Art, Society, Nature Residency: Hypatia

A bowl of glass // In the twilight there was a vision of power

Hypatia Collective are a group of artists composed of Madeline, Katarina, Rebecca and Zo. Brought together under the pedagogical umbrella of arts education, they have diverse practices which span film, photography, sculpture and drawing. Hypatia was an ancient mathematician, astronomer and teacher. Working with the theory of Stereographic projection, she gave lessons in how to use astrolabes; used to measure altitude above the horizon of a celestial body and to calculate latitude on land or sea.

The Margate School’s residency space acted as a laboratory to explore responses to their collective unease around the crisis of consumption and how they move forward post-anthropocene. As a collective they are interested to see how collaboration will push them to consider the philosophical implications and visual potentialities of living, consuming and making things in 2020. Over the course of the residency, they responded, individually and as a collective to universal themes around pre-cognition, epistemology and post-anthropocenic futures. 

Katarina Sengstaken is a digital media artist and educator who works involves cross-media digital expatriations. Her work has been screened in planetariums and in galleries from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, and she has received awards and recognition for her work in the field of full-dome 180º projection. She has an MFA from the Bauhaus in Media art and Design and a BFA in Digital Art from Pratt Institute. She currently works as the FE Pathway Leader for Lens Based Media at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury. Her current work is focusing on scale, structure and automation with projection and filmed elements, exploring the themes of astro-waste created by the dawn of space exploration.

Madeline Jones is a practicing artist and sessional lecturer working in kent. Her work draws from a multiplicity of artistic traditions such as sculpture, experimental photography, print and film. Currently her practice explores cameraless photographic techniques and temporal assemblages to explore internal and external experiences of site. Notions of performance, failure, material ephemerality as well as chance are concerns within her ongoing research into these unfolding visual scenarios.

Rebecca Korn is an artist researcher educator currently working at UCA Canterbury. Originally from London, she has worked for various Further and Higher educational institutions across locations in both the UK and Russia. Her practice-based research follows an inter-disciplinary approach that explores the synergy between art and biomedical science. Working predominantly with abject, non-conforming and medicalised bodies, she has explored reinterpretations of the body through the use of medical imagery, photography, projection, sculpture and sound.

Zo is a relentless constructor of objects and playful expander of material potential. Interested in form and sculpture as fun experiments in the possibilities of stuff; or, superfluous solutions. Superfluous solutions in her work mainly take shape as three-dimensional structures. Pursuing the crude synthesis of materials and construction processes to arrive at architectural, humorous, mimetic structures. She works as a freelance artist. As well as for UCA in an outreach capacity and as a teaching asst on the MA Fine Art program at Canterbury.

The Margate School, Margate's Art School