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  2. School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies
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Susan Ball

Susan Ball

  • Email: rprm5875@leeds.ac.uk
  • Thesis title: 'Listen - its the sound of a new art'. An analysis of a pioneering programme of sound art commissioning in Leeds 2003-13 and the conceptual challenges that listening enacts as a mode of art reception and impacts on public art.
  • Supervisors: Dr Robert Knifton, Professor Helen Graham

Profile

I am a cultural producer and academic researcher who uses collaborative working methods to strengthen value systems rooted in culture, place and community that foster interdisciplinary learning and practice.

My current academic study in FAHACS relates to a self-curated public art programme with international artists that investigated the acoustic and multi-sensory design of the city and listener sensibilities (2003-13).

My interests lie in developing reflexive R&D environments and adopting creative co-designed and DIY organising processes to facilitate place-base communities alongside artists and arts organisations. This way of working was conceptualized as an emergent ‘slow architecture’ methodology and adopted in the re-animation and co-ownership of post-industrial waterside sites in London, Sheffield, Birmingham and Shropshire, with the landowners and client Canal and Rivers Trust.

Other interdisciplinary research and learning environments in my portfolio include ‘The Making of Place’ with the University of Leeds and Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2011) funded by Arts Council England, and ‘Ways of Hearing’, a participative research programme in urban acoustics with thirty-six interdisciplinary practitioners from planning, architecture and sound art & design, University College London, national sonic arts agency Sound and Music, commercial partners Arup Engineering and design publication Blueprint (2013-2014).

As part of research teams, I have co-designed projects in the complimentary fields of public art, creativity, activism and community-led regeneration. This includes structuring activity to facilitate critical review of models, methods and processes with resulting publications in regard to;
• informal alternative economies: ‘Creative Temporal Costings; A Proto-Publics Research Programme’, Royal College of Art (2015)
• building resilience in marginal areas of the city: ‘Margins Within the City’, City Journal (2011)
• a critical analysis of the meanwhile use of buildings for artists: ‘A hidden economy, a critical review of Meanwhile Use’, IXIA (2013)
• slow growth models of regeneration: ‘A Slow But Sure Strategy -Warwick Bar, Birmingham’, Arts Professional (2014).

My interest remains in site-specific public art and of publicness and specifically sound art. From 2002-2013 I commissioned US artist sound artist Bill Fontana for ‘Sound Lines’ with research workshops and publication. As a producer, I introduced the Berlin-based artist Hans Peter Kuhn into the ‘Light’ Neville Street design team to produce a 100m long sound and light installation for the main gateway tunnel into Leeds city centre, launched in 2009 and decommissioned in 2023. I am now working with the Sculptors Papers Archive in the Henry Moore Institute on the 'Light' Neville Street public collection.

I run the cultural agency Media and Arts Partnership (MAAP) and am on the steering group of the artist-led Situation Leeds: Contemporary Artists in the Public Realm (2025 onwards).