Dr Vanessa Corby
Lecturer in the Theory, History and Practice of Fine
Art
Vanessa’s research is the product of a
fascination with the processes, materiality and performativity of
art practice and the means by which they are implicit within the
negotiation and transformation of artistic protocols, culture,
history and society. In particular her attention to the historical
specificity of art production is marked by a desire to read for the
way in which the production of artworks may go against the grain of
dominant ideology to negotiate marginalised, silenced experience.
Thus her research considers the material and theoretical concerns
of class, ethnicity and sexual politics within the context of
cultural memory, displacement, migration and trauma.
Vanessa’s articulation of process as a
supplementary mode of signification in this research has been
dependent upon a close reading of the methodologies of the history
of art. Her approach again has been informed by an interest in
those objects often silenced by discourse. Consequently, this work
often underlines that which has often been culturally overlooked,
or art historically dismissed as work for art rather than
valued as a work of art.
Vanessa currently teaches the theory/history
strand of the BA (Hons) Fine Arts and contributes to the
undergraduate and MA Fine Arts studio teaching, assessment and the
team-taught postgraduate theory modules. Her current PhD students
are:
David Matcham, The Artist As Researcher:
The Criticality, Methodology and Pedagogy of Practice.
Ian Scales, Making Silences Speak – An
Analysis of the Function of, and Effects from, Slash Fiction as a
Method of Reinterpreting Texts.