Dr Janice Howard

• U65570 Fine Art Practice 4: Research and Development (Level 6)
• U65595/7 Fine Art Practice 4: Major Project (Level 6)
• P65501 Fine Art Practice 1: Outcomes of Research in Practice (Level 7)
• P65502: Fine Art Practice II: Major Project (Level 7)

Completed practice based PhD supervision include:

• Dr. Jo Thomas-Presencing Place: an enquiry into the knowing and shaping of place through extended art practices (co-supervised with Professor Shelley Sacks)
• Dr. Aya Kasai-Nothing Matters: Answering the questions ‘Where’s the Art? Through Ma and Gen (co-supervised with Professor Ray Lee)
• Dr. Anna Yearwood-Finding/Making Home: A Practice Based Study in the Use of Everyday Ritual and the Making of Home (co-supervised with Professor Ray Lee)
• Dr. Alisaar Mcreary-Residues of Personal Experience of Conflict and Displacement (co supervised with Professor Ray Lee)
• Dr. Alex Newton: Uncanny Bodies: an arts practice-based exploration of strategies to embody thresholds between life and death (co-supervised with Professor Ray Lee)
• Dr. Wilfred Upkong: Blazing Century: Creative Intervention in the margins of two worlds-Studio Based Art and Connective Social Practice (co-supervised with Professor Ray Lee)

PhD theses currently being supervised as Director of Studies include:

• Catherine Ross: Liminal Light; Liminal Space: A Visual Investigation into Liminality 
• Anne Griffiths: Through the Phallic Eyeglass: How Linnaean Botanical Taxonomy informed Conversations Between the Plant Body and Feminine Culture
• Caroline Shadbolt: Artistic connecting devices: altering perspectives of landscape through visual poetics, kite flying and artificial intelligence 
• Kate Hipkiss: Thinking Through the Making Proces:Contemporary Papercutting in Practice
• April Jackson: One must have means, time and a plate of one's own: An arts based exploration of Western European food economy, heritage and cultute

PhD theses currently being supervised as second supervisor include:

• Blanca Rodriguez Beltran: Being home: An art practice exploration of the sense of home (co-supervised with Professor Ray Lee)
• Heather Burnett Rose: Campaign for Consciousness: An exploration of the ways art installations and public billboard exhibitions can potentially provoke shifts in consciousness and influence zeitgesit (co-supervised with Professor Ray Lee)
• James Elliot: Temporal Place(s): Digital Representations of the Landscape (co-supervised with Professor Ray Lee)
• Katie Taylor: Can a Creative Practice Methodology be Devised that will Satisfactorily Articulate a Sense of Individuality from Unidentified Human Remains? (co-supervised with Dr Clair Chinnery)

Janice is a PhD by practice examiner at Brookes. Examinations include Cordova De La Rosa, Johnson, Chatzigiannis, Manganis, Schaeffer, Lee, Regisford, Lloyd, Kirchgaesser, Glyn, Fox, Hattenhauer.

Janice's practice based research draws on knowledge from feminist phenomenology, philosophy, anthropology, film studies, cultural studies and contemporary art and intersect with the concept of an 'in-between' through themes emerging from lived experience such as illness. 

Janice's research interests include:

• Feminist phenomenology and lived experience as thematics for artistic research
• Autoethnography as artistic methodology
• Embodiment, the senses and artists film and video
• Screen/ space and the projected image in contemporary art
• The haptic as a visual strategy
• Enactments of memory, loss and trauma as temporal phenomena in art
• Liminality, the body and in-betweeness
• Walking and running as methods for artistic research
• Representation of women's experience of illness through visual poesis

Research group membership

• Centre of Research in the Arts (CoRA), School of Arts, Oxford Brookes University

Research projects

Janice's most recent research project 'Encounters with Illness' includes a number of experimental videos. The project navigates some of the physical and emotional dynamics of human experience as they are affected by illness and disease (such as Parkinson's and cancer) and explores ways to locate oneself in relation to such a paradoxical space in-between. The Project is auto-biographical, drawing on personal archives. Each video engages with a poetic visual language to evoke reflections of 'the fear of the other within' (Cristofovici 1999) as we age and encounter experiences of illness and disease. Editing is used to intervene in a natural sequence of events, to create a story that reveals a disrupted body, an 'other than me' (Toombs 1993) and to reflect upon a shift in the temporal dimension brought about by illness and the separation from a hitherto familiar place. The project attempts to articulate a personal complexity of loss that unravels with the slow deterioration of the body and comment on our deeply subjective and sometimes unfathomable experience of disease, often clouded by partial knowledge.

In previous projects, fascinated by the idea of women rendered as vanishing beings by social norms, political perspectives and historical practices, she devised a number of large scale, gallery and site based interventions to explore the concept of the 'vanishing woman' as a precarious position of resistance. She developed a number of projects which utilised darkness as a theme, a material subject and as a component of vanishing to explore the ambiguous shape of 'seeing' and 'knowing' through reference to 'the blind spot'.

These projects include ‘Screen’ as part of Waterwall a large-scale site related projection onto a waterscreen located in the Regents Canal, London in collaboration with Fatima Salim, British Champion Figure Skater and a National Ice Skating Association Gold Medallist. This work developed from research into the normalisation of female bodies achieved through certain ‘bodily practices’ particularly those associated with upper-class European repertoire of movement. The work explored the concept of ‘mobility’ acting as an interrupter and was designed to simultaneously evoke the resilience and vulnerability of the female skating subject through an act of vanishing.

Research impact

Janice has as international research record which includes exhibition at Art Stands Still Collarworks Gallery New York, Filmlatino Mexican Film Institute, Mo Museum Vilnus Lithuania, Adria Shorts Croatia, Twin Rivers Media Festival Flood Gallery Fine Arts North Carolina USA, Czong Institute of Contemporary Art South Korea, ALC Video Art Festival  Spain, Experimental Forum Los Angeles CA, Ill Muestra de Video Arte Faenza Colombia, Single Channel Video Festival Vermont USA, Esto es Para Esto Mexico, Birth Rites Whitworth Gallery Manchester and Kings College Medical School, Displaced P21 Gallery London, Autothnography and Creative Collaboration The Hepworth Gallery Wakefield, University of Buckingham Medical School,  Wheres the Art and Mediations Ovada Gallery Oxford, Luminaries Oriel Mostyn and Aberystwyth Arts Centre, The Serpentine Gallery London, Ffotogallery Cardiff, Chapter Arts Centre Cardiff, Silent Health Camerawork Gallery London, Gallery of Photography Ireland, Cambridge Darkrooms, Stills Gallery Edinburgh, City Museum and Art Gallery Worcester, Open Eye Gallery Liverpool, The Health Promotion Centre Bradford, Carnegie Arts Centre Cumbria, Norwich Gallery.

Her work has been published as part of the Live Art Development Agency Study Room Guide Restock, Reflect, Rethink series, The Displaced and Privilege: Live Art in the Age of Hostility, Representing The Medical Body, The Science Museum London, Kelly+Jones Un/Writing The Landscape, Re/Figuring The Body and she contributed to the research project Miscarriage and Wellbeing: performative rituals for visualising loss led by Dr Jacki Wilson at the University of Leeds.

Areas of expertise

Janice's practice based research spans video projection, experimental film, sound, photography, performance, drawing and text. Her recent research project focuses on the links between writing/ reading/ running  and making videos in relation to autoethnography and haptic visuality as she explores the theme of illness. She draws upon various disciplines in her research including feminist phenomenology, philosophy, anthropology, film studies, cultural studies and contemporary art.

Janice's work has been presented at conferences in the UK and internationally incuding the Public Engagement and Performance Conference at the Hepworth Gallery, TaPRA at the University of Essex, Women at the Centre Film Festival, International Papillomavirus Conference, Barcelona, The Film and Video Poetry Symposium, Los Angeles, CA and the Politics of Vulnerability in Contemporary Women's Writing and Creative Practices, The Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study University of London.

Janice has held numerous external examiner appointments for national, collaborative annd international programmes in Fine Art and Design including Chief External Examiner at both the University of the West of England, Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries and Education and the Arts Institute Bournemouth, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture.

Janice has contributed to the validation of Higher Education programmes at other UK HE and FE institutions and acted externally as consultant on REF submissions and HE Periodic Reviews. She contributed to the Advance-HE degree-standards project and is listed as a trained examiner in their External Examiners Directory.

Janice's academic career began as a Research Fellow in Time Based Media at Cardiff Metropolitan University working alongside Cornelia Parker. She previously held lecturing posts at Cardiff Metropolitan University and Loughborough University and has taught on Fine Art courses at Central Saint Martins College, Solent University and Leeds Metropolitan University. At Oxford Brookes she has undertaken many roles including Head of School as well as University wide roles such as Principal Lecturer Student Experience (Collaborative Provision).

Janice studied Fine Art at The Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford University under Rita Donagh and Douglas Allsop and then went on to study ‘alternative-media’ under Stuart Brisley, Susan Hiller, Lis Rhodes and Jayne Parker at the Slade School of Fine Art. 

Janice is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.