I am an artist and academic currently undertaking PhD research within Art Practice and Learning at Goldsmiths, University of London. I studied BA Fine Art Sculpture at Brighton University, followed by an MA in Sculpture at Chelsea School of Art. I have worked as a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Art Practice and Visual Studies for over 16 years at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and I am a fellow of the Higher Education Academy. My teaching has a direct correlation with my practice, questioning how materially driven pedagogies can inform and heighten approaches to learning, reflexivity and praxis.
My practice-research questions the status and necessity of vital materiality and the embodied encounter within the context of art pedagogy and is located and disseminated at Goldsmiths, Tate and Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (University of East Anglia). My approach is to re-frame the learning event as a material act of thinking and towards a sculptural and performative exchange. My practice is collaborative and allows ideas to be moved, challenged and transformed. I see this collaboration existing between people, spaces, objects and materials where practice outcomes are fundamentally informed and activated by others or other things.
I have work extensively with exhibitions, collections as an artist and consultant since 2000 as one half of collaborative partnership sorhed (www.sorhed.com). As a practice, sorhed focuses on the development and enactment of pedagogical art objects that focus on enquiry and interpretation. sorhed objects both provoke and enable a questioning of authorship, touch and encounter, bringing into active consideration the pedagogical agency of social and participatory practices. There are currently over two hundred commissioned sorhed objects that are situated nationally within galleries and museums including; Turner Contemporary, Imperial war Museum, Museum of London, Rochester Cathedral, Manchester Art Gallery.
I also see the drawing process – in its broadest form, as integral to my work. Questions of truth and representation, decoy and metaphor play out though marks, actions and form as I explore the possibilities of what drawing can be. Through action, collaboration and writing I am interested in drawing on, drawing from and drawing out. This is evidenced through exhibitions, conferences and publications. The most recent being co-authored with Dr Catherine Baker. In ‘Drawing Conversations: Collective and Collaborative Drawing Practice’ (December 2017) Cambridge Scholars. I am excited to be part of the OCA culture and team and I relish the opportunity to help others navigate, develop and visualise their own practices and ideas. Through my teaching experience I understand the questions and preoccupations that can arise from making and making meaning. Finding ways to make ideas manifest is an exciting challenge and I feel privileged to help and support everyone I work with as their ideas come into being.
Kimberley Foster
www.sorhed.com
