SolasArts Humanities

Dr Mandy Bloomfield
Is an academic, a researcher, a writer, an educator and occasional dabbler in creative collaborations. Her professional role is Associate Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Plymouth, where she leads the MA Environmental Humanities programme.

Her research expertise revolves around experimental poetics. She is the author of the academic monograph entitled Archaeopoetics: Word, Image History (University of Alabama Press 2016).

Her current research explores how modern and contemporary poetry engages the dilemmas of our present moment of ecological emergency. She has published several academic articles and book chapters related to this interest. Since she began working at Plymouth in 2014 she developed a fascination - perhaps even an obsession - with all things sea-related.

Mandy is increasingly drawn to thinking about cultural imaginaries of the ocean and asking how poetries of the sea might help us better understand our shifting relationships with the watery world in our current era of environmental change.

Jacqueline Nowakowski FSA
Is a professional archaeologist and researcher for over 40 years with extensive field experience in the UK and abroad (Poland, Germany and Italy). Nationally recognised prehistorian and educator. Currently working freelance following a long successful professional career as Principal Archaeologist, Cornwall Archaeological Unit, Cornwall Council.

She has lectured in UK and abroad and have published widely. Appearances on national television (Down to Earth and Digging for Britain) and interviews on local, national radio and BBC world service, YouTube and podcasts. She develops creative multi-stranded archaeological and heritage projects and works with heritage charities, groups and other creatives with an emphasis on wider engagement about archaeology, landscape and environment, and advocate for community participation in research and outreach.

Clifton Evers
Clifton Evers is a lecturer in media and cultural studies at Newcastle University, He completed his PhD at the University of Sydney. he research sport, lesiure, masculinity, and pollution. His work includes employing wearable technologies as a research method to conduct ‘wet ethnography’ e.g. in the sea. Clifton also uses experimental creative methods to conduct and share research. Clifton’s research has been published in journals such as Leisure Sciences, Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Sport in Society, Social & Cultural Geography, and Cultural Studies Review.

Clifton champions making research accessible to, done with, and made useful for the wider public through civic engagement.

https://pollutedleisure.com/tag/clifton-evers/

Dr Andrew Spira
Andrew Spira is an independent art historian, writer, curator, lecturer and painter. He was a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1996-2002 and a Programme Director at Christie’s Education from 2002-2016. In 2008, he published The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition (Lund Humphries) and, in 2020, he published two books of the relationship between personal identity and cultural conventions - The Invention of the Self: Personal Identity in the Age of Art and Simulated Selves: the Undoing of Personal Identity in the Modern World (Bloomsbury). His interests are highly eclectic, embracing the history of science and music, as well as the visual arts.

Andrew’s current research revolves around the way knowledge and ideas are determined by cultural and linguistic conventions that have evolved over many centuries. It focuses especially on the role of diagrams, both manifest and imagined, as templates for ‘systems of understanding’, and explores the ways in which we use them to conceptualise our experience of the world and of ourselves.

https://www.andrewspira.com

Dr Richard Plant
Dr. Richard Plant is a writer and teacher; an architectural historian with research interests in Romanesque architercture and sacral topography. He studied English literature for his first degree and then spent time living in Sudan and Italy and working as a gardener before taking a master’s degree followed by a PhD in medieval architectural history at the Courtauld Institute. Since then he has taught at a variety of institutions on art and particularly architecture of most periods in the western tradition.

He was Programme Director of an M.Litt and MA in Early European Art and Deputy Director at Christie's Education London. Richard now lectures and leads tours in the UK and Europe (pandemic permitting). He is publicity officer for the British Archaeological Association, and has co-edited four volumes of their series of Romanesque conference transactions.

Lassla Esquivel
Lassla Esquivel is a UK-based art historian, researcher and curator specialising in contemporary art, digitalisation and the art market, with a focus on emerging markets.

She has advised private collectors in acquisitions and collection management, as well as commercial galleries with strategy development, providing consultation to focus the identity of the gallery and art management.

She founded Periferia Projects, a curatorial platform which links emerging markets in Latin America with the UK and Europe in order to promote collaborations between galleries, artists and institutions. She has curated exhibitions in Latin America, Asia-Pacific, Europe and the UK. She is lecturer in different institutions, teaching postgraduate programmes such as Curating and Arts and Cultural Management at IESA arts&culture in Paris, and Art Business at the MSc programme Art, Law and Business at Christie’s Education in London.

She is a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds. Her research interests currently are focused in emerging markets, private museums and its relation to the art market. Her latest research has been published by Routledge on the anthology: Art Museums of Latin America Structuring Representation.

Kate Gordon
Kate Gordon is the founder and CEO of London Art Studies. Having produced arts programming for CNN and Carlton, Kate launched London Art Studies in 2011 (after heading up Sotheby’s Public Programmes Department), which provides educational courses on art. In June 2018, London Art Studies launched online classes, winning the award for the world’s most popular online art courses at the Webby’s 2 years later. Educated at St Paul’s Girls' School, Amherst College USA and University of Moscow, Kate has worked in the art world for over 20 years. In 2016 she co-founded the Association of Women in the Arts (AWITA); she also wrote a regular column about the art world for London’s Evening Standard newspaper from 2016-2020.

After chairing the fundraising group ‘Foreign Sisters’ in 2017 and 2018, Kate remains a Senior Arts Advisor to Cancer Research UK and is also on the board of the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital Art and Design Advisory Group. A member of the Tate Patrons Executive Committee (2014-2018), Kate is now a Trustee of The Art Academy and of Art History Link-Up, and since March 2020 serves as Chair of Serpentine Patrons.

Laurent Issaurat
Laurent ISSAURAT heads Societe Generale’ s Art Banking Services. Alongside this professional business role he is actively engaged in contemporary art initiatives and projects, sitting on the board of Fluxus Art Projects (London) and Fondation Thalie (Brussels). He has participated in various selection committees, in the context of Socgen's Contemporary Art Collection (2016), the Palais de Tokyo's Prix Découverte (2017), the Marcel Duchamp Prize (2018) and the Geneva Contemporary Art Fund’s Digital Mediation Award (2021). Laurent is a keen writer who has published numerous exhibition reviews, interviews and articles relating to contemporary art and the art market. He has also written a survey of French Contemporary Artists. Laurent lectures on art business for business conferences and university seminars (Sotheby’s Institute of Art, ESCP International School of Management, University of Paris Dauphine)

Laurent is a graduate of the Institut d'Études Politiques ('Sciences Po’) Paris and holds a Master Degree in Financial Engineering, Sorbonne University, Paris. He also trained in art history, M.Litt in Modern and Contemporary Art and Art World Practices (Glasgow University /Christie’s Education London) and Art Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. He is a Member of PAIAM - Professional Advisors to the International Art Market - since 2019.

Dr Peter Higginson
A large part of my life activity has been as a cultural historian and teacher, and in the process I have found myself welcoming a spread of interests. School and university teaching, both here in the UK and abroad in Canada. Explorations and research into art and society in 17th Baroque Rome: the ecology of the urban experience, focuses on the rich and poor of the city (with special attention on Caravaggio’s patronage); public ritual and ceremony; and the practice of pilgrimage, the psycho geography of walking in a papal city.

A recurring interest has been in all things post-modern. On an intellectual level, it probably began with a curiosity in the post-war New York avant-garde, and the emerging notions of pinning down meaning – or not. Jasper Johns and Wittgenstein featured heavily here.

I have also conducted numerous study trips abroad: Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Venice, Florence, Sicily, Rome, the surrounding campagna of Lazio (nature, myth and power), Paris, Provence, the Île-de-France (forests, gardens, landscape art and ideology); and also spending quite a bit of time in Cuba.