen, Film History, and British Art Studies.

16.00 Blue and green cannot be seen – Dr Robyn Pender 

In nature, blue and green envelope us: the colours of the sky, the colours of water, the colours of the trees and grass and of so many flowers. Blue sapphires and green emeralds. But until the new synthetic pigments of the 19th century, true blue and green paints were either fugitive, or rare and incredibly expensive: a fact that frustrated many, many generations of artists! But why is nature so good at producing blue and green, except as a pigment? Join us for a deep dive into an area of physics that is anything but dry! Dr Robyn Pender has spent her career combining physics, art and history, primarily through the conservation of wall paintings and buildings. She is fascinated by the way over deep time art has been shaped by the materials available, and what science has to tell us about that availability.

16.20 We have no need of other worlds.  We need mirrors – Kanad Chakrabarti

Kanad Chakrabarti is a PhD candidate in the Art Department at Goldsmiths College, UoL.  He researches the impact of synthetic computation on humanity’s long-term trajectory.  He has exhibited at institutions including the Queens Museum (New York), ICA (London), and CAC (Vilnius), and holds a MA (Painting, Slade School, UCL) and a BSc (Electrical/Computer Engineering, MIT). He can be found @ukc10014 and ukc10014.org.

16.30  Desire lines collapse: painting, poem, pigment, place – Sarah Pettitt

Committed to folly and resigned to failure, Sarah Pettitt attempts to identify the unidentifiable through material anecdote. Influenced by parallels between pre-modern and modern artistic modalities, her work focuses on cycles and collapse in terms of belief and site. Sarah has a MA from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL 2011-2013 and was Honorary Research Fellow for the Material Research Project, The Tyranny of Surface, 2015/16. 

16.50 Culled colour combinations – Brece Honeycutt

Brece Honeycutt, a multi-media artist, uses research as a material for her history and nature-based works.  She works in spoken word, video, installation and works on paper. Brece’s website: https://brecehoneycutt.com/ .

17.10 Colourful Stone: the Art of Pietre Dure – Dr Ruth Siddall 

Ruth Siddall is a geologist and co-author of the Pigment Compendium: A Dictionary and Optical Microscopy of Historical Pigments. She is co-founder of World Pigment Day and in 2018-19 Slade Scientist in Residence. 

End of symposium