Esther Windsor

Esther is a curator, artist, and writer and has curated at Camerawork Gallery and Darkroom, the ICA, The Photographers’ Gallery, and The Royal British Society of Sculptors. Esther established two art school galleries, the waiting room, University of Wolverhampton and mirror, London College of Printing at London Institute (now LCC at UAL). She was director at Hull Time Based Arts and Co-directed, with Dallas Seitz, an artist-led space 1000 000 mph, London. Esther has taught across Fine Theory and Practice for over 20 years, on MFA & MA Art and Space with Cullinan and Richards at Kingston University before coming to Birmingham School of Art in 2017 and teaching Fine Art for BA MA and PhD. 

Esther studied her BA at Goldsmiths where, after having Dick Hebdige and Valerie Walkerdine as lecturers, she became interested in subcultures, class, and gender. She did her MA in Photographic Studies while working at Camerawork Gallery, and Darkroom, directed by Barbara Hunt, with Stuart Hall as a board member. On her MA she had Oliver Richon and Helen Chadwick as tutors, which led her to study at The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and on an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies with Darian Leader, Parveen Adams and Slavoj Žižek, and to attend a long-term lecture programme of Mark Cousins at the Architectural Association, London.

Esther's research and practice emerges from this background and from a Practice-based Fine Art PhD at Kingston University, This included text works, photography, expanded sculpture, and a novel, Ugly Beast, about characters in a contemporary art world on the therapist’s couch. Her research looks at political subjectivities, gender & sexuality, re-activated psychoanalytic texts, fiction, storytelling and the exhibition as artwork. She considers relationships of learning and art production as part of her practice. She has volunteered and worked at The Anna Freud Centre London on a steering group for child mental health services and in community parenting projects and is a governor at secondary school.  Esther has lived in Tokyo, New York, and now London. 

Research uses practice and multidiciplinary  intersections including:

Political Subjectivities

Re activated Psychoanalytic Texts

The Exhibition as Art Work. 

Architectural Space & Social Housing archives

Anthropology, Art and Health

PhD supervision and teaching subjects include: 

Fine Art Practice

Practice Based Research

Sculpture

Exhibition as Art Work

Curatorial Study

Psychoanalytic Study

Sexuality, Gender and Feminisms

Class and Subjectivity

Fine Art Photography

Anthropology