Satellite Salon // Wildness

an evening of art-science conversations

with presentations by:
Kenny Hunter, Bob McGowan, Dr Kenny Rutherford and Edward Summerton

Edinburgh College of Art
Monday 23rd May 2011

Our presenters:

Kenny Hunter is an artist. Based in Glasgow, he has exhibited widely throughout the UK and internationally and is the winner of the inaugural Spitalfields Sculpture Prize. He has created a number of high profile public commissions. Kenny has frequently explored the relationships and encounters between animals and humans in cultural and urban or mediated spaces rather than the natural environment.

Bob McGowan is Senior Curator of Birds at the National Museums of Scotland. He has specific responsibility for the curation of bird collections, including skins, eggs and skeletons. Bob’s research interests include the history of the collections and collection development, egg collections, sampling populations through oil-spill casualties, and record assessment.

Dr Kenny Rutherford is a researcher in animal behaviour and welfare at the Scottish Agricultural College at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh. His current research interest is in the assessment of animal stress and pain, specifically the negative experiences of animals as a consequence of farm housing and husbandry practices.

Edward Summerton is an artist based in Dundee. He draws on a wide variety of representations of nature in his work such as book illustrations, field recordings and dioramas. Ed has exhibited internationally in both solo and group exhibitions as an artist whose work has expanded from the practice of painting into photography, sound works, prints, objects, collaborations and the organising of events and exhibitions.

Our guests:

Dr Emily Brady, Institute of Geography, Edinburgh University. Emily is President of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, and serves on the Executive Committee of the British Society of Aesthetics. Her research interests include aesthetics and environmental ethics, and aesthetics and nonhuman animals. Her publications include Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (2003) and the forthcoming The Sublime in Modern Philosophy.

Samantha Clark is an artist based in Scotland whose work explores aspects of the human relationship with the natural world. Sam has recently completed an MA in Values and Environment at the University of Central Lancashire and is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at St Andrew’s University.

Mark Eischeid is an artist and landscape architect who is currently enrolled as a PhD student at Edinburgh University researching the field of environmental aesthetics as a foundation for studying the Sublime in 20th and 21st century landscape architecture.

Maggie Reilly is Curator of Zoology at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery at Glasgow University and since 2002 has also been  responsible for the medical collections. Maggie has wide experience in collections management and preservation techniques and practices –  particularly in wet-preserved collections and osteology. She is also especially interested in the history of collections and the biology of reptiles and amphibians.

Image: Edward Summerton, Tree Creepy, 2006, gouache on illustration. Courtesy the artist.