Dr Gareth Proskourine-Barnett

Biography

Dr Gareth Proskourine-Barnett is an artist, researcher and educator working at the intersection of illustration, architecture and technology. He is Course Leader for MA Illustration Practices (Online) at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. His research explores how creative practice can investigate the systems, spaces and histories that shape everyday life, and how images, objects, writing and performance can generate alternative ways of understanding them.

Central to his work is an expanded understanding of illustration as a critical and investigative method. Working across visual essays, experimental publishing, essay films and lecture-performance, Gareth explores relationships between documentary evidence and speculation; between material traces and digital images; between historical narratives and imagined futures. His practice asks how fragments, ruins and archives might unsettle established accounts of place, and whose experiences and knowledge are preserved or excluded through processes of recording, representation and redevelopment.

Gareth completed a practice-based PhD in Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art. This research investigated the afterlife of Birmingham Central Library, approaching the internet as an archaeological site through which a demolished building could be encountered and reimagined. Combining archival research, digital imaging and experimental storytelling, the project developed forensic fictioning as a way of working between evidence and invention. His forthcoming book, Illustration and Forensic Fictioning: A Speculative Counter-History of the Birmingham Central Library (Bloomsbury, 2027), extends this research through experimental writing and visual essays.

His current research develops parasitic approaches to creative practice: ways of inhabiting existing archives, institutions, platforms and infrastructures to question their assumptions and make their operations visible. Alongside this, he explores how mycelial thinking - understood through interdependence, reciprocity and distributed relationships - might inform research and creative education. His three-part method (a traingualtion of site, scale and tools) provides a framework for moving between disciplines, connecting situated enquiry with material, technological and performative experimentation.

These concerns also inform his interest in emerging technologies and the politics of image-making, including how digital platforms and AI shape authorship, cultural labour and access to knowledge. Across his research and teaching, he is concerned with how practitioners can engage critically and ethically with complex systems while retaining space for uncertainty, experimentation and unexpected outcomes.

Gareth welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD researchers interested in practice-based and practice-led projects across illustration, visual communication, graphic arts and contemporary art. Particular areas of interest include critical and expanded illustration; forensic fictioning and experimental documentary; architecture, brutalism, infrastructure and landscape; archives, ruins and material histories; speculative futures, the weird and hauntology; new materialisms and more-than-human relations; digital cultures and emerging technologies; visual essays, publishing and ficto-critical writing; and critical art and design pedagogies.

He is particularly interested in supporting researchers whose projects move across established disciplinary boundaries, and who want to develop rigorous, experimental relationships between making, writing and theoretical enquiry.