Dr Cian Quayle
Associate Professor
Biography
Dr Cian Quayle is an Associate Professor and Programme Leader for BA Photography in the Division of Art, Design and Innovation within the Faculty of Arts, Media and Social Sciences. At Chester Cian has led interdisciplinary initiatives for exhibition, collaboration and publication, which also contributed to the development of CASC (Contemporary Art Space Chester). As a Research Coordinator Cian continues to support and mentor research within Art and Design, and also sits on the Faculty Ethics Committee. Dr Quayle is currently Director of Studies of practice-based PhD research students. He has also acted as an Adviser and External Examiner for BA Photography courses throughout the UK. Quayle originally studied painting and printmaking and later turned his attention to photographic practice. Following completion of a practice-based PhD in 2005 he curated Transmission in 2007. This was a select exhibition of among the first tranche of artist researchers emerging from the newly formed University of the Arts London.
Teaching and Supervision
Dr Quayle joined the University in 2007 and was was instrumental in the development of BA Photography, within the Department of Art and Design, becoming Programme Leader in 2008. Quayle’s teaching philosophy is rooted in lived-experience and embodied practice, which draws on personal narratives, the vernacular, and ways in which photography can both document and re-imagine encounters with people, places and objects. A meeting of practice, theory and context guide the development of critically reflective and independent practice using both analogue and digital forms. The moving image and photobook are also significant in the study and understanding contemporary photographic practice. Photography’s relationship with other forms of visual representation including painting, sculpture, video, performance and cinema also situates the wider significance of photography’s multiple forms and specificity as a medium.
Research and Knowledge Exchange
Quayle is a practicing artist, writer and researcher curator whose practice investigates ideas of place, concepts of home, and the trajectories, spaces and encounters, which index or trace the movement between one place and another. The way that artist journeys and travel activate these connections provides the basis for strategies and practices, which adopt autobiographical and layered narratives related to wider identities and exile cultures. An eclectic array of research interests has included responses to the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni, Belgian cycling legend Eddy Merckx, Fletcher Christian and the Bounty Mutineers as well as other artists and writers legacies. Cian’s formative research examined the work of artists in America using photography as a Photoconceptual and performative document, including Ed Ruscha, Douglas Huebler and Bas jan Ader, and the work of artists in Europe collecting and transforming found objects and materials including Jimmie Durham, Gustav Metzger and Kurt Schwitters. Recent projects and writing have followed in the footsteps of Dada artist Kurt Schwitters’ internment and exile, and Wirral born author Malcolm Lowry’s relationship with the sea: the Isle of Man, Vancouver and Liverpool. Clochán explores the landscape of Ireland and sites of pilgrimage and shelter, boundaries and borders. Sites of the Habitus and the Filmic is an ongoing project which investigates sites of habitation, retail, work, and leisure, within the cinematic space of the city, its periphery and landscape beyond.