Changing Places: Transposition and Painting, Methodologies and Concepts was held by the Fabrication Research Group at the University of Worcester. Artists Dr Selma Parlour, Dr John Chilver, Karen David, Neil Gall, and the organisers: Harriet Carter and Worcester PhD student Katrina Blannin, were invited to share their practice findings in relation to transposition and painting through practice-based research. The day was chaired by Dr James Fisher, Senior Lecturer of Fine Art at the University of Worcester.

The event highlighted how a strategic approach to thinking about the relationships between the materiality of practice with its content can lead to more effective methodologies. In particular, Changing Places explored specific considerations that are presented by ideas of transposition.

In painting and drawing transcription has traditionally been used as a teaching tool, a way of learning through the interrogation of another painting: a process of copy, repositioning through the use of metaphor or semiotic play or at least close pictorial interpretation. The process of transposition, however, suggests that examining the relationship practice has or might have with other sites of cultural or scientific activity, as well as other artworks, can help reveal the effect of practice.

Guest Speakers:

John Chilver is an artist and writer based in London. He has exhibited internationally since the 1990s, including solo exhibitions at Casey Kaplan, New York, Galerie Michael Janssen, Cologne, and Il Capricorno, Venice. His writing has appeared in Afterall, Art Monthly, Art Papers, Distinktion/Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, Frieze, Spike, Starship, Schizm and elsewhere. His work approaches painting as an apparatus for concocting fables of agency, ritualising spatial practices and investigating production of subjectivities. He teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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Describing himself – resolutely – as an abstract painter, at first sight, Neil Gall's paintings appear to belong to the contemporary trope of collage, sampling and appropriation; destroy to rebuild etc., but Gall's task of looking at the overlooked begins prior to putting brush to canvas or gessoed panel – with construction. His subjects are his own creations, modelled in his studio out of assorted found objects – packaging, string, tape – their 'faces' collaged from casually appropriated scraps – discarded plastic flowers, crumpled pages ripped from magazines. The iconoclastic oddities are photographed and it is from these photographic records that Gall, as a painter, works.

Neil Gall was born in born 1967 in Aberdeen and studied at The Slade School of Art, London. Solo exhibitions include 'Neil Gall' in 2012 and 'Cut–Outs, Offcuts and Holes' in 2015 at David Nolan Gallery, and 'Re–Make/Re–Model' at Aurel Scheibler, Berlin in 2009. Recent shows include 'Paperhouse’ at Aurel Scheibler Berlin 2016 and upcoming 2018 ‘Neil Gall, The Studio: Cover Versions’ at Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.

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Selma Parlour is interested in painting's in/extrinsic conventions and the technical problems of the medium. Her paintings are meticulously rendered in oil on linen to look as though they are drawn, dyed or printed. The literal transparency of colour borrows from the white primer beneath so that colour glows as if lit from behind. This backlit quality is reminiscent of the screen. The analogue apes the digital, whilst the space of painting is imagined as a two-dimensional stage space that curtails fictive distance as it represents it.

In 2017, Selma Parlour won the Sunny Dupree Family Award for a Woman Artist at the Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London; and in 2016 she was a prizewinner at the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Gallery, Liverpool. She holds a PhD in Art from Goldsmiths, University of London (2014). Her solo exhibition, 'Upright Animal', curated by Sacha Craddock, is currently showing at Pi Artworks, London until February 10th 2018.

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Karen David’s multi-disciplinary practice examines themes and notions of mysticism with direct reference to consumerism and the domestic through the use of materials, mediums and subcultures such as; tie-dye, crystals and dreamcatchers. Her research has taken her to the Southwest American desert to explore its landscape and mythologies and to inform an ongoing project consisting of a fictional artists’ commune where residents investigate links between Abstract Expressionism and New Age memorabilia, Para-anthropology and new possibilities in gardening.

Karen David is a London-based Artist graduated MA Fine Art at Wimbledon College of Art in 2012. In 2014, she undertook a research trip to Marfa, Texas and Roswell, New Mexico and she also writes, curates and runs Cork Lined Rooms; an artist interview and studio project based on the Proust Questionnaire. Solo exhibitions include: Crystal Visions, CIMCOT, Pure Reason Tint of Violet, VITRINE, Santa Fe, Art Lacuna, and Searching for the Viable Essence, Jacob’s Island Gallery, London.

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Katrina Blannin was born in London UK where she currently lives and works. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1997 she has shown her work extensively in the UK and abroad, co-directed artist run project spaces, curated exhibitions and written about contemporary painting. She is currently undertaking a Painting by Practice PhD at the University of Worcester, teaches at Canterbury UCA and Camberwell UAL and works both on the editorial board and the mentoring programme for Turps Banana, London, UK. "The process of experimenting with simple systems, as well as palindromic and isochromatic structures, aims to produce paintings with a logical clarity; both spatial and material in character. The re-examination of historical colour theories and early Renaissance painting conventions, specifically concerning form, is transferred to an investigation which asks questions of twentieth century constructivist and concrete art, in order to generate new possibilities”.

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Harriet Carter was born in Coventry and is now based in Worcester. Harriet won the Elmley Foundation Award for Fine Art in 2014 and was an Artist in Residence at the Sidney Nolan Trust in 2016. Since completing her MRes in 2017, Harriet has been interested in exploring the metaphysical through painting practice. In September 2018, she will be embarking on an M3C fully-funded PhD studentship with Birmingham City University titled: ‘Beyond Transposition: An exploration of painting and the metaphysical through birdsong and Messiaen’s compositions’. The research interrogates transposition between the auditory and visual through the use of birdsong to inform layered paintings. Painting is considered both as an object and site of encounter in relationships with the metaphysical through mediated and unmediated birdsong. Transposition will reconceptualise the painted surface; in which the transient sound of birdsong is made tangible in permanent mark-making.