Dr Martin Westwood

Biography

Dr Martin Westwood is an inter-media artist, researcher, and educator, currently serving as the BA Fine Art Course Coordinator and a PhD supervisor. His work, exhibited in museums and artist-run spaces, spans both traditional media like paper, ceramics, print, and collage, as well as digital video, animation, and writing. With numerous publications, awards, fellowships, and contributions to public research platforms, he integrates conventional and digital studio methods with cross-disciplinary research projects connecting disparate areas of academic specialism: political-economy and the philosophy of technics, literary theory, cultural history, archaeology, and contemporary art practices.

In 2014, Westwood launched Headstone to Hard Drive, a project exploring the link between technics and time and its relevance to Fine Art practices. Headstone to Hard Drive brought together institutions, research initiatives, and academic partners through symposia, colloquia, and published findings in the Journal of Visual Art Practice and Philosophy of Photography.

Since 2015, Westwood has collaborated with Mick Finch on projects involving the Bilderfarzeuge research project, Warburg Institute, Sir John Soane’s Museum and Warburg Haus. In 2022, alongside Elizabeth Wright and Guillaume Paris, they launched The Value of the Copy, a research and teaching project in partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum, Beaux Arts Paris, Glasgow School of Art and Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten Den Haag, examining the modern relevance of historic reprographic collections.

In collaboration with artist Joey Bryniarska, Westwood worked with archaeologists from the Unité Archéologique de Saint-Denis and the Institut National de Recherche Archéologique Préventive in Paris during a NEARCH Fellowship at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2014-18). This project led to the exhibition and monograph DD/u/MM/YYYY, which examines heritage artifacts, like the Basilica of Saint-Denis, to explore cross-disciplinary encounters, the infrastructures of archaeology, and questions of heritage access. A companion video installation and large-scale diagram, also titled dd/u/mm/yyyy, was exhibited at Marres House for Culture, Maastricht, in 2017.

In the 2000’s Westwood’s work articulated the exhibition venue as a medium: a multi-dimensional space bridging architecture, sculpture, print and institution. fatfinger (HAITCH . KAY . EKS) launched a series of four large-scale architectural installations exhibited internationally between 2002 and 2009 including at Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2002), Project Arts Centre (2003), , Collective Gallery (2004), Tate Britain (2005) and Bloomberg Space (2009). Each installation reimagined institutional spaces—such as office foyers and showrooms—to reframe relations between bureaucracy, accountancy, contractual relations, human capital and self-hood. Each emphasised the ascendency of roles and functions above lived experience and human-agency.

In his practice-based PhD, sic (sic), completed at Kingston University in 2017, Westwood explored recurring motifs—such as a stock photo data file, an unemployed consultant, a heritage ritual, and an artist’s voice recording—by transforming them into new forms through lectures, performances, montage, and writing. Westwood’s Stanley Picker Gallery exhibition, part of the PhD, drew on the dissemination of images from Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), reimagining this documentary material as an audio-visual, architectural, and temporal intervention, examining a work's fragile entanglement of production, document and encounter.

In 2018 Westwood curated Serpent and Shadow at the Royal Academy Schools, London. This curation brought together works from the Royal Academy Collections alongside work produced by students at the RA Schools. His own contribution to this exhibition was the display of a small early 20th century wooden Dazzle-boat model within the posterior recess of the plaster cast of Laocoön and his Sons.

Westwood’s recent work explores large-scale, mosaic-like drawings on paper as preliminary designs for wall drawings. Created through repetitive stamping and inking, these pieces merge pattern, object, and image, using rubber-stamped elements derived from various sources: the security patterns from the interiors of envelopes or the facial interactions and emotional role-play of actors in stock-photography. The resulting large-scale patterns invite viewers to shift between the awareness of system and the experience of picturing. This approach is influenced by Constructivist and post-Minimalist traditions in which system and anomaly are emphasized above event and expression.

From 2013 to 2016, Westwood held the Frank Martin Research Fellowship at Central Saint Martins. Previously, he was a Stanley Picker Fellow at Kingston University (2009-2011), received an Abbey Fellowship at The British School in Rome (2009) and was a resident at the European Ceramic Work Centre, Den Bosch (2010).