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European Fine Art Masters Tutors

The Art Society Nature coordinator and tutors are research active practitioners and the programme is supported by a core team of regular tutors with visiting tutors joining the programme to teach specific practical modules.

Benjamin Jenner

Tutor, European Fine Art Masters
Fine Art Masters Tutor

Benjamin Jenner is an artist and practice-based researcher whose creative process is rooted in participation and dialogic exchange as a platform for the generation of collaborative forms of representation. They are particularly interested in devising techniques for allying ulterior forms of sensory perception with the embodied imagination in order to exceed empirical methods of observation and normative forms of knowledge production.

In 2024, Benjamin completed a fine art, practice-based PhD at The University of Leeds that employed poetic form, site writing, drawing, and videography to re-present the experience of non-visual forms of subjectivity. As part of this enquiry, they co-founded the collective Local Senses, a group of nine individuals undergoing changes to their vision; and Reading and Writing Bodies in Space, a group of six artist-researchers exploring the interface of drawing/writing/performing as a site for thinking beyond semantics. By these means, Benjamin engages the field of artistic-research as an opportunity to ask questions of the role of scholarship in society and the role of subjectivity in defining a relationship with the world.

Benjamin disseminates their work nationally and internationally via exhibitions, festivals, online and print publications, and practice-sharing gatherings. In October 2024, they will contribute a workshop and text publication to Drawing Across x Along x Between University Borders at The University of Porto; and in December they will collaborate on the project Drawing as Slow Conversation at The Writers’ Room, London. Benjamin sits on the editorial board of CePRA Journal at The University of Leeds.

Sara Trillo

Tutor, European Fine Art Masters
Fine Art Masters Tutor

Sara Trillo is a visual artist based in East Kent. She explores landscapes through research, walking, and making, seeking to uncover hidden histories of the human presence within our shared ecological environment. Her sculptural output ranges from small handheld tools to immersive installations deploying archaic making skills such as flint-napping and plant-dyeing processes. She also leads public walks which include performative sharing narratives about the mythologies of these sites. 
Recent projects include commissioned work for "Chaleur Humane", the 2023 Dunkerque Triennale Art and Industrie: "Still and Still Moving", Od Arts Festival Somerset 2023: "Re-Enchanting the Commons" at Celsius Projects, Malmö 2023; "Wasteless 2" at Way Out East, University of East London 2024: and a series of commissioned performative walks this year for organisations including Cement Fields/Whitstable Biennale Archive, RCA/Kent Downs NL, Jarman Now/Manchester Metropolitan University, and Canterbury Christ Church University. Sara is currently collaborating with gardener Fiona Parry to experiment with planting traditional forage crops using chalk and soil mixes as sculptural output, as part of a Kent Downs NL/Creative Folkestone commission. This research will be developed further through a chalk extraction residency at GroundWork Gallery, King’s Lynn this summer.

Ian Bottle

Tutor, European Fine Art Masters
Fine Art Masters Tutor

Ian's work spans painting, sculpture, drawing, photography and artists books. He completed his MA in painting at Chelsea School of Art after studying to BA at Newcastle Polytechnic. Originally from Kent, he returned to the coast to set up a studio and work as a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art in the School of Further Education at University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury. Ian has continued to show work throughout his career whilst participating in a variety of research projects that have continued to shape his practice.

Dominic Rose

Tutor, European Fine Art Masters
Fine Art Masters Tutor

Dominic Rose is an artist living in Margate. Working across a variety of media including photography, sculpture and found materials, his work explores the role of the artist and artwork in the era of hyper-production, as well as ideas around materials and waste.
A dual national and bilingual in French, Dominic teaches aspects of 20th century French art history and culture, with students working with print and French language. The course includes Situationism, Collapsologie and protest with work being produced in screenprint and letterpress.
Dominic is himself a graduate of the European Fine Art Masters programme at The Margate School.

SÅ‚awa Harasymowicz

Making Digital Tutor, European Fine Art Masters
Fine Art Masters Tutor

SÅ‚awa Harasymowicz is an artist currently based on the East Kent coast. Her practice is largely narrative-driven and she works with drawing, moving image, different photographic and print techniques, installation, writing and sound.

After graduating from The Royal College of Art in London she produced a body of work responding to Sigmund Freud’s ‘Wolf Man’ including a book and exhibition. She has exhibited at The National Poetry Library Southbank Centre, London, the Ethnographic Museum of Kraków, Poland, and The Freud Museum, London. In progress is a site-specific project in Germany.
She is currently completing a practice-based PhD in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Harasymowicz has lectured at the Royal College of Art, UCA, and other universities in London and beyond.

Amias Hanley

Tutor, European Fine Art Masters
Fine Art Masters Tutor

Through sound and spatial media, Amias Hanley explores auditory-led questions that engage the scholarship of queer ecologies and transgender studies. Central to their practice is the question of how listening processes can give rise to the experience of ecological awareness and how auditory sensations produce senses of being, place, and relationality. These inquiries are often site-responsive, generating speculative encounters that aim to offer sonic propositions for engaging composite forms and conditions.
 
Currently, their research-practice focuses on exploring the purposes and mechanisms used by plants, animals, and machines to process, interpret, and understand audio signals. Amias is particularly interested in investigating the artistic possibilities and influence of these processes on the futures of sonic communication, sound ecologies, and auditory cultures.
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Their artworks, installations, and collaborative projects have been shown internationally with organisations, festivals, and galleries including: Ars Electronica Festival, Avantwhatever Festival, Gertrude Contemporary, III International Conference on Sonorities Research (CIPS), Latrobe Regional Gallery, Liquid Architecture, McClelland Sculpture Park Gallery, MESS (Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio), Next Wave, Speak Percussion and The Substation. Amias has published sole and co-authored papers for Unlikely Journal for Creative Arts, Journal of Intercultural Studies and Disclaimer Journal. 

Rachel Kirk

Maker & Print Tutor, European Fine Arts
Fine Art Masters Tutor

Rachel is a Graphic Designer, Communications Consultant and Educator. She holds an MA in Graphic Communication Design at Central Saint Martins, UAL, where she now teaches Critical and Contextual Studies alongside other design modules. Rachel has a broad design and communications skillset and over fifteen years of experience working primarily with not-for-profit organisations and start-ups focusing on sustainability and socially-engaged practice. Alongside leading the Maker & Print module for European Fine Arts, Rachel

Cecilia Bonilla

Tutor, European Fine Art Masters
Fine Art Masters Tutor

Cecilia Bonilla is a multi-disciplinary visual artist working with collage, installation, assemblage and video. She completed her post-graduate studies at Chelsea College of Art and Design and now lives and works in Margate, UK. She has taught at postgraduate level in various universities including University of the Creative Arts, Farnham and Canterbury and The University of Bedfordshire.

Recent exhibitions include: "The Touch of Others" commissioned by The Eye Sees, Pepineire, France(2023); Campo Art Festival, Laguna Garzon, Uruguay (2022); "Contagio" (2020), Cecilia Brunson Projects, London; "Notices in a Mutable Terrain" (2019), Piero Atchugarry gallery, Miami; "I’ts Not Forever" (2018), Galeria del Paseo, Punta; del Este, Uruguay. Her videos have been screened at Arnolfini, Bristol (2013), at Charlie Dutton Gallery, London (2012), at EyeBeam, NY (2013), amongst others.

Melissa Ryke

Professor of English at Esä
Fine Art Masters Tutor

Melissa is an Australian artist. A graduate of the Schools of Fine Arts in Australia and France and of the European Post-Graduate Diploma in Art and Sound (EPAS) at the KASK in Ghent (2020), her creative research focuses on a playful and poetic investigation of everyday life and on experimentation with audiovisual installations. Using these media, she approaches the notion of bodily experience from a phenomenological angle. Her most recent projects explore the notion of 'embodied listening'; the listening, recording and broadcasting of sound as a haptic and sensory experience.

Rebecca Truscott-Elves

Memoire and Sculpture Tutor, European Fine Art Masters. On Maternity Leave for 2024-2025 term.
Fine Art Masters Tutor

Rebecca Elves is a multidisciplinary artist making ceramic, drawn and painted beings which work to quietly repair the fabric between worlds. Selected recent exhibitions include A Siren’s Call, commissioned as part of Art in Romney Marsh (2023); Lido Open, Lido Stores, Margate (2023, selected by Charles Williams); In and Beyond Things at Limbo Arts, Margate (solo, 2023); Supple Octopus with Coral Brookes at The Tub, Hackney (2022); What I See I’ll Never Tell at Wilder Gallery, London (2021); Ghosts That Live Amongst Us (2020) at 155a Gallery and The Studio at 4 a.m. at Hastings Contemporary (2020), curated by Anne Ryan. Rebecca has spoken about her practice at venues including Drawing Room’s Drawing Research Forum (2023) and the University of Gloucestershire’s Home Symposium (2022). In 2016 she graduated from the Royal College of Art, where she received the Gordon Peter Pickard Award to make drawings in Montréal. She has recently completed her fully funded practice-led PhD, during which she was awarded a 2021 British Council Venice Research Fellowship.

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