Press release 

Image, Memory, Place

Phoenix Art Space, Project Space, Brighton, BN2 9NB

Preview: Thursday 12 June 2025, 6-8pm

Exhibition Open: 11-22 June 2025, Wednesday-Sunday, 12-5pm

Phoenix Art Space is pleased to announce Image, Memory, Place, a group exhibition bringing together recent works by artists Matthew Cornford, Fergus Heron, Alexander James Pollard and Naomi Salaman

The art school is the connective thread throughout this exhibition, providing a shared context for the works on display. It reflects an interest in the physical site of the art school as a platform and resource, alongside its disappearing histories, the rise of data technology and AI, and the social and political narratives surrounding art education in higher education.

Each of the participating artists studied at art schools and have spent many years teaching within them. Their combined experience as students and educators act as a kind of tachometer – measuring the passage of time in art education and revealing the lived politics, events and transformations that have shaped and continue to shape its history.

Matthew Cornford presents photographic work from his ongoing Art School Project with John Beck. Combining fieldwork and archival digging, over the last fifteen years the pair have explored the towns and cities of the United Kingdom, building a photographic record of each art school building, or the site upon which it stood, the images speak to a complex and varied history and shifting priorities in art education and beyond

Fergus Heron’s photography charts the sightlines and thresholds around Dorset Place, engaging with the residues of place and the possibility of a building to look back, returning the gaze. The situating of the camera in the making of this work corresponds closely with the University of Brighton’s School of Art and Media Dorset Place Gallery, utilising street facing windows as apertures, lenses and frames to reconsider the building as a place of image production.

Alexander James Pollard’s contribution, a comic/zine titled The Precognitive Painting Programme is a speculative work that reworks Marvel’s 1982 Blade Runner graphic novel through the strategy of cut-up détournement. Positioned within the shifting landscape of AI and contemporary education, the work examines how foresight and instinct intersect in an increasingly mediated world. Free copies of the zine/comic are available to take from the exhibition.

Naomi Salaman exhibits a four-metre drawing based on a photograph of Brighton College of Art, Grand Parade, now part of Brighton University. The work was drawn with artist Sophie Gibson for the Sweetshop Window Gallery, in 2023. A small mock-up of the drawing in situ is also shown in the Project Space gallery. Salaman considers the Grand Parade building itself as a testament to the high value placed on art education and the combined the forces that brought a purpose-built art college into existence.

Together, the works form a constellation of practices that reflect on the art school as an Image, Memory and Place.

For further information, images, or to arrange interviews with the artists, please contact:

f.heron@brighton.ac.uk

More Information on the artists  

Matthew Cornford

Matthew Cornford is an artist and teaches Fine Art at the University of Brighton. For over 15-years he has worked with John Beck on The Art School Project, a project to find and document former art school buildings or the sites upon which they stood. Recent solo exhibitions: The Art Schools of North West England, Bluecoat, Liverpool (2018); The North West Art School Record Machine, Bury Art Gallery and Sculpture Centre, (2019); Harmony, Contrast & Discord: Rochdale and the Art Schools of the North West, Touchstones Rochdale, (2021); The Art Schools of the West Midlands, The New Art Gallery Walsall, (2023); The Art Schools of the East Midlands, Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University, (2023); The Art Schools of the Midlands, Martin Hall Gallery, Loughborough University, (2024).

Fergus Heron

Fergus Heron is an artist and Course Leader for MA Photography in the School of Art and Media at the University of Brighton. He studied at the Royal College of Art and the University for the Creative Arts. Exhibitions featuring his work have taken place at venues including Tate Britain, Museum for Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark; K3 Project Space, Zurich, Switzerland. His writing is published in Emerging Landscapes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). He selected The Photographers’ Gallery Photography Culture: Photography and Landscape (2018), edited Visible Economies (Brighton: Photoworks, 2012) and contributed to A Companion to Photography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2020).

Alexander James Pollard

Alexander James Pollard (b. 1977) is an artist. In 2005 Pollard represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale. Other selected exhibitions include: Jungle at Celine Gallery, Glasgow in 2017, WoW PAINTINGS at Young Team HQ gallery in London in 2016, Black Marks at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, 2007 and Counter Facture at Luhring Augustine, New York, also from 2007. Pollard has worked as a Fine Art Painting Lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art, Wimbledon College of Arts, London, and now at The University of Brighton, where he is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Painting and MA Fine Art.

Naomi Salaman

Naomi Salaman is an artist who teaches Fine Art at University of Brighton. Her work investigates art practice, pedagogy and cultural institutions using historical, critical and feminist perspectives. She has a doctorate in Visual Arts Practice, on the history of art history and theory taught in the art school, from Goldsmiths College, supervised by Victor Burgin. Recently she has been organising Sweetshop Window Gallery, researching and working on a community archive of one of the fine art courses at University of Brighton,  Fine Art Critical Practice.

General Information

The Project Space

Exhibition Dates: 11 June – 22 June 2025

Open Wednesday – Sunday, 12.00 – 17.00pm

Preview: Thursday 12 June, 18.00 – 20.00pm

Artist Panel Discussions: Tuesday 17 June 18:00 – 19:00 (discussion chair, Danit Ariel, curator at Photoworks)

Find the Artist:

Fergus Heron: @fergusheron

Alexander James Pollard: @ajpollard

Naomi Salaman: @naomisalaman

Matthew Cornford: @‌theartschoolproject

Image: Fergus Heron, Dorset Place, Brighton, England, June 2023 C type print 320 x 400mm (detail)