Dr Paul O'Kane

Biography

Paul O’Kane is an artist, writer and lecturer. He studied BA Fine Art & Art History, then MA Visual Cultures, and completed a PhD in History at Goldsmiths, University of London (2009).

O’Kane lecturers in Fine Art and Critical Studies at Central St Martins and Chelsea College of Art, and at SOAS, University of London, and makes and exhibits artworks concerned with a history of technologies and narrative. He writes for leading art journals, including Art Monthly and Third Text, and has published over 100 articles, reviews and catalogue essays. He is a founder member of the small artists’ book publishing imprint eeodo, with whom he published ‘Where Is That Light Now?’ (2014), and is currently writing and designing his third book, ‘Technologies of Romance’, collecting materials from his undergraduate seminar series at CSM. He is a Member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics) and blogs at ONLY YOU.

My main interest as an artist, writer and lecturer is in the mechanised image and the way in which art’s values and forms are influenced by a history of technologies.

My fine art practice has grown up through a fascination with photography, printmaking, video and film. My PhD (on Hesitation, supervised by Howard Caygill in the History Department at Goldsmiths), concerned time and the way in which we might start to write history, a theme which arose from a protracted period of isolated studio work (seven years) in which I used writing, drawing, sculpture and photography to try and represent temporal experiences. My current aims are to continue developing an idiosyncratic specialism as a creative researcher who makes objective explorations and contributions to an idea of living historically, while editing and presenting coherent statements emerging from my extensive archive of barely exploited works, spanning more than 30 years of work as an artist in London.