Mark Wilsher
Artist & critic based in Norwich, UK
My artwork is grounded in the belief that art is essentially a social process. In recent years I have been interested in the public sphere and last year completed my 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, although I am as likely to make sculptures, installations or drawings. 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. This is informing my current work which looks at how contemporary art is received, understood and used by its various publics.
I am currently developing new work for gallery & 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.