Becky

I am a writer, artist and AHRC funded art historian-in-training at the University of York. After completing a BA: Fine Art art at Chelsea College of Art, London, I worked in an East End gallery, managed a fair trade cafe in Islington and still, somehow, found the time to make art, organise a couple of shows, sing at open mic nights, and start to write about it all too! My natural curiosity led me to take two years of postgraduate art historical study through the magnificent Open University, before coming to York in October 2010.

My research interests now involve the abstract painting and drawing of Agnes Martin, the status of psychoanalytic theory in art interpretation, and the reworking of modernist tropes by contemporary artists. Also of particular interest, given my fine art background, is the relationship between the art historian, the artist and the work of art, and the question, ‘What does theory do to art’? (An appropriation of Jaqueline Rose’s enquiry, ‘What does psychoanalysis do to children?’) I’m working on a PhD proposal and will commence doctoral research in Autumn 2011.

I regularly write exhibition and book reviews; artist and gallery profiles; interview-based features; and other arts-based articles for regional, national and international print and online publications, as well as having short stories published in zines and on a gallery wall.

CONTRIBUTOR: MAP, Axis Web, Mslexia, The Crack, White Hot Magazine, USELESS, [a-n], Read This Magazine, Dazed Digital

From June – September 2010 I’m travelling, conducting archival research and speaking with scholars on Agnes Martin across the North East of the USA! I’ll also be lecturing at the Philadelphia Pecha Kucha on 28th August 2010.