Verity-Jane Keefe, visual artist, explores the complex relationship between people and their environment in her work. Through moving images, text, and installation, she examines public space not only as a physical location but also as a place of stories, memories, and interactions. Her practice focuses on urban redevelopment, questioning how art can contribute to making both existing and often invisible communities more visible and empowered.

In this lecture, Verity-Jane Keefe engages in conversation with Irish graphic designer Paul Bailey, who approaches graphic design as a critical tool to unravel the complexities of contemporary culture.

During this Design Dialogue, both speakers explore the connections between art, design and urban development, the role of creativity in building meaningful connections, with a focus on interactions within communities, in a time when the relationship between people, space, and culture is constantly evolving.

SPEAKERS

Verity-Jane Keefe

Verity-Jane Keefe is a British visual artist working predominantly in the public realm to explore the complex relationship between people and place.

She is interested in the role of the artist within urban regeneration and how experiential practice can touch upon and raise ambitions of existing and invisible communities. Since 2003 she has been developing new models of practice within municipal, collaborative contexts – following long term residency approaches that produce outcomes that explore the politics of participation. Her practice takes many forms, but always starts with lurking, place and archives. The incidental, the overheard, the conversation, the observed. Working with text, moving image, site-based research, archives, installation, print, social structures and object. She is recently delivered a public commission with Towner Gallery (Eastbourne) and is the current Wheatley Fellow and Incidental Artist with Eastside Projects (Birmingham), and is a pre-doc candidate at ZHdK (Zurich). She is an associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins where she teaches on the BA Fine Art XD pathway and was formerly a Unit Master at the Architectural Association.

Paul Bailey

Paul Bailey is an Irish graphic designer, researcher and educator based in London (UK), exploring a practice that is made public through exhibitions, publications, performances, workshops, writing, teaching and curation.

He has collaborated with various artists, organisations and institutions such as Forensic Architecture, Victoria & Albert Museum, Royal Institute of British Architects and Irish Museum of Modern Art. His studio practice, teaching and research have been awarded, exhibited and published internationally.

He has been an invited presenter, critic, jury member and examiner at a range of international institutions such as Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins, Goldsmiths University, Royal College of Art (UK); Icelandic Academy of the Arts (IS); National College of Art & Design (IE). He co-authored and directed the MA Graphic Media Design course at London College of Communication, UAL (2014-22), and was an advisor at the Jan van Eyck Academie (2015-18).

He is presently Professor for Communication Design & Research at HfG Karlsruhe (DE); pursuing a PhD in the Arts at KASK & Conservatorium (BE); and leads an independent design-research studio (UK). He recently published ‘I Shivered Violently / Don’t be Startled in the Night’ with Bryony Quinn (Set Margins’)

Design Dialogues

Design x Connection is part of the curated lecture series Design Dialogues organised by the design department of KASK & Conservatorium and Design Museum Gent. Unique voices from the broad field of design are invited to reflect on the role, impact, and future of design in a changing world. Each lecture is a critical dialogue centered around a theme and concludes with an open discussion between the speaker and the audience. Our mission: to provide engaging perspectives that empower design students and enthusiasts to tackle the challenges of today and tomorrow.

“If you’re looking for something here let me point you in the right direction…”
Paul Bailey curated a new selection of artists’ books in our 1M3 vitrine, whilst thinking on the words by Fred Moten.

In 2015, 1M3 was established as an exhibition space for artists' books from Kunstenbibliotheek's collection. A guest curator is asked to make their own unique selection and present them in 1M³'s showcases.

At Open Masereel, researcher Paul Bailey and Bryony Quinn present the new publicationI Shivered Violently / Don't be Startled in the Night; A networked essay on (dis)order, (il)legibility and (dis)orientation.

By way of gathers and gaps, leaps and snaps, this publication presents two networked essays that, between them, attempt to bring into view the poetics and possibilities of (dis)order, (il)legibility and (dis)orientation.

I Shivered Violently / Don’t Be Startled in the Night… approaches the renowned dynamic ordering and continual inventory of the Sitterwerk Foundation Kunstbibliothek (CH) as a site and a system of intrigue. In particular, these essays track the intent of a bespoke machine, fitted with an RFID scanner, that reads the shelves of the library at the end of the day. Visitors return items to the stacks at random and so, at night, an up-to-date record — and map — of the collection is created.

The behaviour of magnets, prompted by their role in the library’s technology used in the library, guides the attention of this publication, and is the subject of the written essay by Bryony Quinn. The visual essay, by Paul Bailey, which arranges material harvested from the Sitterwerk collection and beyond, deals with the conditions and manipulations of seeing with, and through, machines.

This publication is an A4-size folder with 5 mm spine, which includes 6 A2-size posters folded to A4.

Open Masereel is a brand new biennial arts festival centered around print as a way for artists to express themselves, understand art and the world that surrounds us, connect and more. In addition to multiple new editions, publications and a print art fair, the program includes live performances and music, a culinary experience by a top chef, artist talks and more.

The Meeting Grounds series invites investigation, and experimentation, with the visual essay as a verb (essaying), an event (a gathering) and as a social form for collective reasoning.

‘If we stop thinking about the form of the essay as the form of a thing, the form of an object, and reconsider it as the form of an activity or action (as in a dancer’s form, or the form of a golfer’s swing, or the form of a tennis player’s backhand), we can locate a consistent and unbroken line of agreement about the nature and the form of the essay to contemporary essayists and theorists; the essay is kineticism incarnate—the embodiment of perpetual mobility, motion and movement’.
- Paul Heilker, The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form (1996).

For this edition at the Camden Art Centre, we will explore essayistic strategies that bring the temporalities, materialities and opacities of language into view, and consider how they might be put to use across contemporary practices of graphic design, literature, performance and installation. 

Guided by a series of propositions shared by our contributors, guests are invited to join the gathering as participants in a rehearsal for an essay yet-to-come. 

‘It is the essayist’s job to gather up the shards and map them where they are, to find patterns out there or make one … about the disconnections and mysteries’. – Rebecca Solnit, The Best American Essays (2019).

Paul Bailey is affiliated as an artistic researcher to KASK & Conservatorium, the school of arts of HOGENT and howest. Meeting Grounds is financed by the HOGENT Arts Research Fund, with support received from the Centre for Other Worlds (PT), Kunsthal Gent (BE) and the Camden Art Centre (UK). This iteration of the Meeting Grounds identity, developed with Sjoerd Beijers and Seppe-Hazel Laeremans, features oblique and swirling extensions to Garamon(d/t) typeface published by fonderie.download

Essay as Event

Paul Bailey is affiliated as an artistic researcher to KASK & Conservatorium, the school of arts of HOGENT and howest. The research project Meeting Grounds was financed by the HOGENT Arts Research Fund.

Meeting Grounds identity developed with Anouck Voisin, Seppe-Hazel Laeremans and Sjoerd Beijers featuring oblique and swirling extensions to Garamon(d/t) typeface published by fonderie.download