Associates Programme Faculty

Clair Le Couteur

Dr Clair Le Couteur (they/them) is a non-binary research artist, educator and folk singer whose work explores voice and the fictive. Clair makes transmedia performance assemblages, entangling fact and fiction, research and creation, tradition and contemporaneity. These can take the form of objects, lecture performances, museum installations, academic publications, fictions or musical compositions. Clair is one half of live art duo Lunatraktors; they have performed in venues including the V&A Museum, the Turner Contemporary, the Aldeburgh Festival, the Royal College of Art and the Horse Hospital.

Benedict Drew

Benedict Drew lives and works in Whitstable and Margate, UK. He works across video, sculpture, music and their associated technologies. He creates large-scale installations, often concerned with ecstatic responses to socio-political anxiety.

Solo exhibitions include TRAPPED IN A STICKY SHED WITH SIDE CHAIN COMPRESSION, iMT Gallery, London; The Trickle-Down Syndrome, Whitechapel Gallery, London; KAPUT, QUAD Gallery, Derby; Walker Gallery, Liverpool; THE ANTI ECSTATIC MACHINES and Heads May Roll, Matt’s Gallery, London. Drew’s work has been exhibited internationally including at Adelaide Festival, Australia; Lofoten International Arts Festival, Norway; and in Hayward Touring exhibitions British Art Show 8 and Shonky: The Aesthetics of Awkwardness. He has been commissioned to create video works for public spaces including Art on the Underground, London and Focal Point Gallery, Southend, and his installation KAPUT (2015) was acquired by the Arts Council Collection. Drew has released several records, including Crawling Through Tory Slime (MANA Records) and The Ughhh Ballads (Bloxham Tapes) and regularly collaborates with other artists and musicians. He is a lecturer in Fine Art at Slade School of Fine Art and is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London.

Anthea Hamilton

Anthea Hamilton’s work is always site-specific: a consideration of the location, the cultural and political environment as well as personal circumstances at the time provide a framework for Hamilton’s research. The environments she produces are live and conversational. Hamilton’s work considers the lineage of materials and images, tracing their changeable meanings in elaboration of alternative kinds of knowledge. She has shown internationally in solo, group exhibitions and biennales. The New Life, Secession, Vienna (2018); The Squash, Tate Britain, London (2018); Lichen! Libido! Chastity!, SculptureCenter, New York (2015); Britsh Art Show 8, various venues (2015-17) and the 58th Venice Biennale (2019). Hamilton was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2016.

Nkisi

Nkisi is the pseudonym of Melika Ngombe Kolongo, whose activities as a producer, live musician, DJ and curator are channels for an ongoing inquiry into sound as a tool of communication beyond the purely lingual. Musically, this manifests in a captivating cross-talk of African rhythms, uncompromising European hard dance tropes, foreboding synth melodies and a relentless, galvanising energy, as heard on the ‘7 Directions’ LP on Lee Gamble’s UIQ label and harnessed for her increasingly kinetic live performances and DJ sets.

Sally O’Reilly

Sally O’Reilly writes for performance, page and video. Recent projects include the novella The Ambivalents (Cabinet, New York, 2017), the novel Crude (Eros Press, 2016) and the libretto for the opera The Virtues of Things (Royal Opera, Aldeburgh Music, Opera North, 2015). She was writer in residence at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (2010–11) and at Modern Art Oxford (2016), producer and co-writer of The Last of the Red Wine (ICA, London, 2011), a radio sitcom set in the art world, and co-editor of Implicasphere (2003–8), an interdisciplinary broadsheet. She has also performed her own solo and collaborative works internationally in galleries, museums, festivals and biennales.

Dr Cecilia Wee wears thick framed stylish glasses and wears a black shirt style top, they are smiling at the camera.

Cecilia Wee

Dr Cecilia Wee fRSA (she/they) is an independent curator, researcher, educator, coach and agitator who grew up in Thatcher’s London. Cecilia produces projects that aim to address equity, relationships within and beyond capitalism, and infrastructures for art and social action, with a focus on Global Ethnic Majorities, disabled, working class and LGBTQIA+ communities. They work with practitioners who use experimental sound, performance, visual and design practices. Cecilia has worked as a producer in UK arts organisations and taught in higher education. They have edited books, curated exhibitions, events, led research and artist professional development projects with organisations in the UK and Europe including Akademie der Künste Berlin, Furtherfield Gallery, Resonance FM, Sound and Music, and Tate. Cecilia wrote her PhD on the documentation of Live Art, is Visiting Tutor in Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art, Consultant Producer (Fair & Equitable programme) with Contemporary Visual Arts Network England and founder of tdwm studio.

A black and white photo of Artist Simeon Barclay sitting in a chair with a mask over half their face

Simeon Barclay

Simeon Barclay (b.1975, Huddersfield, UK) draws upon a rich vein of pop cultural sources, producing works that activate complex cultural histories, whilst exploring the ways in which we navigate identity, both imposed or self-curated. Combining a diverse range of media, Barclay creates reductive, sophisticated works that engage with aspects of aesthetics, British culture, subjectivity and memory.

Barclay received his BA from Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds in 2010 and an MFA from Goldsmiths College, London in 2014. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally including at Southbank Centre, Tate Britain, South London Gallery, London; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Workplace Foundation, Gateshead; Holden Gallery, Manchester; The Tetley, Leeds; Cubitt Gallery, London; The Bluecoat, Liverpool; Jerwood Space, London; Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer, Vienna; Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; Arcadia Missa, New York and W139, Amsterdam. Simeon lives and works in Leeds, UK.