Dr Vanessa Corby

Teaching

I have taught critical and cultural theory, and the history of art to practice-based students for more than 20 years. My approach to teaching is very much indebted to my own experience of University as the first in my family to go. I tell students that what they have achieved so far is only a measure of the opportunities they have been given, not an indication of their potential, and work hard to help them develop learner confidence.

My teaching is very closely informed by my research which covers drawing, painting, photography, sculpture and sculptural installation in the 20th and 21st centuries. This work is supported by my knowledge of art and its history from classical antiquity to the present.

I welcome enquiries about traditional and practice-based PhD supervision in the following areas:

• The politics of art and education
• The body politic, difference (class, gender, race and sexuality), and art practice
• Art and in the era of neoliberalism
• The primacy of the visual in contemporary art
• Site specific practice and the significance of place

Research

My research is the product of a fascination with the processes and materials of art, which transform artistic protocols, culture, history, and society. My attention to the historical specificity of art making is marked by my desire to read for the way in which artworks negotiate experiences that have been marginalised and/or silenced by dominant ideologies. As a result, my research has considered the felt experience and theoretical questions posed by ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and social class within the contexts of cultural memory, displacement, education, migration, trauma, and neoliberalism.

Publications

2016  ‘Art Matters: Studios, Material Diversity and Neoliberalism, Aesthetica: Future Now

2014  Book Review ‘Steve Baker Artist I Animal (2013), Journal of Visual Studies, DOI:10.1080/1472586X.2014.941588

2011  ‘Say What You See: The Drawings of Sally Taylor’ in Sally Taylor: Drawings, (Arts Council England and Ryedale Folk Museum).

2011  Co-Editor, JAR 0 Journal of Artistic Research (Bern)

2010  Eva Hesse: Longing Belonging and Displacement, London, I B Tauris. 95,000 word monograph.

2007  ‘Something to Show for It? Preliminary Notes on Termination and Creativity in the Work of Tracey Emin,’ in The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference, Griselda Pollock & Victoria Turvey - Sauron eds., London, I B Tauris.

2006  Encountering Eva Hesse, co-editor with Griselda Pollock, Prestel Press, London and Munich. Essays by Renate Petzinger (Museum Wiesbaden), Elisabeth Sussman, (Whitney Museum, New York) Alison Rowley (University of Huddersfield), Phyllida Barlow, (UCL, Slade).

2004   ‘Eva Hesse from the Collection of Dr. Sam and Ruth Dunkell,’ Modern and Contemporary Art, Bonhams, London.

2003    ‘Who is Dorothy Beskind?’  El Temps De L’Art.

2002    Making Sense of the City: Films and Photographs of Artists in New York by Dorothy Beskind, Exhibition curator, catalogue essay, editor, (University of Leeds, Art Gallery).

2002   ‘Prismas cambiantes,’ La Vanguardia, Vanessa Corby and Griselda Pollock.

2001   ‘Don’t Look Back: Reading for the Ellipses in the Discourse of Eva Hess[e],’ Third Text, issue 57, winter 2001-2002, p.31-42.

Conferences and Conference Proceedings

2018 ‘Formless, Bataille and the re-materialisation of the social’, Panel The Confluences of Anthropology and Art History in Art, Materiality and Representation, Royal Anthropological Institute, The Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, British Museum and the Department of Anthropology, SOAS, 1-3^rd June 2018.

2017 ‘A Feminist Space at Leeds: Looking Back to Think Forward’, symposium 15-17 December, ‘”Painting out patriarchy”: The matter of the maternal and the work of Virginia Bodman and Griselda Pollock.

2017 ‘The maternal line’ with Lucy O’Donnell and Sally Taylor, Drawing Conversations 2: Body, Space, Object, Institute for Creative Enterprise, Coventry University, 8^th December. 

2017 ‘Materials and Making: Smithson, Egypt, Barnsley and Me’, Ancient Egypt in Yorkshire: Lecture Series, Cooper Gallery, Barnsley, 4 November, invited speaker. 

2017 'Drawing Matters', One-day International Symposium, convenor, co-organised with Dr Lucy O’Donnell and Sally Taylor, 14^th July, 2017. 

2017 ‘The Sedimentation of the Social: Smithson’s Egypt and the ruins of the death drive’ and invited roundtable discussant, Society of Literature, Science and the Arts, ‘Empathies’, Basel, Switzerland, 20-24^th June.

2016   Aesthetica Future Now Symposium: Panel Chair Session 9, ‘The Future of Art: Talent Development and Responsibility with Dani Burrows, Delfina Foundation. Portfolio Review session. 

2013   ‘Matrixial Memory, Phallic Forgetting: Migration and Mothering in the Case History of Eva Hesse,’ The Cultures of Memory, York St John University (host), Syracuse University, UCL and Massey University,  

2010   ‘American Cultural Memory and the Absented History of Eva Hesse:

Testimony and the resituating an artist’s of practice,’ Witnessing History: Holocaust Testimony from the Scrolls of Auschwitz to the Present, University of Leeds.

2009   Creative Practice/Creative Research: Materiality/Process/Performativity. An International Symposium, York St John University, convenor, April 15-17. Plenary speakers: Estelle Barrett (Deakin), Barb Bolt (Melbourne), Bracha Ettinger (European Graduate School, SWISS).

2008   ‘Common Sense: Class, Creativity and the Everyday in the Work of Richard Billingham,’ College Art Association 96th Annual Conference, Dallas 2008

2007   Contemporary Issues and Material Culture, York Museum’s Trust Symposium, November. 

2007   ‘Makers and Making Between Trauma and Cultural Memory,’ panel co-convenor, with Dr. Elsa Chen, UCLA, Contestations, Association of Art Historians 33rd Annual Conference, Ulster University, Belfast.

2006   ‘Couched in Aggression: Darwin’s legacies for Freudian theories of Creativity.’ Evolution: Biological, Cultural and Cosmic, 20^th Annual Conference of the Society for Literature, Science and Arts, New York.

2006   ‘Matrixial Memory, Phallic Forgetting: Migration and Mothering in the Case History of Eva Hesse,’ panel paper, and Chair of Session ‘Post-Trauma, Post-Memory: History, Representation, Affect’ at The Afterlife of Memory: Historia/Memoria/Amnesia, Congress CATH 2006, AHRB CentreCATH, University of Leeds.

2006   Yorkshire Society, Annual Dinner, Speaker.

2005    ‘“…What You Need is A Nice Cup of Tea Dear” or Tracey Emin; Speaking Experience Beyond Cultural Memory,‘ Mothers and Death: Ethical and Aesthetic Issues Around the Lethal Mother-Child Relationship, University of Bordeaux III, 1-3 December.  

2005    ‘Something to Show for It?: Preliminary Notes on Termination and Creativity in the Work of Tracey Emin,’ The Sacred and The Feminine, AHRB CentreCATH, University of Leeds, January 14-16^th.

2004    ‘Staying Alive; Trauma, Creativity and Survival in the work of Eva Hesse,’ CAA Annual conference, Seattle, February 2005. Paper accepted but could not attend conference due to serious injury.

2002    Encountering Eva Hesse, A split site conference to coincide with the 2002 Eva Hesse retrospective at Tate Modern, convenor, co-organiser with AHRB CentreCATH, University of Leeds and Tate Modern in association with the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.

2002    Encountering Eva Hesse: Then and Now through changing Prisms, a joint conference paper with Griselda Pollock, Eva Hesse: Kontext - Materialität – Rezeption, Symposium Museum Wiesbaden, Germany, 30^th August – 1^st September.

2002    “‘The Academic’ as Masquerade: Terror and Belonging for a Working Class Woman in Academe” panel paper presented at Translating Class, Altering Hospitality, Congress CATH 202 International conference, AHRB CentreCATH, University of Leeds.

Professional Activities

• Member of the National Art Education Archive (UK) Steering Group and Working Group.
  
• Member of the Research Innovation and Knowledge Exchange Alliance, Council of Higher Education for Art and Design.