Jane Madsen, an artist and art historian, works in film (16mm), video and installation. Her work has been regularly shown in galleries, festivals and cinemas. She is a lecturer in Moving Image for Fine Art and Graphics at the Camberwell School of Arts, University of the Arts, London. and also, previously at Central St. Martins (Foundation). From 1993-1996 she worked at the London Filmmakers Co-Operative (later Lux). Since completing an MA in Fine Art at Middlesex University (2002), she has completed four films and video installations. Recent work has been shown at the Tate Britain (as a part of the Blake exhibition), the Jan Van Eyck Academy (Maastricht) and the University of Ghent (Belgium). Jane Madsen is now preparing the research and raw footage for her work, Collapse II.

Helen Kirwan B.SS., LL.B., BL., B.A. (Fine Art), MA (Fine Art), MA (Philosophy: Aesthetics and Art Theory) works heuristically that is to say experimentally, tending towards a trial-and error- kind of procedure, not as an individual creator but a catalyst. Using interactive methodologies, interpretations and relational objects, she explores a fragmentary, critical and reflexive model of art (art as the production of its own theory) as elaborated by Frederich Schlegel and others. This proposition is developed in her dissertation Early German Romanticism’s Enduring Themes In Contemporary Art Practice (2004).

The work is performance and social event, philosophy and art installation. It aims to create experimental sites for engagement, to stimulate interactions, to prompt encounters, relations and experiences. These create a fluid network of new possibilities for connections in the shared space. The ‘work’ lies in this matrix of prompts, suggestions, questions and responses arising in these transitory situations rather than in any created objects or solid materials. It lies in the transformation of relations and the production of meaning through connectivity. This matrix of elements, psychological, social and physical, tangible and intangible allow the work to expand beyond formal time and space; thus offering an expanded conception what of art and an ‘art space’ could be.

These experiments and challenges- to notions of authorship, originality, museological context, viewer, visual, object, owner and value serve to critically engage with questions of art’s production, distribution and consumption. They also demonstrate the paradoxes of transgression and offer possibilities for reflection on the ontology of art in philosophical terms. }}}…………FOOTPRINTS…………..{{{
[ Omtrent de Biennale van Venetië [2003]-[About the Venice Biennale [2003] ] which began in June 2003, activated a series of collaborative journeys with Jane Madsen which are continuing.

Helen Kirwan, 2005.