Dr Mike Collier
BiographyMike Collier is a lecturer, writer, curator and artist. He studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College before being appointed Gallery Manager at the ICA in London.
He subsequently became a freelance curator and arts organiser, working extensively in the UK and abroad. In 1985 he moved to Newcastle to run the Arts Development Strategy at the Laing Art Gallery, where he initiated the Tyne International Exhibition of Contemporary Art.
For the last 15 years he has worked in education and is currently Programme Leader for Foundation Studies in Art and Design at the University of Sunderland.
Throughout his career, Mike has maintained his artistic practice and he is now based in the High Bridge Studios in Newcastle. He has shown work in a number of one person and group shows in the UK.
Research Interests
My work explores the interrelated nature of ecological and cultural ideas through a detailed study of local environments and (through walking) our embodied engagement with `landscape¿.
It charts the tensions between abstraction and representation. My images and colours are abstract and arrived at intuitively; my text is poetic but place specific. I maintain that our perception of the world is phenomenological - it is active and multi-layered which is why the act of walking through the environment is central to my work.
I am also interested in the phenomenology of language and etymology. In Six Birds of the Coquet Valley I pictures the names of birds common to the Coquet Valley in local dialect - names which derive mostly from Old English.
Wittol (Wheatear), Chitty (Meadow Pipit), Queest (Woodpigeon), Calloo (Curlew), Keelie (Kestrel) and Wizzle (Dipper).
These words are a poetic reminder that an understanding and feeling for the natural environment was there in the language ordinary people used - these names are what local people called the birds; names that reflect more closely than current nomenclature, either the look (Wittol), sound, (Calloo) or action (Wizzle) of the birds.
These new works reflect a twenty first century perspective on the relationship between contemporary society and the roots from which our understanding of natural processes comes from; a relationship based more on our direct experience of the environment than on hierarchies of class and ownership.
Research Activities
Cosmopoetics and Art Walking: Between 2008 and 2010, I produced a coherent body of work that looked at the relationship between art, ecology, environment and experience through walking. It was shown in a number of venues over a two-year period, during which time I was also commissioned to make a new work for the Contemporary Urban Centre (Independents Liverpool, Liverpool Biennale) for the European City of Culture and to produce a billboard in Byker. The culmination of this activity was an invitation to present a paper about this work at the international conference of Cosmopetics at Durham University in September 2010. This paper will be published by Routledge in a forthcoming book entitled Cosmopoetics.
NOTES on a return: I was project consultant (exhibition, symposium, performances & book), selector, writer, symposium chair for NOTES on a return, an exhibition and symposium programme at the Laing Art Gallery (5/09 - 9/09) conceived and curated by Sophia Hao. `NOTES on a return placed the afterlife of live works (from the 80s in Exhibitions which I curated) into a space of continual reconsideration and provided a contextual introduction to the role of memory in the production of archives - [channelling] it into a maze of 'adjustment and re-adjustment', said Hao.
PhD: I have recently successfully completed a practice-based PhD entitled: An evaluation of the link between abstraction, representation and language within the context of current theories of Environmental Aesthetics and Phenomenology.
Current Projects: A Summer Walk up the Tyne and the North Tyne with natural historians Keith Bowey, Matt Hawkins, Steve Westerberg and Tina Wiffen walking from the mouth of Tyne, via Hexham up the North Tyne to Thorneyburn.There are nine walks over five weekends in May and June 2011. (see www.mikecollier.eu for further information).
These walks are part of a project funded by VARC (Visual Arts in Rural Communities) and supported by The Customs House, South Tyneside Council, The University of Sunderland and Northumberland National Park.
An exhibition (at The Customs House and High Green), a series of artist-led workshops and a publication will be developed from information recorded on these walks. This project will then be mirrored with a similar project in Japan.