Dr Andrew Sneddon
Job title:
Lecturer, Art
Office:
Main Building, Room K.04
Office hours:
Mon, 10am - 11am
Research Output:
Edinburgh Research Explorer linkBiography
Andrew Sneddon is a Scottish artist who lives and works in the UK. He is lecturer in Fine Art and teaches on the MFA/MA Contemporary Art Practice course at Edinburgh College of Art/University of Edinburgh. He is also a senior lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. He holds an MA in Fine Art and a BA (Hons) Printmaking from Glasgow School of Art (1984-1990). Andrew was also awarded a scholarship to study at The British School at Rome in 1990/1. He completed his practice-led doctorate from The University of Edinburgh in 2017 entitled, Confusion of Meaning in the Concept of Place: An investigation into the role place occupies in influencing the production and reception of the artwork.
Andrew started teaching on the Painting & Printmaking undergraduate course at ECA in 2009, initially working across different levels he now teaches postgraduates and supervises PhD students. He is an experienced academic with experience of teaching and external examining at a number of British and Japanese art institutes. Andrew teaches across a variety of mediums and approaches to Contemporary Art practice in the studio as well as teaching and supporting students in a range of contemporary art theoretical studies. He has received a number of awards for creating innovative and new ways of combining and blending old and new approaches to creative art practices. He comes from the tradition of research related teaching where teaching and research are seamlessly combined in student centred learning.
Research
Research
Andrew's research interests focus on exploring our complex engagement with place. He makes site-responsive artworks that explore the relationship between people and place with particular attention paid to traces of cultural memory. He is interested in the habit and signatures of place and how they are encoded within material forms of the commonplace. He is also interested in the allegorical and poetic potential of investigating the intersection between contemporary and classical art.
As well as producing work for exhibition, Andrew presents papers and publishes articles on place-making, site-responsive and situational practices, including serendipity and improvisation. In, The Slender Margin Between the Real and the Unreal, he was co-author with Professor Kiyoshi Okutsu (Yamaguchi University, Japan) and Gavin Morrison (Atopia Projects, Europe) that explored the connection between the stroll gardens of the Tokugawa and Meji periods of Japan and the European pleasure gardens from the same period.
He is co-director with Dr Becky Shaw and Penny McCarthy (Sheffield Hallam University) on an interdisciplinary project called Gravity, (www.gravity21.org) that was launched in 2011 to provide a forum for critical debate surrounding visual art practices. Through a themed programme of invited speakers this research project examines the myriad ways the art world deals with its ambivalent and yet enduring relationship with the materiality surrounding the object. This project is currently in receipt of Arts Council funding.
Current PhD students
Michael Trainor
Thawing the Nuclear Mammoth - Creative Responses to Nuclear Weapons
Haiyu Yuan
How Contemporary (Green Screen) Artists process their image prototypes in their practices
PhD Supervision Topics
- Contemporary Art Practice
- Place
- Situation
- Site-Responsive
- Art Theory
- Painting & Printmaking
- Sculpture
