School of Fine Art, Crafts & Photography | University for the Creative Arts

Our School of Fine Art, Crafts & Photography, is home to an inspiring academic community whose research work is shaping conversations in the field.

The School of Fine Art and Photography Research Centre (FAPRC), Directed by Professor Jean Wainwright, was established in 2017. It supports selected international research projects and initiatives, encouraging debate and scholarship with a series of specific research clusters, exhibitions, conferences and symposia, resulting in critical dialogue around Fine Art and Photography.

The School's dedicated research centre is the base for dozens of pioneering projects, including Fast Forward: Women in Photography and postdigital publishing platform The BookRoom.

Featured Projects

Fast Forward women in photography

Fast Forward is designed to promote and engage with women in photography across the globe. We want to provoke new debate and ensure that we are in the news and in the history books. There are millions of women in the world of photography and now is the time to arrest the process of forgetting that so frequently erases women from the burgeoning histories of photography and shed light on new ways of thinking, showing, discussing and distributing our work.

Fast forward women in photography project website

bookRoom, post-digital innovations

bookRoom is an experimental post-digital research and publishing platform. For the past 10 years, bookRoom has surveyed and published the impact of digital technologies on emerging publishing practices, bringing in contact the various perspective of artists, publishers, thinkers, collectors while always acknowledging an affinity with the artist's book, the kind of books that enabled artists, writers and thinkers to operate at the critical edge and on the margins of art institutions, conventional publishing and their respective gate keepers.

bookRoom project website

Photomonitor

The University for the Creative Arts has partnered with Photomonitor, one of the leading online platforms of photography and lens-based media, on a new “in residence” project.

Dr Caroline Molloy, David Rule and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé will support the work of Photomonitor as editors, commissioning new online features and supporting opportunities for emerging voices and talent within photography.

Photomonitor has been in operation since 2011 and its online archive now includes more than 1,400 features, including portfolios, exhibition and book reviews, essays and interviews.

They are now inviting submissions of interest for new writing on photography. We welcome emailed ideas for features, including interviews, exhibition and book reviews, essays and experimental texts on photography, to features@photomonitor.co.uk 

Please visit the contact page on the Photomonitor website for details on timing and commission rates for selected features, for online publication in July 2023. 

Our
Projects

Read about some of the projects from the School of Fine Art, Crafts & Photography.

Bloom, Edward Chell

In an exhibition at the Horniman Museum and Gardens and an accompanying publication, Chell celebrates the (re)discovery of 19th-century botanist and pioneering photographer Anna Atkins’ work at the Horniman. Sharing Atkins’ ‘fondness for botany’, Chell’s interdisciplinary practice uses drawing, writing, painting, sculpture and photography to investigate the discrepancies and overlaps between creative expression and scientific investigation.

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From Ship to Shore and Powerful Tides, Professor Jean Wainwright

In From Ship to Shore and Powerful Tides’, Wainwright drew on interviews with artists whose work has focused on the sea, as well as her own knowledge of nautical history and seafaring, to create three exhibitions and a book that shed new light on contemporary artistic responses to the sea.

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Stem, Professor Kathleen Rogers

This video installation and series of photographic works explore the conceptual and visual expression of stem cells in regenerative medicine.

The research is was informed by Rogers’ residency with the Bone and Joint Research Group at the University of Southampton, which enabled her to engage closely with scientific research into embryonic and adult stem cell tissue engineering and cell regeneration.

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Jenga Arrangements, Dr Mike Marshall

This work consists of a series of ten photographic prints on A3 recycled paper, laid on a desk. Each image shows a different arrangement of four wooden blocks from a game of Jenga. This game usually involves balancing a precarious structure, but here the blocks are arranged into compositions that resemble models for larger-scale minimalist sculpture.

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Feminist Soft Resistance, Minna Pöllänen

The solo and group exhibitions that form a part of this work both draw on a developing body of research that uses multi-material installations to explore the themes of feminism, protest and power.

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