About Us
           
Please meet the holt journal for artistic research co-founders and editors: Dana Ariel, Dawn Gaietto and Sarah Fortais.



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Dr Dawn Gaietto

dawn m gaietto is a lens-based practitioner working and living in London. Her doctoral research, entitled What is happening here? [exploits of the nonhuman] was completed at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Her research is centred on examining  small components of nonhuman agency, allowing for momentary lapses in preconceived notions, and exploring the impacts of nonhumans acting upon and influencing humans. Recently she has been in residence at LABVERDE in Manaus, Brazil; and recent publications include Trace: Journal for Human-Animal Studies, Espacio Fronterizo, and Time to Waste. Recent exhibitions include the installation of a functional pigeon loft within a gallery space. This intervention allowed for a potential reconfiguring of viewership — creating new formulations of sustainability — both in the art making practices and a wider practice of being-in-the-world.

Dmgaietto.com


Dr Dana Ariel

Dana Ariel is an artist and researcher based in London, and a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth. Dana completed her doctoral research, entitled Sites of Unlearning: Encountering Perforated Ground, at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London with an awarded studentship from the AHRC. In her art practice, she explores the conceptual, political, material and poetic interpretations and implications of the process of unlearning through photographic representations of the landscape. This is done through experimentation with analogue printing processes of photographs and hybrid printmaking techniques, video, sound, text and abstract notions of drawing. Her work has been exhibited internationally in various venues and events including the recent solo exhibition ‘To Cross the Border with a Pomegranate’, Maya Gallery, Tel Aviv (2018), Brighton Photo Fringe Festival (2016) and Neo Gallery, Bolton (2014). Recent group exhibitions include 'Home Sweet Home' at the Institute for photography, Lille and Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles (2019), The International Print Biennale, Newcastle, 12 Star Gallery, Roaming Room and UCL Art Museum in London.

Danaariel.com


Dr Sarah Fortais

Sarah Fortais is a Canadian artist and researcher interested in bricolage: disassembling, repurposing, and modifying existing objects or ideas to generate new understanding. Fortais received a PhD in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art (2018), where she built spacesuits for animals, borrowed NASA moon rocks, produced the first graphic representation of every animal that has left Earth's atmosphere, and created strategies to observe and define what it means to call a person or thing ‘cool’. Fortais has also created a copy of an Apollo A5-L pressure suit out of materials sourced from the streets of London, and has produced a series of performative mission simulations and exhibitions, including 'Voyageur' (with Nikolas Ventourakis) for, "Hors Pistes: La lune: Zone Imaginaire à Défendre", in the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2019). She received the Kenneth Armitage Sculpture Prize and the Westbury Arts Centre Graduate Residency, Milton Keynes, in 2016. In 2018, with Dr. Dawn Gaietto, Fortais put together an interdisciplinary conference focussing on the nonhuman (titled:"Rendering the Invisible Visible") at University College London, and was awarded an Octagon Grant. Currently, Fortais is the Specialist Casting Technician for Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and delivers lectures on themes such as cool, bricolage, the non-human, copying, mapping, spacesuits, and defamiliarization. She is the first Artist in Residence at the Centre for Outer Space Studies at UCL.

Sarahfortais.com