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- Professor of Fine Art
- The Slade School of Fine Art
- Faculty of Arts & Humanities
Foundation Brighton Polytechnic 1972/3 BA Combined Honours in English and Fine Art, Exeter University/Exeter College of Art 1973-76 PGCE Exeter University 1978.
Painting Department at the Slade School of Fine Art since 1992.




In writing and making art, my themes of drapery, painting, portraiture and pilgrimage elide and inform one another, making the progress of my work not linear but rather elastic and broad ranging.
Early photo-booth collages arose from scrutiny of self-portraits that in turn led to writing books and curating exhibitions. The essay, Golden Years?1905-1950: a non-digital world (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art) 2012, continued research for; Insights: Self-portraits (The National Portrait Gallery, 2005) and Mirror/Mirror: Self-portraits by Women Artists (NPG & Watson-Guptill, N Y. 2001). Warhol’s Dream: the self multiplied, introduction to 500 Self-portraits (Phaidon, 2018) and Essence of Memento Mori, in Basquiat by Himself (Hirmer Verlag) 2019 continue the study.
How to Read Painting : a short survey of Western European Painting (Bloomsbury & Rizzoli) 2014 & 2015, is still in print (over 55,000 + copies) and on sale in The National Gallery London. It was the basis of an Exeter College, Oxford University Summer School 2018 & 19 and is translated into Chinese, Spanish, Turkish, Korean, Polish and Russian. The launch was supported by lectures at museums and galleries both in the UK and USA, research and travel funded by an Art Fund grant. In 2018, Madam and Eve, was co-authored with Kathleen Soriano (Laurence King) and my essay Erotic Cloth Echoes in Film, appeared in The Erotic Cloth (Bloomsbury Academic). Pictorial duel: Xenia Hausner and the dual performance portrait has a delayed publication date of 2021 (Albertina, Vienna).
Five solo exhibitions in the USA included a retrospective at The University of Massachusetts, in 2001, Lucas Schoormans Gallery, New York, in 2000/01/06 and Gallery 339, Philadelphia in 2014.
A British Academy Grant enabled me to film the cotton industry in India and Light Curtain was the commissioned film projection for Cotton: Global Threads at The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 2012. Splicing Time: Rome and the Roman Campagna; Leverhulme Fellowship, 2016-17, investigated the emotional resonance of drapery. Connections with the C18th Grand Tour were explored with an innovative photographic installation at UCL’s. Art Museum as Artist-in-Residence and also at Compton Verney in 2020. Further Roman-inspired work was supported by the Cities Partnership Programme; Feu Follet, 2018 and Temporal Stabilities, 2020.
My artwork featured in History of Photography: Series and Sequences, at The Victoria and Albert Museum, 2015 and is in public Collections including, Tate, The Yale Center for British Art, George Eastman Museum, University California Museum at Berkeley, USA and The Museet for Fotokunst, Denmark, The Portland Art Museum, Oregon, The Whitworth Art Gallery, New Hall, Cambridge and the British Academy.
At the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL) I have contributed to exhibiting, teaching, supervision, curriculum development and assessment.
Exposing the self and juggling the uniform, was the keynote lecture at the conference Autoportraits en costumes, at the University of Nantes and the Beaux Arts de Nantes, 23-24/11/18. Straw Poll was a paper delivered at the ON PAINTING conference in Manchester at the Whitworth Art Gallery on 31/11/15.
Straw Camera, was the catalogue essay published in connection with the exhibition, Fishing for the Moon celebrating the work of Michael Farrell, who worked at the Slade from 2003 - 2015. This was part of the Photo Club Salon, showing photographs by staff and students at the Slade School of Fine Art.
Slade Summer School courses include, Collage (2015) and Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal! (2016, 17, 18, 19) these focus on making connections between drawing in the studio and drawing in museums and art galleries. I continue to involve myself with UCL public engagement, including the Slade Salon and at the Bloomsbury Festival of Light, I was part of a panel with Berry Chevasco discussing, Light in Art, Literature and Architecture.
01-OCT-1999 | Lecturer Fine Art | Painting Department | Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, United Kingdom |
01-OCT-1992 – 30-SEP-1998 | Lecturer Postgraduate Painting | Slade School of Art | UCL, United Kingdom |
1978 | Postgraduate Certificate in Education | University of Exeter | |
1976 | Bachelor of Arts | University of Exeter |