Professor Elizabeth Price

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Elizabeth Price
About
Teaching and learning
Research
Image gallery

About

I was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1966. I grew up in Luton, Bedfordshire and attended Putteridge Comprehensive Secondary School. I studied at the Royal College of Art, London and the University of Leeds.

I create short videos which explore the social and political histories of artefacts, architectures and documents. The subject matter may sometimes be historic artworks of great cultural significance, but it is more frequently marginal or derogated things, and often pop-cultural or mass produced objects. The video narrations draw upon and satirise the administrative vernaculars of relevant public and academic institutions as well as advertising copy and other texts of private and commercial organisations.

I have exhibited in group exhibitions internationally, and have had solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, UK; The Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, USA; Chicago Institute of Art, USA; Julia Stoschek Foundation, Dusseldorf and The Baltic, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. In 2012, I was awarded the Turner Prize for her video installation THE WOOLWORTHS CHOIR OF 1979. In 2013, I won the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award with the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers Museums, Oxford.

Alongside my work as an artist I have always taught, and in recent years have been employed at Goldsmiths College, The Royal College of Art and the Ruskin School of Art before coming to work at Kingston University's School of Art. I teach across disciplines and levels but recently have focussed particularly upon working with artists developing formally innovative PhD projects.

Academic responsibilities

Professor of Film and Photography

Qualifications

  • BA Fine Art, Ruskin School of Art
  • MA Fine Art, Royal College of Art
  • PhD Fine Art, University of Leeds

Teaching and learning

Undergraduate courses taught

Postgraduate courses taught

Research

I work in the field of contemporary art moving image. I use digital video incorporating live action, motion graphics, 3D computer animation and sound. The videos I make combine multiple social and cultural histories in the course of a single work. They include storytelling, but are not linear, usually employing multiple narrators and cyclical presentation. They are intended to be exhibited in installation, incorporating a specifically designed environment.Whilst I am informed by histories of narrative cinema, documentary and experimental film, my works are more concerned with digital moving video and its contemporary heterogeneity. Digital moving images are currently used for a wide range of purposes, in television and cinema, but also in applications as varied as knowledge organisation and navigation. Moreover, the production-worlds of reprography, phonography and film, previously separated in technical, cultural and institutional terms, increasingly coincide through the digital. So, in part my work responds to this particular moment, in which several distinct technical and cultural histories convene.The moving image projects and artworks I have concluded in the period between 2006 and 2020 are all developed from existing cultural and historical materials and objects. My interest has predominantly been in collections of photography and in archives. I am particularly interested in images that have migrated through a series of contexts and technologies. To this I add I the manifold technical possibilities of digital, moving-image editing and post-production processes.I usually convey the social history of artefacts, but also compose stories that elaborate upon it. These are usually in ghost or science fiction genres. I use such fabulation to create a spectral proxy for the endless, unknown archival omissions: experiences and histories which remain unrepresented in the archival record.

Areas of specialism

  • Visual Art
  • Moving image and sound

Research student supervision