Seeing Beyond the Immediate Symposium

15th June 2017 // 10am - 5pm Gracefield Arts Centre, 28 Edinburgh Road, Dumfries

Seeing Beyond the Immediate is a symposium concerning art practice and cognition organised by artist Patricia Cain with
Upland CIC. We are concerned with exploring how artists evolve through the practice of art and how they contextualise
themselves as part of this.

The symposium accompanies an exhibition by Patricia Cain (incorporating work by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham) that looks beyond
the aesthetic of artworks to focus on the mind sets and processes of artists, whose observation of the world leads them to make
both figurative and abstract artworks.

The symposium extends these themes to look at the practitioner’s development, and how understanding and knowledge is
developed through practice, reflection and contextualisation. The presenters have something in common – they consider much
bigger issues from the specificity of their disciplines, often fusing art, science and spirituality, and we are interested in making
this event participatory in place of a more traditional speaker and audience approach.

We will use some words spoken by Francesco Varela at the Art meets Science and Sprituality in a changing Economy conference in 1990 as a means of drawing our disparate interests together:

         'I have come to the conclusion after all the time I spent looking at perception as a bodily activity, that what the visual arts do is to draw out 
          the invisible into the visible...so there is a freshness to what we see and what we appreciate with our eyes.

         That’s what artists know because they do it. It is something that in fact they know much better than scientists. But for a number of years in 
         cognitive science - and when I say cognitive science, I mean neurobiology and artificial intelligence - we were convinced over the last forty 
         years that visual perception was a matter of finding the way things are. There is no indivisibility, it’s all out there as a given set of properties. 
         For example, you would have an edge, you would have a colour, and the task of the brain was actually to get it right. Therefore art could not 
         be other than some kind of funny, chaotic comment on what already is. What is, is the reality, and then art is something that is just added for 
         the benefit of museums. What I’m trying to say is that in fact what visual artists know and do and show is closer to the heart of what visual 
         perception is…

         But there is a school within neuroscience and within cognitive science, to which I adhere… that has begun to question this notion, that in fact 
         the act of seeing - although this extends to any cognitive activity, hearing, moving, thinking - is something to do with this information pick-up 
         and processing. That fundamental act of perception is precisely that drawing out, into the visible, something that wasn’t there as visible 
         previously. Thus the great genius of being alive, of having a brain, is to actually bring forth that reality' (Wijers 1990:130).
 

Schedule for the day:

10am: Welcome, tea & coffee. A chance to look around the exhibition

10.30-10.45am: Brief Introduction

10.45am – 11.30am:
A shared aesthetic: Bodies and systems : Dr Francis Hallsall in conversation with Dr Patricia Cain
Francis is Course Director MA Art in the Contemporary World, National College of Art and Design Dublin
http://www.ncad.ie/research-people/view/francis-halsall. Patricia Cain is an artist and academic http://www.patriciacain.com/

11.40am – 12.30pm:
Drawing out the Otherwise Unseen: Dr Sarah Casey in conversation with Gerry Davis
Sarah Casey is Lecturer in Fine Art (Installation, Sculpture, Drawing) Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA) and
Investigator in Dark Matters: An interrogation of thresholds of imperceptibility through theoretical cosmology, fine art and
anthropology http://darkmattersproject.wixsite.com/thresholds/about. Gerry Davis, is an Artist and Senior Lecturer at LICA
https://www.gerrydavies.co.uk/

12.30 – 1.30pm Lunch

1.30 - 2.30pm: Louwrien Wijers Film & conversation via Skype: Walking is Sculpture, Writing is Sculpture, Talking is Sculpture
Louwrien Wijers is a Fluxus artist and organiser of the 1990 Art meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy series of
conversations. http://www.louwrienwijers.nl/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rydvSn7bBbY

2.30 – 3.15pm:
Making Visible : Richard Talbot
Richard Talbot is an Artist and Head of Fine Art, Newcastle University http://www.richardtalbot.org/

3.15 – 3.45pm: Coffee break

3.45 – 4.30pm:
Drawing as a process of rendering society sensitive to ideas: Professor Anne Douglas in conversation with Patricia Cain
Anne Douglas is an Emeritus Professor at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen.

4.30pm: Final reflection

5pm: Drinks reception


For more information visit: www.weareupland.com/events/seeing-beyond-the-immediate-symposium

Booking is essential. Please book via Eventbrite: 
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/seeing-beyond-the-immediate-symposium-tickets-34033161101

Please note that there is no ticket fee for this event but there is a £10 contribution for refreshments & lunch to be paid on the day.