Mark Wilsher
Artist & critic based in Norwich, UK
My artwork is grounded in the belief that art is essentially a social process. It makes use of a particular discursive language that different communities can access to different degrees, and within that framework everything is able to signify and be utilised. In recent years I have been interested in the public sphere and have just finished a PhD which was a critique of the use of dialogue in describing relational art practices.
I often work with the spoken word, live performance, and text. Since 2001 I have written regularly for Art Monthly and contribute sometimes to exhibition catalogues, most recently for the Royal Academy's Modern British Sculpture.
From 1999 to 2005 I worked as a curator at a series of public gallery spaces in London, staging projects and exhibitions by many artists including Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane, Juan Cruz, Cornford & Cross, Bob and Roberta Smith, Carey Young and David Medalla. It was a fun time, just before the absolute institutionalisation of curating by academia and the proliferation of curators with master's degrees, and taught me a lot about different audiences and different views of contemporary art.
I am currently developing new work for public spaces, and starting a research project analysing the representation of contemporary art in mainstream media. Feel free to contact me at markwilsher@hotmail.com but please don't put me on your mailing list - I have enough messages already.
NEW: Here is a link to a talk I gave back in April 2011 which concentrates on my work with text and the spoken word. It was organised by Kiln Projects.