Transmission: Penny McCarthy and Terry O’Connor – Tuesday 05 February 2019
Penny McCarthy and Terry O’Connor will present their practices and shared interests, touching on the processes of making work in relation to language, authorship, and interpretation. Their dialogue will also explore the kinds of experiences their work opens for viewers in the different contexts of its presentation.
Penny McCarthy is a Reader in Fine Art and Course Leader for Postgraduate Fine Art. Working primarily with drawing and text, her work is presented internationally in a variety of contexts: in museums and galleries, at conferences, and as live projects and publications. Her work has been supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England and Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her recent projects have been for Liquid Crystal Display at Site Gallery, Sheffield, Picture Room in New York and Beware the Cat, a research collaboration with Terry O’Connor.
Terry O’Connor is a core member and performer with Forced Entertainment, a collective practice of six artists based in Sheffield who have been making performance since 1984 and received the 2016 International Ibsen Prize for contribution to theatre. In 2009, she was awarded an AHRC Creative Fellowship at Roehampton University and in 2011 she was made Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance Practice at the University of Sheffield. In November 2016 she became Creative Fellow as part of a collaboration between the University of Birmingham, the RSC and the Shakespeare Institute. Her work investigates experimental and improvisational process and collaborative aesthetics in contemporary performance.
Transmission: Penny McCarthy and Terry O’Connor
Tuesday 05 February 2019, 4.30PM – 6.00PM
Pennine Lecture Theatre, Owen Building
Sheffield Hallam University, City Campus S1 2LW
Transmission is an annual series of lectures and symposia, now in its seventeenth year, and is a collaboration between Fine Art, the Art & Design Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, and Site Gallery. Convened by Sharon Kivland in 2001, Transmission was developed collaboratively with Lesley Sanderson from 2001 to 2004, and with Jasper Joseph-Lester from 2004 to 2012. The series is now convened by Sharon Kivland, TC McCormack, Hester Reeve, and Julie Westerman, in association with Site Gallery, Sheffield. The lecture series has an annual theme, and involves students from Fine Art, fromundergraduates to PhDs.
Transmission is the passing of information via a channel, and this is the intention of the Transmission project. We enquire about the aesthetic and discursive forms required by practices in the field of contemporary art and theory that address sociality and subjectivity. It has encompassed a lecture programme, seminar discussions, an annual symposium, a print portfolio, four series of books: Transmission Annual, The Rules of Engagement, Transmission chapbooks, and five volumes of discussions/interviews, entitled Transmission: Speaking and Listening. These are published by Artwords Press, London.
Site Gallery is Sheffield’s international contemporary art space, specialising in moving image, new media, and performance. Pioneering emerging art practices and ideas, Site works in partnership with local, regional, and international collaborators to nurture artistic talent and support the development of contemporary art. At the heart of what Site does is the connection of people to artists and to art, inspiring new thinking and debate through its public programmes and participatory activity. Through diverse programming, Site reveals the process of making art to invite its audience to engage, explore, and connect. In 2018 Site Gallery re-opened after a building programme which trebled the scale of its public area.