Speaking of Art: Art, Histories and the Podcast

Dr James Mansell is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity (2017) and co-editor, with Christopher Scheer and Sarah Victoria Turner, of Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, the Arts, and the American West (2019). His research is on sound culture and he is currently leading the AHRC project ‘Sonic Futures: Collecting, Curating and Engaging with Sound at the National Science and Media Museum’.

Jo Baring is the Director of the Ingram Collection of Modern British & Contemporary Art, one of the UK’s leading art collections. She has curated exhibitions at museums and galleries across the country. A former Director of Christie’s UK, Jo is regularly requested to interview artists at museums and art fairs. She is a trustee of arts charities ArtCan and the Artists Collecting Society, is a member of the Association of Women in the Arts, the Association of Professional Art Advisors, sits on the board of the Women of the Year charity, and also acts as an arts mentor. She is on the authentication committee for the artist Elisabeth Frink and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She is working on her first book Modern British Art: New Reflections which will be published in Autumn 2022. Her first podcast series, Sculpting Lives, a collaboration with Dr Sarah Victoria Turner, and supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, was released in Spring 2020.

Cathy Courtney is Project Director of Artists’ Lives, which she and others established in 1990, an on-going oral history project for National Life Stories, based at the British Library. Now numbering over four hundred in-depth audio recordings, averaging twenty hours each but many considerably longer, the project captures, via informal conversations, the life stories of artists and those whose careers are associated with them. Cathy Courtney was co-curator with Elena Crippa (Curator Modern and Contemporary British Art) of the exhibition Artists’ Lives: Speaking of the Kasmin Gallery at Tate Britain (2016–2018), presenting extracts from Artists’ Lives alongside works in Tate’s collection. She is also Project Director of a sister NLS oral history project, Architects’ Lives.

Between 1995–1997 she held a Fellowship in Book Arts at Camberwell College of Art, and between 1983–c.1999 wrote a regular column on book art for Art Monthly. In 1995 she was co-curator with Maria White (former Tate Chief Cataloguer, Artists’ Books) of the exhibition, Artists’ Books at Tate Britain. 

She is a Trustee of the Jocelyn Herbert Archive (theatre design) now housed at the National Theatre Archive. Publications include Jocelyn Herbert: A Theatre Workbook.

Inigo Wilkins is a writer and lecturer (CalArts, New School for Research and Practice) working across many disciplines (sonic culture, cognitive science, philosophy, and finance). He took his masters in Sonic Culture at the University of East London, and completed his PhD in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths in 2016. The title of his thesis was Irreversible Noise, which forms the basis for a book forthcoming by Urbanomic. He has a piece called Improbable Semantics in the book Construction Site for Possible Worlds (Urbanomic), and has published articles in such journals as Litteraria Pragensia, Mute Magazine, and HFT Review. He is co-director of the online journal and research platform Glass Bead (www.glass-bead.org).