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Stephen Pedley
Aims
My aims are
1.To better understand, make sense of and represent the world around me; recognising how I organise or adapt to it.
2. To explore and document change experienced in a range of experiences or environments. This might be a moment of unsurpassed beauty or a longer experience.
3. Collaborate with and learn from other artists in order to recognise the complete multi sensory elements of experiences.
Objectives
Environmental Explorarion
· The creative process, stimulates an inquisitive nature and celebration of the world around us. I continue to seek opportunities to make sense of an environment. Our understanding is formed through the evidence at hand alongside our prior knowledge in similar environments.
· My work with children with multi sensory impairment has stimulated my interest in the methods we use to understand our immediate environments. The experience of travel necessitates constructing understandings of more than one environment to enable comprehension of our changed position. As a result an ongoing theme of my art is this investigation of change.
Change
· Change stimulates investigation. In identifying key elements of a situation, natural rhythms, forms and textures reoccur. By drawing on previous knowledge we begin to recognise and later come to understand that which we witness.
Collaboration
· Recent and proposed projects include collaborations with a number of sculptors and painters along with work in collaboration with a florist.
· The UC experience conducted in July and August 2004 involved collaboration with a sculptor, a sound engineer and a musician.
Experience
Sept 96 – current St. Anns School, Bordesley Road, Morden, England
Classroom Teacher
· Experience in delivering the curriculum to children with a range of special needs and more particularly sensory impairments, profound and multiple learning difficulties or who are on the autistic spectrum.
· Teaching in the past eight years across the age ranges from nursery to year six.
· Co-ordination of the schools D.T. and more recently the ICT curriculum from nursery to age 19.
· Will be working part time from September 04 to focus on my art work.
Sep 97- Dec 99 The University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England
Postgraduate Diploma in Teaching Children with Multi Sensory Impairments
I attained a diploma and certification as a teacher of children with multi sensory impairment. The course embodied the following areas:
· I chose to study multi sensory impairment due to my interest in understanding and perceptions of the world and how these are constructed.
· Have taught many children with multi sensory impairments within classes of children with other needs while also working for a period within a school for pupils with multi-sensory impairment.
· Identification of the causes and implications of multi- sensory impairment. Awareness of the senses functions and how this alters a persons understanding of the world around them.
· Recognising early communication attempts and appropriate approaches to developing communication in learners with multi- sensory impairment.
· Recognising the importance of the environment through an introduction to the design, construction and supported investigation of specialised environment’s.
Sep 90 – Jun 94 Westhill College, Selly Oak, Birmingham, England
Bed (Hons)
Graduated from Westhill College with an Honours degree in teaching art at primary age level. The course embodied the following areas:
· Studied the visual arts to degree level, specialising in sculpture in the final two years. Decided to study sculpture as it was an opportunity to work in three dimensions.
· Tutored by the artists Bob Treadwell, Andy Coates and Bill Butcher.
Selected and Most Recent Exhibitions
· Solo and group exhibitions in London, Birmingham, Devon and Hungary.
· Café Gallery Project – Part of group exhibition in Southwark Park. 2003 and again 2004.
· Wandsworth Art Society, Group Exhibitions – Clapham, Fulham etc. 2003 - 2004.
· Solo exhibition - Searcy’s, The Barbican, London. 24th January - 24th April 2004
· Wear the Fox hat group – group show The Fox Club, Mayfair and Searcy’s, The Barbican September – December 2004.
· Artist open house exhibition – 6th– 7th November 2004.
Prizes and recognition.
No prizes awarded yet.
My work is held in private collections in the Australia, Hungary, Indonesia, Abu dhabi and New Zealand.
Statement
As a teacher of students with multi sensory impairments I have witnessed how important the ability to explore and the information gathered are in forming our personal understanding of the world. I recognise that experiences are composed of many elements. Through my art I seek to represent the totality of my perceptions, feelings and memories of any given subject. The sum of my personal understanding, not a view. I hope to motivate an audience to gather their own realisations from the information presented.
Perhaps due to my study as a sculptor the textural energy and life of the mediums I use remains key. I continue gaining greater ability in my command and interaction with my materials, which include oil, acrylic or watercolour paint, collage, casting, printing or sculpture utilising collected environmental material. I hope never to pretend to know everything. I enter each project striving only to be true to the subject and not bound by expectations, styles, motifs or flashy catchphrases.
I have always been fascinated by change and how one recognises something has changed. My subjects are the result of prolonged or repeated exposure within a landscape or experiencing a natural phenomenon, a singular vision capturing interplays of line, form, light and rhythms, which may otherwise have remained unnoticed.
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