Alumni : St Martin's College of Art

The invitation to participate in this group exhibition came from the curatorial team at Tate Britain who were developing exhibition themes tracing the recent history of British Art. For Dye, the opportunity to reappraise his student work formed part of a more extensive re-engagement with his pioneering media installations of the 60s and 70s. Dye’s selection for ‘Alumni’ was based on the significance of the researcher’s early work for present-day artists and art students. The intellectual and reflective nature of Dye’s ‘Alumni’ contribution, focuses on issues of re-invention and recognition. The debate that helps this researcher decide on the differing roles of contemporaneity and history in his current practice are also part of Dye’s research activities in relation to his extensive contribution to the organisation of postgraduate taught courses in Visual Arts at Northumbria. ‘Alumni’ displays a range of student sketchbooks which Dye has used to create seminar material that explores the role of late-career artists in the contemporary art school. Dye is using his ideas about the relationship between experimental practices and traditional learning tools within the cross-divisional supervisory team of Heather, whose doctoral project is entitled: ‘Practice-led Research based on a collaboration between an artist-teacher, her students, and other artists.’ Heather is developing research themes in relation to Northumbria’s new Fine Art & Education MA (validated 2000) which is a collaboration between the School of Arts and Social Sciences, the School of Health, Community & Education Studies, and the education programme at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. This pioneering promotion of postgraduate provision for artist-teachers, and the contributions made to the pedagogic ambitions of the course by researchers such as Dye, was discussed in ‘When Artists Teach,’ a paper by Baker-Alder (course leader), at the National Society for Education in Art & Design conference, Tate Modern, March 2005.