Dr Elle Reynolds

Staff details

Dr Elle Reynolds

Position

Programme Leader, Graduate Diploma in Art

Department

Art

Email

e.reynolds (@gold.ac.uk)

Elle works with materials to explore alternative pedagogies, collaborative and informal spaces for learning.

Scholar/researcher/quiet disrupter, Elle Reynolds has an extensive background in organising practice and teaching within art higher education. Yet she continually challenges traditional institutional structures, reimagining the use of time and space in academia. Working both within and against these frameworks, Elle formulates strategies for alternative models of education systematically applying her concept of Diagonal Practices. Her making includes object installation, collaborative events, performative lectures, and interventions that unsettle the notion of archive through spatial exploration, participation, and the disruption of academic language. She holds a PhD investigating alternative art school spaces and serves as a Non-Executive Director and Board member of TOMA (The Other MA), an alternative art school in Southend-on-Sea, Essex. Elle is currently Programme Leader of the Graduate Diploma in Art at Goldsmiths.

Academic qualifications

  • Practice Based PhD: Nottingham Trent University 2024
  • Research Methods Course: Royal College of Art 2009
  • MA Art: University of Reading 2002
  • Postgraduate Certificate in Education: Didsbury School of Education 1986
  • BA Ceramics, Metal and Wood: Manchester Polytechnic 1984
  • Diploma in Art: Bolton College of Art 1981

Research interests

A current project situates Morass as a living site within an overarching and iterative mapping of alternative art education. It explores Morass in Negril, Jamaica, not as a fixed location, but as a constellation of spaces: environmental, historical, and conceptual. In removing the definite article, Morass becomes fluid: a living site, a place of nourishment and connection for biodiversity, and a sanctuary for marooned or peripheral communities. It is conceived as an evolving cartography of fragments, memory, and resistance. Through collaborative mappings, we/the project investigate transitions from sea to seagrass meadows to swamp, tracing the movement of water as it travels, deposits, and shapes terrain. By drawing on local knowledge systems and responding to site-based and documented social, political, and material narratives, Morass becomes both a tool of orientation and a call to attention. It points to the possibilities of the then and now, reimagines and imagines actions and languages, forming one aspect of a wider conceptual map.

Elle is a member of the collaborative project, No Telos, which was part of the Research Pavilion, Venice 2019. Additionally her work has been exhibited and performed at locations, art spaces and galleries, in Estonia, Italy, Romania, Spain and the United Kingdom. She has held External Examiner positions for many years. Elle is currently on the board of Directors for TOMA, (The Other MA), Southend on Sea.

Professional projects

April 2025 : Residency at Studio 459, Tomar, Portugal.

Conferences and talks

2025: A Vision With Artists: New Contemporaries at the ICA
Workshop: A Vision With Artists, The first iteration of A Vision With Artists, a New Contemporaries event, was an afternoon dedicated to thoughtful and inclusive discussions.