Radical Sabbatical is an artist residency programme which brings together creative practitioners from Eastside Projects’ ESP associates scheme with academics from across the University of Birmingham. Each year, four artists are encouraged to enter into creative dialogue with UoB academics to explore how each other’s research is produced and conveyed. This terms themes are COMMON-WEALTH and THE UNCONDITIONED MIND.
Our 2019 Radical Sabbatical artists – Leah Carless, Kelly Large, Priya Mistry and Brian J Morrison – have been working with academics in response to research themes of Common-Wealth and The Unconditioned Mind, unpicking the traits of loneliness, exploring medical imaging and connections to emotional states, understanding the biologically adaptive role of delusions, analysing the binaries of charisma and connections between obsessive compulsive disorder and body dysmorphia.
For their End of Term event artists introduce new ideas and talk about work that has been taking shape over the past few months.
“Do we all need to be a little bit more Psycho, more imagined or more Shamanic?”, through her research Priya Mistry explores this very question. Whilst engaging with the Research & Cultural Collections store, in dialogues with Project Perfect researcher Eugene Lancellotta and working under the theme of ‘The Unconditioned Mind’ Mistry’s research is investigating the body as a vessel, the potential of definitions, alternative data, and functional adaptations.
Leah Careless presents the research around the wax anatomical models accompanied with images, scans, casts, drawings, replicas, writing, research books as well as thoughts and feelings.
Kelly Large’s research focusses on the significance of ‘charisma’ in contemporary society. For the residency she will depart from conventional, gendered and racialised expressions of charismatic presence to speculate on what a feminist, queer, non-western, non-binary version might be, conveyed through a vocabulary of physical gesture and embodied movement.
Brian J Morrison is interested in how we might visualise complex scientific and philosophical ideas which are often otherwise dislocated and he aims to interpret this via performative paintings.
Images by: Paul Stringer & Priya Mistry
