Guest Speakers
Heather Ackroyd
Heather Ackroyd of artistic partnership Ackroyd & Harvey, has worked internationally in both the visual and performing arts. Throughout the 80’s and 90’s she was active at the forefront of contemporary theatre performance, working amongst others with Impact Theatre Cooperative, Graeme Miller, Gary Stevens, The People Show and Katie Mitchell at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Since 1990 she has collaborated with artist Dan Harvey, exhibiting in galleries, museums, found sites and public spaces worldwide. Sculpture, photography, ecology and architecture are some of the disciplines that intersect in their artwork, revealing an intrinsic bias towards process and event. In 2007 they presented their largest installation to date on the exterior of London’s National Theatre, growing the landmark flytower with seedling grass. They have made a series of expeditions to the High Arctic with Cape Farewell studying the effects of climate change on the fragile ecosystem, and will be showing a new work inspired by this at the forthcoming Royal Academy GSK Contemporary Earth: Art of a Changing World in December 2009.
A S Byatt
A S Byatt is renowned internationally for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize-winning Possession, The Biographer's Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman. Her most recent novel, The Children's Book was published in 2009. Her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, Elementals and Little Black Book of Stories. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A S Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.
Paul Clark
Paul is co-artistic director Clod Ensemble and has written original scores for all the company's productions to date, most recently: Red Ladies (ICA and Serralves Institute, Porto); Under Glass (off site at Sadler's Wells) and, with Peggy Shaw, Must: The Inside Story. He has also written four chamber operas including The Weather Man (Opera North 2004-9) and liebeslied/my suicides (ICA/Genesis Foundation 2004). He has written dozens of scores for theatre from the fringe to the National Theatre, for directors including Katie Mitchell, David Farr, Jonathon Holloway and Judy Hegarty, and composed new scores for Beckett's Words and Music and Cascando for RTE. He has also written for film and TV, for directors including Arnaud Desplechin and Emily Young and collaborated with a huge range of musicians from Dangermouse to Mark E Smith. Awards include an Arts Foundation fellowship in 1999.
Leslie Forbes
Leslie Forbes began by studying physics, moved to writing and illustrating travel books, then to presenting BBC radio programmes on such diverse subjects as botanical exploration, Bollywood and molecular gastronomy. Her three novels arose out of her collaborations with artists and scientists; her second (long-listed for the Orange prize) was inspired by winning a Wellcome Trust Sci-Art award for her work with a physicist. In 2005 Forbes developed a form of epilepsy generated in the language processing side of her brain, but this does not prevent her continuing to trespass from the arts into science and back on work where image, sound and story influence and inspire each other. Currently writing a novel based on her experiences as an epileptic, she also mentors torture survivors, helping them to write and publish their own stories.
Karl James
As director and founder of The Dialogue Project, most of Karl's time is spent helping people think together when the stakes are high. He works extensively with big organisations like Unilever, TBWA and the BBC as well as smaller ones like Educare Small School in Kingston. Recent projects include Your Thoughts With Mine, a series of dialogues across England on themes around the radicalisation of young Muslim men in Britain.
Karl's work as a dialogue artist involves recording, editing and publishing conversations on subjects that people struggle to talk about. His latest work, Between Friends premiered at Latitude Festival '09.
Karl's theatre experience includes training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and working for eleven years as an actor and director with Kenneth Branagh, Tom Stoppard, John Retallack, Declan Donellan, Deborah Page and David Masserella.
He first worked with Tim Crouch at the National Youth Theatre in 1982. After a gap of twenty-one years, Tim gave Karl a script of My Arm to read. Karl suggested they put it on for one night at the Hayward Gallery to generate interest. After subsequently co-directing and producing My Arm, Karl has since co-directed An Oak Tree and England.
Cornelia Parker
Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997, Cornelia Parker has became known for her installations and interventions, including Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View 1991 at the Tate Modern where she suspended the fragments of a garden shed, blown up for her by the British Army, and The Maybe, a collaboration with actress Tilda Swinton, at the Serpentine Gallery in 1995. In 2003 she wrapped Rodin's Kiss with a mile of a string to make a new work The Distance (a kiss with string attached) for her contribution to the Tate Triennial. Her film Chomskian Abstract was shown at the Whitechapel Gallery 2008.
She has works in the Tate Collection and in numerous public and private collections in Europe and the USA. She is represented by Frith Street Gallery, London and D'Amelio Terras, New York.
