Annie Carpenter is an artist and academic based in the South Pennines. Her studio practice employs amateur labour in a haptic-driven pursuit of scientific knowledge, often in the form of mechanical sculptures. She periodically brings these DIY methods into performative ‘demonstrations’, giving the viewer an intimate, two-way encounter with the themes behind her work. She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Leeds Beckett University and co-director of para-lab, an organisation facilitating experimental methods of collaboration between artists and scientists, running in parallel to academic institutions.

For her practice-based PhD with CNoS, Carpenter is addressing the normative cultures of collaboration between art and science which have produced unhelpful asymmetries of exchange where art is instrumentalised for the public understanding of science. The project will critically co-opt methodologies drawn from the natural sciences and sociology, using research-driven art practice to disrupt the standard terrains (physical and social) of the working cultures surrounding both art and science to provide new models of science outreach. Employing fieldwork ‘excursions’, amateur labour and intimate performance, the project will respond to scientist and philosopher Isabelle Stengers’ urgent call to replace public engagement with a ‘public intelligence’ of science.

For further information see: www.anniecarpenter.co.uk
Contact: annie.carpenter@northumbria.ac.uk