gabrielle llewellin – lecturer

gabrielle llewellin – lecturer

gabby1

 

 

gabby4

 

 

gabby5

As a practising Fine Artist and Lecturer I have spent many years encouraging and guiding others to discover their creative potential, examine, challenge and contextualise the role of ‘the artist’ in the contemporary arena and society in general. This has resulted in an extensive career from graduation spanning some 20 years in FE and HE Art and Design Institutions where I have held a number of responsible and significant positions including Head of Fine Art, Head of Textiles and Deputy Head of Art Foundation, Lecturer in Fine Art at BA (Hons) level.

The majority of my lecturing experience is centred within the areas of Fine Art and Textiles (BA (Hons), Foundation Art Studies, ‘A’ Level, GCSE, Access and Adult Education. This is coupled with experience in Arts Development, Funding, Gallery Management and longstanding professional practice/research as a Fine Artist. This broad skills base means that I bring to my lecturing extensive experience of the interface and collaboration between disciplines, combined with evident experience of academic management, curriculum development and a clear understanding of the fundamental and philosophical issues related to broad based contemporary Art Education. In addition to the post held here at Totnes I lecture in Fine Art Critical Studies at Plymouth University.

As a Fine Art practitioner my experience and focus resides within a multi-media expression and is at present being developed through PhD study. The study, represents an approach to research which is Fine Art practice-led.

Central to the research is a practice that is rigorously critical, reflective and discursive and presents as a conduit, a reciprocal opening. The standard notion of ‘thesis’ as attached to academic research is challenged, as exegesis is pursued in an embodied found and/or concrete poetic, contiguous with questions of methodological intersection and abundance. The embodied thesis presents a means by which the visceral, emotional and aesthetic apprehension of the visual, is enhanced.

The rationale is to address a research question, which contributes originally to theories of solitude, silence and stillness by proposing a combined philosophy, theories which reside within Existentialist/Nihilist/Solipistic philosophy/literature, Ontological/Metaphysical theology and at the interface of western & eastern mysticism/philosophy.

Multiple discourses from these sources are interwoven theoretically, physically/metaphorically in an ethopoietic study which through a studio narrative that embraces notions of poiesis and praxis has evolved an aletheitic image making process centred in photography and film.

Through reduction/obstruction/veiling, absence is manifest. In that absence a process of aletheia reveals ‘other’ presence, the subjects becoming shrouded/dissipated in an ’objectal dignity’, that preserves their ‘radical alterity.’ The images speak of object and masses, ’the place where beings disappear and where Other appears. ‘ They echo with, and evoke notions of transcendence, transience, transformation/transmutation, transmigration, alterity/otherness.

In these spaces thought is ambivalent, not measured or nuanced ‘the task of thought if possible, to make the world more enigmatic, unintelligible (ibid) and reach intuitive sense.