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Curriculum Manager: Pernille Holm Mercer, BA, MA, PhD

Pernille Holm Mercer has worked as lecturer for sixteen years. She taught at City Lit and Goldsmiths College and continues to teach at UCA and Camberwell Art College. She has worked as Manager for the Foundation Degree at Working Men’s College validated by Middlesex University since 2007. She is a practicing fine artist working in 3D, installation, and new media. She has exhibited in Europe, London, and the North and South East of England, and is the winner of several awards, including the Goldsmiths' Bursary, the Jackel International and Rentokil Foundation Awards. Her current interests include the poetic of the everyday, semiotics, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic perspectives on art, particularly links between art, play, and creativity.

 

Lecturer: Lola Frost, BA, MA, PhD.

Lola Frost has worked as a lecturer for 22 years and has taught Art History and Art Theory at Rhodes University and Technikon Natal and drawing at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. She has lectured on the FdA Historical Context of Art and Design at the Working Men’s College, validated by Middlesex University since 2007. She has given conference papers, written and published on the topic of Politics and Aesthetics. Lola Frost is also a practicing artist who has exhibited in the UK and in South Africa, where her work is held in several major collections. Her current painting practice engages the tradition of sublime painting and her contribution to that field is the articulation of what might be called a relational and gynocentric sublime. 

Lecturer: Gillian McIver, BA, MA (Canada) BA, MA (UK)

Gillian McIver gained postgraduate degrees in Cultural History, and worked in media before doing BA Hons. Film and Photography and a Master of Arts in Visual Culture. She makes and curates site specific art, and makes films and photography. She has been working as a lecturer since 2003 alongside her art practice. Her work is strongly informed by Expressionism, involving explorations of real things and real places, reinterpreted through an expressionistic, subjective and wholly immersed direct experience. 

Lecturer: Simon Hollington, BA

Simon Hollington has been teaching in higher education since the year 2000 and is currently an associate lecturer in Contextual Studies at Central St. Martins, University of The Arts London.  He is a practicing artist working in a range of media from painting and drawing to interactive narrative environments. His worked has been exhibited widely in The UK including Tate Modern and The ICA London as well as internationally including The 51^st Venice Biennale as well as shows in mainland Europe, North and South America and Australia.  He has been a guest speaker at Tate Britain, The Royal College of Art and The Royal Society for the Arts.

 

Module Leader: Business Context of Art and Design & Employment Engagement: Alison Heath BA, MA (RCA)

Alison graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2005 with an MA in Fine Art, Printmaking, following a BA in Graphic Fine Art at the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury. Since completing her MA she has exhibited extensively in a number of group shows in London, including at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and in Europe and the US. Alongside her own practice Alison has been teaching since 2007 and joined the Working Men’s College as Module leader in 2011. She also teaches at the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury, the Mary Ward Centre and Morley College. Within her work she uses a range of processes in print, photography and digital, exploring urban space and the imaginary.

 

Lecturer: Andrea Luka Zimmerman, BA, PhD
Andrea Luka Zimmerman has run filmmaking workshops for over a decade, in communities, colleges, and higher education, and she is a visiting lecturer and tutor at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, and Wimbledon School of Art, and teach on the Documentary MA at Brunel University. She is an artist-filmmaker, photographer and cultural activist. A founding member of film-collective Vision Machine, her first feature essay film “Prisoner of War” (85mins, 2012) emerged from research for a practice PhD that explored the borderlands between public and private memory; concerns that continue to inform her practice. Her current research interests are Performativity and Genre, Cinema and Militarism, Grey Zones between Private and Public Memory, Spectral and Spectacular Representations of Political Violence, Cultures of Representation.

 

Lecturer: Christina Niederberger, BA, MA, PHD

Christina Niederberger has worked as a lecturer for six years. She taught on the MA at Goldsmiths College and has a part-time post as a visiting tutor on the Foundation Degree at the Working Men’s College since 2008. Christina is a practicing fine artist working in painting and her work is represented by galleries in the UK and Switzerland. She has an international exhibition profile and her work is regularly exhibited in London, Europe and the US. Christina’s work is included in several private and public collections including the British Government Art Collection, Goldsmiths Collection and the Collection of Media and Communication in Switzerland. Christina has received several awards such as a full AHRB and AHRC bursary, the Goldsmiths’ Warden Purchase prize and student awards from the Byam Shaw and Heatherleys School of Art. Christina’s artistic practice is directed at a testing of the possibilities of painting as an innovative medium in the 21^st century with a particular focus on re-interpretations of Modernist rhetoric for a contemporary context. 

Lecturer: Laura Emsley, BA, MA

Laura Emsley has taught at various institutes since 2008 including the Slade School of Fine Arts, The University of Westminster, UCA and UWE. She is a London based artist working in painting, 3D and media and has exhibited in London, Glasgow and Europe (including Paris, Rotterdam, Maastricht and Bregenz.) Her work has been shown in galleries such as The Approach (London) and Witte De With (Rotterdam.) In 2011 she was awarded a residency at the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa. The founding reference for Emsley’s work is the painting by Paul Gauguin entitled “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”  She seeks to re-ask and link the big questions to specific contemporary events and locations. For instance, the 2010 Football World Cup held in South Africa, becomes a template on which to map out a series of relationships linking the evolution of the human foot to historical and contemporary diasporas.

 

Lecturer: Sheena Calvert BA, MA, PhD

Sheena Calvert has over 25 years’ teaching experience, in the UK and USA. This presently includes Central St. Martins College of Art, the London College of Communication, and the University of Westminster. In the past, she has taught at the University of Hertfordshire, Bath Spa University, and Rutgers University in the USA.  Her teaching and personal practice includes theory and practice, across graphic design, illustration, and fine art. She has a particular interest and experience in typography and book design. She ran her own design studio in New York for a number of years, and has worked for many clients in both the profit and non-profit design spheres. She has been a recipient of AHRC awards, and teaching and research grants, both here and in the US. Her current research interests include the ‘shifting’ relationship between digital and analogue technologies within creative practice, and the role of ‘material’ forms of language in shaping experience and knowledge. She has her own letterpress printing studio in E3, where she experiments with these ideas, and ‘more’.

 

Technician: Coleman Saunders BA, MA (RCA)  

Coleman Saunders is a highly experienced 3D tutor and art technician at WMC. He has a BA in Sculpture and an MA in Glass and Ceramics from the Royal College, and over 30 years of teaching and work experience in the creative industries. He has had a varied career involved with the “practical” and the solving of problems. Apart from teaching, he has worked for Sotheby’s as a porter and for a firm transporting and hanging art, including a show at the Hayward Gallery. He has also worked as a prop builder for film and theatre and interior designers, his clients including the English National Opera, Liberty of Regent Street, and the architects Merrimetch & Withers.