Dr Conor Wilson

Personal statement

Conor Wilson is Director of the Art Research Centre and Research Lead for Art in the Bath School of Art, Film and Media. He is also Lead for Unit of Assessment 32 (Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory), for the School’s REF2029 submission.

Conor is a Senior Lecturer in Art with a focus on Practice Research methods, writing and practices of making. As Course Leader for MA Ceramics, he led the development of a new MA Fine Art programme with pathways and was Programme Leader in its inaugural year of 2021-22. This is an innovative, cross-disciplinary programme with integrated practice and research modules. Conor led the Research Methods modules for two years and continues to teach into the programme.

Conor co-leads the Material:Making Research Group with Professor Keith Harrison. He also co-leads, with Dr Natasha Kidd, the School’s annual Practice Research Symposium, doing together.

Academic qualifications

• PhD Royal College of Art (AHRC Studentship)
• MA Cardiff School of Art and Design (UWIC)
• BA (Hons) First Class Bristol School of Art and Design (UWE)

Conor has undertaken leadership training and is an Early Stage Researcher Mentor for BSU.

Professional memberships

• SWWDTP Reviewer 2017-2022
• AHRC Peer Review College 2018-

Additional roles

• Internal Peer Review College
• Research and Ethics Committee
• Regular contributor to Researcher Development Programme

Teaching specialisms

• Making
• Practice Research
• Creative Writing
• Ceramics and Sculpture
• History and Theory of Art and Design

External examiner

• Periodic Review, Cardiff School of Art and Design (2017)
• Periodic Review Artist Designer: Maker Programme, CSAD (2024)

Current scholarship

I am a practising artist and writer. Despite developing a specialist knowledge of ceramics over 25 years, I characterise my practice as a mix of craft and bricolage, veering between various processes and approaches that fall under the broad disciplinary umbrellas of art, craft and design.

My work is held in a number of public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, CASS Sculpture Foundation and the collection of Omer Koç.

Over the past decade I have developed a number of material/conceptual making processes that I refer to as writing_making methods. These methods exploit the potential of making as a means of generating writing and the potential of writing to generate, or to contaminate, making. I set up situations which facilitate a ‘reporting back’ from making, either alone, alongside, or with other people, utilising various methods for generating / gathering a language of production.

I am particularly interested in the meaning-making potential of skilled production and am driven by the imperative to identify good questions to ask about what making is.

I see making as a speculative activity, a particularly intimate engagement with the world around me; a burrowing into the gaps between things. The work is seen as a thinking through of an approach to living, an exploration of how to engage with the world through practice. Practice is seen as a way of, a set of methods for, finding out about the world; not as a vehicle for communicating already formed insights.

My current project, Random Precision Amendments, explores new relationships between collage and poetry through a confluence and comparison of visual and textual methods. Image and text are produced, as far as possible, using the same method, allowing me to begin to map the territory between ekphrasis and visual poetry.