We bring together practice-based study and critical inquiry in studio art, game design, cultural leadership, digital media, creative technologies, and curating, exploring connections between material and visual practices across social and cultural spaces.
With an emphasis on research and a diverse international student body, we encourage and support interdisciplinary thinking at the intersection of art, science, technology, and culture. As part of the Winchester School of Art, we offer an inclusive environment where research and enterprise are well supported.
Supporting our research-led teaching, an exceptionally well-resourced team of technical specialists and instructors run a range of accessible, high-spec workshops, labs and studios.
The Winchester Gallery offers students and staff the opportunity to participate in curating exhibitions, which range from international collaborations to local projects on the Winchester campus. The gallery also sometimes works in partnership with the University’s John Hansard Gallery in Southampton.
We work across a range of cultural spaces, including:
museums and galleries
schools and classrooms
print and audiovisual media
academic journals
Students in The Winchester Gallery. Photo: Dave Gibbons
Degree shows
Each year, students in our undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes complete their studies by creating a body of work that is exhibited in the degree shows.
Winchester School of Art degree show exhibitions, private views and open houses offer graduates the opportunity to share their vision and showcase their skills to artists, academics, professionals and employers in their field. It’s an important event whether they’re continuing their studies at the postgraduate level or moving into industry.
The degree shows are also a chance to celebrate landmark personal achievement alongside friends and family.
Research culture
Research underpins our collective ethos. We use critical and creative inquiry, exploration and practice to expand our knowledge in ways that:
benefit larger research communities
influence our classroom and studio practices
confront larger socio-political concerns
We use research to contribute to solutions for current crises, as well to make the most of opportunities for positive change. Research enables us to contribute individually and collectively to a wider economy of ideas.
We nurture our community of researchers, past and present, who work collectively to better understand the world and reimagine it as more equitable, just and beneficial for all species inhabiting it.
We have internationally renowned scholars in:
artistic practice
history and theory
media
curating
gaming
creative computing
arts leadership
critical technology studies
Students at all levels benefit from this research environment, which includes PhD students conducting their own research and contributing to the department’s intellectual community of practice.
We are members of the Creative Network South Research Alliance which brings together:
University of Southampton
Solent University
University of Portsmouth
University of Winchester
Research leadership
We’re an active department, editing a number of journals and book series.
We are also regular contributors to the annual Transmediale festival which is a leading digital art and culture event.
Our impact
The impact of our department is wide-ranging. Our projects encompass books, workshops, exhibitions and games design.
Workshops
Dr Megen de Bruin-Molé has been running creative workshops as part of the Speculative Space of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums project. The workshops explore the critical ground that exists between science fiction and gallery, library, archive and museum spaces and collections.
Dr Emma Reay has set of a series of workshops in collaboration with ‘A Good Death?', a research group based at the University of Cambridge. The workshops bring together game designers and death-adjacent practitioners, such as doctors, bereavement counsellors or headstone engravers to facilitate better conversations about death and dying.
Books
In their book, Dr Sami Everett and Rebekah Vince explore Jewish-Muslim interactions across North Africa and France through performance culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. They offer an alternative view to the current trend of viewing these interactions primarily through conflict.
In her book Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon, Professor Louise Siddons examines lesbian photographer Laura Gilpin’s classic 1968 book The Enduring Navaho. Questioning the limits of political solidarity, she investigates the politics of Navajo sovereignty and queerness over the course of the 20th century and asks how visual culture contributes to social change.
In the Petrified Media project, Dr Stephen Cornford explores electronic waste as it sediments into Earth’s stratigraphic record. By applying the techniques of geology to a hypothetical technofossil, the work imagines a future where discarded technologies become part of the planet’s geology.
Exhibitions
Professor Jussi Parikka is involved with the Climate Engines exhibition. This features artistic projects that address climate change and environmental justice. The works range from media arts, gaming, to video art, installation, and photography. It includes a new piece commissioned as part of the WSA and Potsdam University project Weather Reports.
Videos and games
Dr Vanissa Wanick has been working on a number of projects within the theme of applied games and playful design for social good and education. Demoplay is a hybrid roleplaying game for participatory budgeting. Plausible Futures is a boardgame which looks at how games can elicit conversations about inequalities. Healthy Ageing is a digital game which aims to raise awareness of dementia risks.
Commissioned by Cinema Rediscovered, ‘Bushman (Reassembled)’ is a video essay on David Schickele’s 1971 lost film Bushman. Dr Kwame Phillips remixed, recut and reassembled its dialogue and footage to accentuate the film’s discussion of othering and belonging.
My research and teaching covers media theory and practice, and creative, playful and every day uses of technology from games and robots to toys and AI.
I would describe what I do as putting knowledge systems and theory in dialogue, as a means of exploring social action, and activating that to create artistic research. So, a mix of practice, play, and protest.
