Dr Maxine Bristow
Associate Professor
Biography
Dr Maxine Bristow is Associate Professor and Programme Leader for MA Fine Art. In her role as Research Coordinator for Art and Design, she was instrumental in the development of practice-based research within the university. She served as a member of the RAE2008 Art and Design sub-panel and was a member of the Arts and Humanities Peer Review College 2008 - 2018. As an artist, she has an established practice and exhibition profile spanning over 25 years. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented in the permanent collections of the Crafts Council, London; The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; and Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery. She was selected for The Jerwood Textiles Prize in 2002, and in 2008 was one of the nominated artists for the Northern Arts Prize.
Teaching and Supervision
Maxine has taught in the department of Fine Art since 1993. She teaches across all levels of the BA Fine Art course and is Programme Leader for MA Fine Art. Having initially trained in textiles, the dialogues between the medium specific conventions of textile and the post-medium condition of contemporary art have developed as a distinctive feature of the curriculum. Her teaching interest and expertise, however, extends beyond ‘the expanded field’ of textiles and is more broadly concerned with a material sensibility within contemporary fine art practice that transcends media boundaries. This includes the wealth of associated interdisciplinary discourses (material culture; feminist theory and issues of subjectivity; poststructuralist theory; the poetics and politics of space; the aesthetics of affect; ‘New Materialism’; sculpture, installation, and embodied practice; the decorative and relationships between fine art, applied art, and craft) that are both particular to textile and inform the richness and diversity of contemporary practice. Her teaching expertise at postgraduate level lies in research methodology/methods with respect to practice-based research, the distinctive epistemic dimension of artworks, and the particular role of practice within the context of research. She also has an interest in reflective practice and the use of learning journals, delivering lectures and seminars on the subject to both undergraduates and postgraduates. She has supervised/co-supervised three doctoral students to successful completion, is currently supervising/co-supervising a further four practice-based PhD students, (internally and externally) and has undertaken the role of examiner for six doctoral projects.
Research and Knowledge Exchange
As an artist with a history rooted in textiles, her research arises out of the positioning of her practice on the boundaries between the disciplinary contexts of textiles and fine art. Her practice-based research interrogates the complex material and semantic conventions of the textile, together with the everyday functioning environment, modernist legacies, and postmodern discourses with which the medium is entangled. These provide a point of departure for an expanded artistic practice that variously takes the form of wall-based objects, sculpture, and installation. Her early work harnessed the processes, materials and accompanying contexts of needlework/plain-sewing within the conventions of a minimalist aesthetic and the discourses of modernist autonomy. More recent work extends the agenda from the legacies of modernist abstraction and debates surrounding the literalist ‘objecthood’ of minimalist painting and sculpture, to one that draws its reference from the everyday ‘object-ness’ of mass material culture, and the often overlooked spatial practices, corporeal habits, and repeated routines through which we invisibly mediate our relationship with the world. Her current practice takes the form of a quasi-catalogue of interchangeable ‘thingly’ sculptural components, which are conceived in a way that can be configured and reconfigured within a series of formally staged mise-en-scènes. Offering the opportunity for continual rearrangement, the physical form of the work remains essentially mutable. Meaning similarly remains mutable mobilised through the various connections and temporary coalitions that are set in play across the different elements, the installational context and the subject of the experiential encounter. Informed by Theodor Adorno’s conception of the constellation and mimetic comportment and framed within PhD research entitled 'Pragmatics of attachment and detachment: medium (un)specificity as material agency in contemporary art', the studio enquiry developed into a much wider philosophical and phenomenological interrogation of the ‘productive indeterminacy’ of aesthetic experience as a formative sensuous mode of knowledge production.