I am an artist, lecturer and researcher, based in Bath.
I have taught in Higher Education since 2005 on MA, MFA, BA and Foundation Studies, across a broad range of disciplines, levels, and media, in both art and design subjects. Underlying all my teaching is my belief that creativity is a powerful and vital thinking process, but one that needs to be understood rather than simply taken for granted. To this end, I aim to help my students not only make work, but to understand their ‘creative engine’ – to understand how they think, and how their creative process can be employed to drive thinking and generate new insights.
I am passionate about the potential of artistic and creative methods to shed light upon ideas and situations in unique ways. I encourage my students to have belief in their methods, to see the critical potential of them, and to use them to explore their own visions of the world.
In my teaching I innovate and directly apply creative methods and thinking from my art practice, so that students learn not just about practice, but learn through practice. I am particularly interested in running projects which involve students as co-researchers in an open and discursive process. In these projects there is an openness and a sense of the unknown, a situation where student’s input actively shapes the discussion, direction and output. I believe that situating students at the centre of the learning process fosters peer support and student autonomy. A recent example of this approach is: Studio in, Studio Outside, a project which investigates the nature of the educational studio space, made in collaboration with a broad range of students from fine art, graphic design, interior design, and across 1st Year BA, MA and PhD students. You can find out more about Studio in, Studio Outside here on my website: https://www.jeromeharrington.net/studio-in-studio-outside
Throughout my teaching career I have taught across both studio practice and contextual studies. I encourage my students not to be overawed by theory, to foster an active, rather than passive relationship, and to find ways to use it to propel their thinking.
I aim to be an easily approachable, empathetic and supportive lecturer. In 2016 I was nominated for an Inspirational Teaching Award at Sheffield Hallam University.
MY PRACTICE
My practice investigates our rapidly shifting relationship to the material world, examining how our knowledge is ‘made’ from a conglomeration of competing and contradictory information. I am fascinated by how we ‘collage’ together our understanding of the world, and am particularly drawn to instances where knowledge is created and transferred through images and objects.
Although the outputs of my practice are broad, drawing and making are fundamental to my thinking. Drawing and making give me immediate visual and material ways to log ideas, to experiment, to interrogate the world around me, and drive my thinking forwards.
There is a direct correlation between my practice and my teaching on the O.C.A, where I teach across the Drawing, and Graphic Design programmes, where visual images are made with the intention to communicate with others.
In 2016 I completed my Practice based PhD in Fine Art. My research explored how our understanding of the material world is shaped by images and film of its manufacture. For a summary of my PhD research, please see my website here: https://www.jeromeharrington.net/practice-based-phd
BACK GROUND
In addition to working for the O.C.A, I currently teach on the Integrated Foundation in Art and Design at Bath Spa University. From 2009 – 2018 I taught at Sheffield Hallam University, on the MA, MFA, and BA (Hons) Fine Art and Creative Art practice, as well as on the Integrated Foundation. Previous to this, I taught on the Art and Design Interdisciplinary BA (Hons) at Leeds College of Art (2005 – 2009).
I have a first class BA (Hons) from Edinburgh College of Art (1998), and studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (2001), the latter supported by a prestigious Leverhulme Trust ‘Study Abroad Scholarship’.
