Louisa Minkin

Biography

Louisa Minkin is a London-based artist and researcher, and Reader in Visual Art Practices at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, where she coordinates Research into Teaching for the Art Programme. Her practice moves between art, archaeology and digital imaging. Through photogrammetry, 3D modelling, augmented reality and material making, she follows how images and objects change as they pass between people, technologies, collections and places. Her research brings archaeological and museum methods into conversation with the vernacular modelling cultures of gaming communities, treating digital imaging as a situated practice of making and knowledge-sharing.

From 2020 to 2022, Minkin was Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded network Concepts Have Teeth, a Blackfoot-led collaboration with Knowledge Holders from Kainai, Piikani, Siksika and Amskapi Piikani. She also led the UK team of its sister project, Mootookakio’ssin [Distant Awareness], supported by Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund, administered by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The network brought together community members, artists, archaeologists, museum professionals and students to develop shared ways of visiting with belongings held in UK museums and working through art-based practices. Prisoners of Love: Affect, Containment and Alternative Futures (AHRC GCRF Imagining Futures, 2022–24), led by Minkin, with Lennon Mhishi and Esi Eshun, developed and extended this work. It initiated an ongoing relationship between Mootookakio’ssin and Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, and involved work with Compound 13 Lab in Dharavi and the Horniman, as well as the Pitt Rivers Museum in collaboration with the University of Ghana.

Minkin collaborated with Ian Dawson, Andrew Meirion Jones and Marta Díaz-Guardamino on research into decorated artefacts of the British and Irish Neolithic. Archaeological/art practice collaborations continue and include two edited volumes: Diffracting Digital Images (Routledge 2022) and a volume on the Skeuomorph (forthcoming from Bloomsbury). She works with Francis Summers as LM/FS. Her work has been presented at Ashkal Alwan, the ICA, Modern Art Oxford and CalArts, and exhibited at Ritsurin Gardens, the British Library, Foxy Production and LLS 387, Antwerp. Awards include an Abbey Fellowship in Painting at the British School at Rome and the Art Foundation Fellowship in Painting.