Dr Joseph Noonan-Ganley
Staff details
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Joseph works across moving image, sculpture, performance and text to explore how identity is collaboratively made.
I am an artist who has taught across BA, MA & PhD level across the UK and internationally. I have taught in the art department at Goldsmiths since 2012 and I am currently a lecturer on the Graduate Diploma in Art.
My supervision interests are in the areas of moving image, sculpture, performance, queer art, text/writing art, sexual dissidence, materialism, experimental biography and identity exploration.
Academic qualifications
- PhD Fine Art, Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University, 2017
- Masters Fine Art, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2013
- BA Fine Art Painting, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, 2009
Research interests
My art explores how identities are collaboratively made in the process of interpreting others, being interpreted by others and the integration of these relationships.
Themes cluster around embodied labour, biographic authorship and illicit sexuality. Aiming to expand queer sensory vocabularies by complexifying male sexuality my art exposes problems that are cleansed out of contemporary queer culture (e.g. political ambivalence). The works draw from the literary genre of bio-fiction, feminist bodily experience, theories of sexual dissidence, Materialist and Cinéma Vérité filmmaking.
I often take as artistic material the lives and works of bisexual and homosexual men (Joseph Cornell, Charles James, Gareth Thomas). My exhibitions, performances and publications openly manipulate the remnants of these artists, designers, sports people, dressmakers and writers. Materials unearthed from the person’s life and work are remade through filming, sculptural construction and textual experimentation in explicit detail. Closing in on singular elements gives the artworks the building blocks to open up new meanings and resonances, shifting the material’s relationship to its original creator.
Examples of some of these materials: misty footage of a muddy sports match; letters riddled with arguments; an amateur mini-TV series shot on a grandmother’s camcorder; digitised tape recordings of interrogations of young rugby players; video footage of a famous American artist’s home.
I find methods and techniques through engaging these biographic materials, where I unravel popular notions of the authentic self. These allow me to establish idiosyncratic processes of understanding. An example is the editing technique developed for my 2017 video installation ‘The Cesspool of Rapture’, which was derived from the function of the zipper in the couturier Charles James’s work.
Publications and research outputs
Art Object
Carter, Claire Makhlouf; Noonan-Ganley, Joseph and Wakeford, Nina. 2022. DEMO PHOENIX.
Noonan-Ganley, Joseph. 2022. Our Bed.
Noonan-Ganley, Joseph. 2017. The Cesspool of Rapture.
Article
Noonan-Ganley, Joseph. 2021. Bed Text. Mirror Lamp Press(4), pp. 42-52.
Noonan-Ganley, Joseph. 2021. Our Prop Mud. NERO Magazine,
Artist's Book
Noonan-Ganley, Joseph. 2019. The Cesspool of Rapture.
Book Section
Noonan-Ganley, Joseph. 2021. I Gave Them To All The Guys In The Room. In: Maria Fusco and Lizzie Homersham, eds. The Happy Hypocrite – Without Reduction. London: Book Works. ISBN 9781912570102
Noonan-Ganley, Joseph. 2020. Deflexion. In: Richard Porter, ed. A Queer Anthology of Wilderness. London: Pilot Press.
Noonan-Ganley, Joseph. 2019. My Library. In: Chris Dreier; Gary Farrelly and Carl Haase, eds. ECII - The European Conference of Institutional Ideators. Berlin: Fantôme. ISBN 9783940999467
Edited Book
Noonan-Ganley, Joseph, ed. 2012. Idioglossia: an art writing glossary. London: Art Writing Guild. ISBN 9780957029439
Teaching overview
I established and ran the Fine Art PhD research programme at Newcastle University (2019-2022) and the Language and Performance course on the Studio for Immediate Spaces MA at the Sandberg Instituut, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam (2015-2019). As well as my role on the Graduate Diploma in Art at Goldsmiths I was interim Programme Co-Director MFA and MFA Critical Studies Course Leader, 2022, and interim Year Leader for BA Fine Art Critical Studies, 2023-2024. I am also a Senior Tutor on the MFA at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University.
Selected teaching experience:
• Newcastle University (2018-2022) – PhD Fine Art & BA Fine Art
• Goldsmiths, University of London (2019-2021) – PhD Fine Art & BA Fine Art
• Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (2014 - current) - MFA & BA Fine Art
• University of Reading (2021) – PhD Fine Art
• Goldsmiths, University of London (2017-2021) – BA Fine Art & History of Art
• London College of Communication, University of the Arts London (2020-2021) - Art Direction BA
• The School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University (2018-2021) - BA Fine Art
• University of Huddersfield (2018-2021) – External examiner, Fine Art MA by research
• Goldsmiths, University of London (2019-2020) – MA Artists’ Film and Moving Image
• Sandberg Instituut, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam (2015-2019) – Language and Performance; Studio for Immediate Spaces MA
• Bath Spa University (2018-2019) – BA Fine Art
• Liverpool John Moores University (2018) – BA Fine Art
• Royal College of Art, London (2017-2018) - Critical Practice MA
• Sandberg Instituut, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam (2015) - External examiner, Critical Studies MA
• Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts (2013) – Staff research symposia
• National College of Art and Design, Dublin (2010-2011) – BA Fine Art Sculpture