Meet our research-active academic staff.

Plymouth College of Art is home to a cross-disciplinary community of makers and thinkers, all of whom are seeking a critical space in which to interrogate and push the boundaries of their specialist interests and working practices. Our research-active academics and invited experts collaborate to radically expand creative practice and propose new approaches to social justice and creative learning.

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Associate Professor Paul Fieldsend-Danks

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Judith Noble

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Dr Stephen Felmingham

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Dr Steven Paige is Senior Lecturer & Subject Leader for Postgraduate Studies and Subject Tutor on MA Fine Art, at Plymouth College of Art.

Dr Steven Paige

Peter Barker Head of School Design and Communication at Plymouth College of Art Photo by Katrine Worsoe

Peter Barker

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Mel Brown

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Lucy Leake

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Caroline Pedler

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Dr Antigoni Pasidi

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Dr Eddie Falvey

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Dr Kim Bagley

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Dr Mohini Chandra

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Dr Natalia Eernstman

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Frédérique Santune

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Gayle Matthias is a Senior Lecturer & Subject Leader for BA (Hons) 3D Design Crafts at Plymouth College of Art. Gayle is also a Subject Tutor in the postgraduate centre, applying her experience at the V&A and Museum of Glass to undergraduate and MA specialisms including ceramics, glass, and sculpture.

Gayle Matthias

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Huma Mulji

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Jane Prior

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Jason Hirons

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Kirsty Smith

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Louise Fago-Ruskin

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Rachel Darbourne

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Robert Manners

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Tim Gundry

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Research

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Connect with the research-active staff that make up our college's outstanding academic expertise.

Research Staff

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Integrity & Ethics

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Our Research, Scholarship and Practice Activities gain national and international attention. Find out about our past and present research events and symposiums.

Events & Conferences

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Research Themes

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Repository

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Research and Scholarship at Plymouth College of Art is involved externally on regional, national and international levels. Find out about the research projects supported by or carried out by staff and students of the college.

Supported Projects

Our research philosophy is grounded in our distinctive mission and purpose as a specialist provider of education in art, craft, design and media. It reflects our beliefs in the value of creative practice and the centrality of the principle of thinking through making.

It also reflects our commitment to promote innovation, intellectual curiosity, entrepreneurship and creativity, adding value to the cultural, social and economic life of Plymouth and the South West region, and contributing positively to broader national and international cultural and economic agendas. 
We strongly encourage and support links between research and pedagogy and between research and professional practice, and thinking through making radiates through all our communities of practice - fine artists, makers, designers and creative media producers. 
It denotes, for us, the fundamental importance of the practitioner’s relationship to, and understanding of, materials, media, tools and processes, be it (for example) film-making, glass-blowing, curatorial research, or performance art.

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We maintain a strong focus on professional studio and workshop regimes of knowledge and action, underpinned with an entrepreneurial/critical-curatorial approach to contexts of practice that are increasingly structured around portfolio career/SME settings. 
There are strong historical threads embedded in this stance that can be traced back to our roots as the Plymouth Drawing School, established in 1856 as part of the then nation-wide wave of art, design and industry teaching institutions set-up in the wake of the 1851 Great Exhibition. However, our contemporary investment in thinking through making emphatically does not signify a simplistic concentration solely on embodied technical skill. 
We view creative making as essentially a research site, or laboratory, for the deep exploration of determinate ideas and feelings - a project that is radically open to the future and which embraces an ‘expanded’ field of creative practices.

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Research and Scholarship at Plymouth College of Art is involved externally on regional, national and international levels. The sections below provide a brief synopsis of notable research projects supported by or led by staff and students of the college.

Making Learning is a crucible for open inquiry through arts education, that places making at the gravitational centre of learning. Creative learning and social justice are the double helix of our DNA.This cross-disciplinary conversation assembles the most progressive thinkers and practitioners in creative education across the full learning continuum. 
Making Learning is also a biennial symposium convening an international community of expertise and practice in creative pedagogy throughout the full continuum of learning, from early years education to Masters level, research and professional development.
For more information please visit our Research Groups page or contact Academic Dean, <a href="mailto:pfieldsenddanks@pca.ac.uk">Paul Fieldsend-Danks</a>

Making Futures is a research platform exploring contemporary craft and maker movements as ‘change agents’ in 21st-century society.
Convinced of the transformative potential of small-scale making and its capacity to contribute to new progressive futures, Making Futures seeks to situate these material cultures at the centre of the critical issue facing global consumer society: how we move beyond the reductive instrumentalism of ‘homo economicus’ and modes of mass consumption that are destructive of human and non-human natures.
For more information please visit our Research Groups page or contact Head of Research, <a href="mailto:jnoble@pca.ac.uk">Judith Noble</a>.

Tate Exchange is an ambitious ‘open experiment’ which enables associate organisations to devise and develop creative learning through public participation at Tate.
For more information please visit our Events &amp; Conferences page or contact Head of School (Critical + Cultural Studies), <a href="mailto:sfelmingham@pca.ac.uk">Stephen Felmingham</a>.

Seeking the Marvellous was a two-day interdisciplinary symposium that examined the work of Ithell Colquhoun (1906 - 1988) and other women connected both with Surrealism and with Britain. Organised by Plymouth College of Art in partnership with the Black Mirror research network, it was held at Plymouth College of Art in March 2018.
For more information please visit our Events &amp; Conferences page or contact <a href="mailto:jnoble@pca.ac.uk">Judith Noble</a>.

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Thinking through making

From art and social justice to memory and artefact, discover the future of making and learning.