Meet our speakers
Tuesday 24 June 2014
16:30 – 18:00
272 High Holborn
Book your place
As part of this year’s exciting Artsmart festival, we are delighted to bring together two pairs of alumni collaborators who will share their stories about how staying in touch and working with fellow UAL graduates has helped their careers and creative projects. Join us to hear first-hand how Chris Cawkwell and Jane Harris joined with fellow Wimbledon alumni to create ArtLacuna. They will be joined by creative partnership Stephanie McLaren-Neckles (LCC) and Ansel Neckles (Camberwell), Co-Founders of Let’s Be Brief (LBB), a cultural journal and professional development platform for the creative industry.
Speaker Profiles:
Ansel Neckles and Stephanie McLaren- Neckles. Photo by Robert W Mason
Stephanie McLaren-Neckles is an unusual creative, being left handed with a right thinking brain that is strangely organised.
Stephanie’s experience spans across several creative industries: from TV – as a presenter on Trouble TV and MTV; starting her own design label Sexie Booda, wholesaling to high street retailers and boutiques such as Topshop, Urban Outfitters and House of Fraser; to setting up a creative agency, twenty%extra, who have worked with clients such as Virgin Media Pioneers, Louis Vuitton Young Arts Project and Channel 4. Stephanie’s most recent enterprising project is Let’s Be Brief – a cultural journal and professional development platform for creative industry professionals. In short, Stephanie loves nothing better than to create something out of nothing.
In 2012 Stephanie won Best New Business Award & London College of Communication Award from University of the Arts – Creative Enterprise Awards.
Ansel Neckles. If you asked his mum, she would say that Ansel would have popped out the womb with a pencil and pad if it were possible. Always with an idea and quotable to hand, Ansel graduated from Camberwell College of Arts in Graphic Design.
Wanting the challenge of pairing his design skills and wordsmithery, Ansel spent a number of years at Tribal DDB advertising agency as an Art Director / Copywriter. Whilst there he earned a couple of D&AD commendations for his VW Golf and Touareg campaigns, as well as working on numerous ad campaigns for other household names such as British Gas and The Guardian to name a few. Ansel also has time at Saatchi & Saatchi and Wunderman under his belt.
Ansel now runs creative agency twenty%extra and cultural journal Let’s Be Brief with Stephanie.
Chris Cawkwell
Chris Cawkwell is an artist whose work explores the relationship between global marketing and consumption. Utilizing contemporary technologies, performative and interactive elements to critique the social systems and processes which operate around us and highlight the rate at which products are consumed and commodified.
Cawkwell graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from Wimbledon College of Art in 2012. He has exhibited nationally and internationally; in Mumbai, India, as part of cross-collaborative venture Project India (Asia Arts Projects & the 1%-ers Art Collective, 2011) and Tokyo, Japan, part of Tokyo Wonder Site’s Creator in Residence program (2012).
He has completed residency programs at Space 118, Mumbai, (2011), Tokyo Wonder Site, Aoyama, (2012) and at the Bohunk Institute, Nottingham, in preparation for solo show Sensorama (2013). His work forms part of the permanent collection at Space 118.
He is a founding member and director of artist led space (and collective) ArtLacuna, based in Clapham Junction, South London.
Jane Harris
Jane Harris works with found footage using voice and language to locate, but not identify, (for that is the reader/viewer’s role), moments of intensity and affect. There is sometimes a violent, narcissistic streak, but this violence is not aimed at the audience. It is a means to an end. To transgress has value; unfettered by literary/artistic etiquette, ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, (whatever they may be), have a better chance of being exposed if revealed through the edge of experience.
Harris graduated from Wimbledon College of Art in 2012 with an MA in Fine Art, she is a founding member of ArtLacuna and is currently working on Roland Barthes’s unwritten novel, which forms the basis for her Phd.
This event is run by Development and Alumni Relations. If you would like to be involved in future events like this, please email alumni@arts.ac.uk