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Gerard Williams

Senior Lecturer

Nottingham School of Art & Design

Staff Group(s)
Fine Art

Role

Gerard is a 0.5 lecturer/senior lecturer in Fine Art at NTU and has taught all three years on the undergraduate course. He has taught at NTU since 2008/9. He also teaches into the MFA programme here. He has a special interest in the relationship between the aims or intensions behind the artwork and its materiality as well as making and resolution through staging. These interests emerge through various key aspects of his teaching at NTU.

Research areas

Much of Gerard’s artwork is made in response to various aspects of site or exhibition context, so histories and curatorial agendas have regularly come into play. His work has developed strategies that instigate a backwards glance, thus prompting the audience to re-examine and reflect upon their own initial assumptions.

The practice has worked to blur the boundaries between made and found. It is often concerned with opposites such as well-made and badly made, finished and unfinished: the prospect of an imagined completion (and imagined past histories) forming in the mind of the viewer in response to the work is a current excitement.

Value, in its many guises, is a recurring concern that has been regularly explored through, for example, the juxtaposition and contextualisation of objects. The staging of things, ways that objects are understood relative to where and how they appear or are experienced, is often a key concern.

External activity

In addition to his part time teaching at NTU Gerard maintains an active practice as an artist and he continues to teach at other universities. Residencies and commissions that offer the possibility of working relative to place or other aspects of context take him to unusual locations where a focus upon site specific research and experimentation dominate. He regularly works with London based Handel Street Projects and worked with New York’s Parkers Box Gallery for more than 10 years. Forthcoming residencies that focus upon developing outcomes in relation to context will be at GP in Lincoln, UK, and the Blackrock residency in Gloucestershire. Gerard co-directs the Broadcaster project a rural initiative that invites artists to make new work for the context of 2 church notice boards that operate like site/gallery/picture-frames-in-the-street with coupled web presences.