Dr Kimberley Foster
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Kimberley is an artist and researcher whose work focusses on pedagogical approaches to art practice in the art museum.
Kimberley is an artist and lecturer and has worked within in Higher Education in differing areas of art practice and art education for over 20 years at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She is currently PGR Supervisor for the CDP between Goldsmiths and the National Gallery. She was previously Head of Programme and a Lecturer in Arts, Education and Learning
She has a collaborative practice: www.sorhed.com and works extensively with exhibitions and collections. This sculptural-object-based-practice focusses on the development and enactment of pedagogical art objects questioning interpretation, touch, and encounter. From 2023-25 Kimberley was a Cambridge University Visual Culture Visiting Research Fellow with her practice research focussed on the Fitzwilliam Museum collection. Her practice-based PhD (Material Acts of Thinking and Learning in the Art Museum. Embodied Encounters and the Pedagogical Art Object) took place at Tate Modern and Sainsburys Centre UEA.
Academic qualifications
- PhD Art Practice and Learning. Art Practice and Learning.Goldsmiths
- Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
- MA Fine Art Sculpture. Chelsea College of Art
- BA Fine Art Sculpture. (First Class Honours) University of Brighton
Research interests
Kimberley extends her collaborative and PhD research through her continuing work in the Art Museum. Through her recent Visual Culture Visiting research fellowship at Cambridge University she questioned how we might encounter materiality or touch within the museum. How might aspects of intangible touch have the potential to become tangible through a prosthetic encounter (Garoian 2013) with Pedagogical Art Objects?
Her interest in a prosthetic art pedagogy questions an extension out from familiar knowledge through material practices, a learning experience where habitual ways of perceiving and interpretation, can be contested. A space where a materially focussed pedagogy can enable alternative ways of experiencing the museum.
Kimberley's focus is on the potential of how this additional subjective reach can enable the space of the museum to become reimagined and repositioned with an emphasis of individually resonant encounters, that extend from existing knowledges - and enhance participant/audience agency.
Her recent research took place within the Fitzwilliam Museum- University of Cambridge and York Museums Trust where she developed Pedagogical Art Objects with the intention to enable an intimate, personalised, and inclusive learning experience and an engagement with differing forms of visual literacy that can enable a discordance with the expected approaches to looking and understanding.
Featured publications
2024:
Material Acts of Thinking and Learning in the Art Museum. Embodied Encounter and the Agency of the Pedagogical Art Object
PhD Practice research. Written Thesis and Visual thesis. Art Learning and Practice - Goldsmiths
2021:
Pistachios, pencils, and punctuation: performative encounter and the art of conversation
Foster, K, Foster, K & Mitchell, V. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. Volume 13. Number 2 -Intellect journals.
2017:
Inappropriate Shifts
co-authored book Chapter Baker. In Collective and Collaborative Drawing Conversations. Ed (J. Journeaux, H, Gorrill). Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Professional projects
Kimberley has been commissioned widely in both Museums and Galleries including; Manchester Art Gallery, Turner Contemporary, Museum of London, Imperial War Museum, Millennium Galleries Sheffield, British Library, Rochester Cathedral, York Museums Trust.
She is currently a Cambridge Visual Culture Visiting research Fellow (23-24)
2022/23: Commission for a series of pedagogical art objects for ‘Ecologies of Practice’ AHRC funded Climate Change project with the Climate Museum UK and Goldsmiths Centre of Arts and Learning.
2021: And, But: Punctuation, paraphernalia and the peripheral. Presentation and performance K. Foster, K. Foster, V. Mitchell. Affective Digital Presence series. Centre for Arts and Learning. Goldsmiths.
2020: Film for Comfort/Discomfort material reflections in Lockdown. Goldsmiths.
2020: Transparent Things project with Centre for Contemporary Art Goldsmiths and HGAED School. Material interventions informed by Nabokov text and exhibited artworks.
2019: Making thinks with Sebald. Project using sorhed objects in dialogue with Sebald exhibition. Visualizing practice research in the gallery. Castle Museum. Norwich
2019: Thinking thinks with Sebald. Project using sorhed objects in dialogue with Sebald Exhibition with children. Castle Museum. Norwich
2019: ‘Drawing from the collection’ project informed by Jim Eade’s thinking, collections and objects to stimulate drawing processes. Kettles Yard Gallery. University of Cambridge.
2019: Object Commission -sorhed objects created for Coopers Gallery. Barnsley Museums and outreach programmes.
Conferences and talks
2025:
Material Encounters. Henry Moore Foundation Studios and Gardens
Object Handing interactions with Pedagogical Art Objects.
2025:
CAL Known and Unknown. A Space for Touching Knowledges and Southern Outfall
Artists Talk - Centre of Arts and Learning. Goldsmiths
2025:
Practice Research: anti Methods, active Approaches and reciprocal Engagements
Co- Led Doctoral practice reach training. Supported by CHASE
2025:
Holding Subjectivities in the Art Museum. Pedagogical Art Objects and an Ethics of Care.
Talk/Lecture for Visual Ethics Network. University of York
2025:
Practice- Based Research Residency. Exploring Interdisiplinary Methods
Invited Speaker -
2023:
Can Intangible Touch Become Tangible in the Art Museum?
‘Touch-Space: The Tactile Imagination in Contemporary Sculpture’. Henry Moore institute. Leeds University
2019:
Ecologies of Practice
Ecologies of Practice’ symposium paper/presentation with Dr Clare Stanhope. Goldsmiths
2019:
Presentation and Object Interventions
Study event 'Artists in Collections’ Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. University of East Anglia.
2018:
Sorhed encounters
sorhed research presentation for research cluster ‘Material Encounters’ Birmingham City University.
2018:
Research, Practice, Provocations
Presentation for Engage. Wysing Arts Centre.
2018:
The religion of New Materialism; pedagogical mattering’s and suspensions of disbelief
Presenting performative provocation: Material Engagements with Communities and Borders in Times of Movement with Clare Stanhope at Urban Matters. Utrecht University
2018:
The Physicality of Research
Organized and presented materially led symposium at Tate exchange. Tate Modern, with Dr. Emily Pringle
2018:
Pedagogies of Attention and Matter
Art Historians Association Conference. Courtauld Institute.
2018:
Material transplants, reciprocity, and art pedagogy
Paper for ‘Art, Materiality and Representation’ conference. British Museum.
2018:
You and I are discontinuous beings
Exhibition. International Project space. Birmingham School of Art.