Kimberley Foster is an artist and academic whose practice research explores embodied approaches to learning and interpretation in the art museum. She questions how a different material approach tethered to specifically tuned pedagogical art objects can engage previously unheard voices and extend the museum materialised experience. These objects are made to be physically encountered, acting as conduits between exhibit and audience, material provocations that push the museum visitor to find new material points of entry and a space for the subjective and autobiographical.
Kimberley’s doctoral practice research questions how these material acts of thinking and learning focus on the development and enactment of tangible and intangible touch. She explores the potential of a prosthetic art pedagogy that drives the learner beyond the conventions of dialectic thinking towards a disequilibrium. An approach where messy entanglements with materiality create an extension to the habitual ways of knowing or encountering learning. The relational encounters of Kimberley’s PhD research took place at Tate Modern, and at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia.
This practice research has developed from her established collaborative sculptural practice sorhed, and the development of ‘Object Dialogue Boxes’ which were widely commissioned by creative institutions, including Manchester art Gallery, Turner Contemporary, Museum of London, Museums Sheffield, Imperial War Museum, Rochester Cathedral, and the British Library.
Kimberley lectures at both undergraduate and postgraduate level and sees her teaching as an integral part of her practice, embedded in her making, collaborations, and research. She has extensive teaching experience within Visual Studies, Fine Art, and Art Pedagogy in differing UK institutions and is currently a lecturer in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. From September 2023, Kimberley will be the head of the MA Arts and Learning programme at Goldsmiths.
