Visiting Artist’s Talk – Bethan Hughes

For this week's Visiting Artist's Talk we welcome alumna Bethan Hughes.

Bethan Hughes’ audiovisual installations, sculptures and texts interweave archival research and and speculative narratives to explore the unnatural ecologies generated through industry, commerce and technology.

Her work has been exhibited at venues including LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón (SP), gnration, Braga (PT), Kunstpavillion, Innsbruck (AT), nGbK, Berlin (DE), Ars Electronica, Linz (AT), Haubrok Foundation, Berlin (DE), and HAUNT/frontviews, Berlin (DE).

In 2023, she was a European Media Art Platform fellow and in 2024, she completed an Art & Ecology residency at Museums Quartier Vienna.

Bethan studied Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art and Media Art at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. She completed a PhD in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds in 2020, with a thesis titled Against Immateriality: 3D CGI and Contemporary Art.

She is currently working on her first monograph, forthcoming early 2025 with K. Verlag. Titled Elastic Continuum, it traces the material and symbolic transformations of a rubber-containing plant better known the Kazakh dandelion.

About the Visiting Artists’ Talks series

The Visiting Artist’s Talk (VAT) series hosts talks by an exciting range of arts practitioners from around the world every Monday afternoon from 2 to 4pm during teaching weeks.

All of our talks are compulsory for our Fine Art students but are also open to anyone else who would like to join us. There’s no need to book – please just turn up!

For more information, please email Chris Taylor.

Find out more about the Visiting Artists Talks series.

Directions to the venue

This week’s talk takes place in Electrical Engineering Keysight Technologies Lecture Theatre (1.52).

See the campus map for location of Electrical Engineering building.

From main entrance, go upstairs to the first floor, go straight ahead, through two sets of double doors. The Keysight Technologies lecture theatre is ahead.

Accessibility information can be found here.

Image

Bethan Hughes, Hevea Act 6: An Elastic Continuum, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist.