Our People
Professor Stephen Felmingham
Stephen Felmingham is an artist and educator and has lectured extensively in drawing, painting, print and contemporary art practice on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes across the UK, including Falmouth University, Norwich University of the Arts and Leeds Arts University. He studied at Middlesex University and the University of the Arts London (Wimbledon) where he completed an MA in Drawing in 1999. He gained his doctorate from the University of Leeds in 2014 reading drawing, place and the contemporary sublime.
He was nominated a member of the LAND2 Research Network in 2009, was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in the same year and was a finalist in the Celeste Art Prize, New York, in 2010. He speaks regularly both on drawing and art and design pedagogy and his work is represented in collections nationally and internationally and he has exhibited widely in the UK and in Europe.
He has an active research interest in creative pedagogies, specifically research-led learning and alternative art school models and he leads on projects that work in and for communities, introducing this into socially-engaged art and education and connecting organisations (artist-led initiatives, community organisations, public and philanthropic funders) who are working with the agency of creativity in the social realm.
His research outputs have developed over the last three years into outward facing social practice projects, including work with refugee communities that cohere with the College’s strategic aims of creative pedagogy and social justice. Much of this work has positive impact in the College community as well as internationally, including co-founding Beyond the Now, a syndicated online platform working in locations across Europe, the MENA region and the Global South to open new creative, cultural and political affinities for a post-pandemic world.
Stephen Felmingham is a visual artist with a practice that engages with contemporary drawing and its expanded possibilities. He works with ideas of place, perception and memory: his current research interests are focused on societal trauma through the remains of the Cold War, its sites, bunkers and social memories and he has completed a practice-led PhD at the University of Leeds 'Drawing, Place and The Contemporary Sublime'.
Publications
Felmingham S. 2015 Approaching the bunker: bodies, materiality and meaning-making in Cold War ruins ed. Bennett L. London: Rowman and Littlefield
Felmingham, S. 2016 in Allen J. and Rowles S. Professional Practice: 20 Questions. Q-Art and the Higher Education Academy.
Felmingham, S. 2014 in Allen J. and Rowles S. 15 Methods 20 Questions: process, value and potential of art education and methods of teaching art and design. Q-Art and the Higher Education Academy. ISBN: 978-0-9564355-3-8
Felmingham, S. 2014, Putting It Into Practice: Bridging the gap between learning and doing in: Making Futures: Interfaces between craft knowledge and design: new opportunities for social innovation and sustainable practice. Vol 3. ISSN 2042-1664
Felmingham S. in Kovats, T. 2014. Drawing Water: Drawing as a Mechanism for Exploration. Edinburgh: Fruitmarket Gallery.
Felmingham. S. 2013. The Drawing Derivé. In: 72 Assignments: The Foundation Course in Art and Design Today. Briggs C. (ed) Paris: PCA Press. ISBN 978-2-9546804-0-8
Felmingham S. 2012. T-shaped Thinkers: Drawing and Professional Practice in the Art School. TRACEY Drawing Research Network Conference, University of Loughborough. Available here.
Celeste Prize Catalogue. 2010. Julia Draganovic, Mark Gisbourne. Treviso: Zel Edizioni
Jerwood Drawing Prize Catalogue. 2009. Tania Kovats, Roger Malbert, Shonagh Manson, Anita Taylor, Nicolas Usherwood. Jerwood Visual Arts. ISBN: 9780956357007
Recent exhibitions
2017 Made Up at Glasgow Arts Club
2016 RWA Candidates Show, 9th Oct - 27th Nov, RWA Bristol
2016 Imagined Landscapes at the RWA, Bristol (with Paul Gough RWA, Rae Hicks, Eileen Lawrence RSA, Melanie Rose, Jem Southam and Veronica Vickery)
2015/16 Collateral Drawing at UCS, Ipswich (with Sarah Lucas, Ryan Gander, Matthew Darbyshire, Matthew Collings)
2015 Recent Drawings at Plymouth Theatre Royal Gallery (with Joseph Hillier)
2014 The Violet Club at PCA Gallery, Plymouth (solo show)
2013 Peripheral Artifacts at Lubomirov-Easton Gallery, London
2012/13 touching:clear at Galerie Lucy Macintosh, Lausanne, Switzerland (solo show)
2011 Tocsin Bang, Union105 Gallery, Leeds (solo show)
2011 Art Dubai with Galerie Lucy Macintosh
2010 Celeste Art Prize (Finalist) Brooklyn, New York
2010 Stockholm Art Fair Supermarket with SevenSeven Contemporary Art, Kulturhuset, Stockholm.
