23.04.2025
Design × Connection
Design Dialogues
Verity-Jane Keefe, visual artist, explores the complex relationship between people and their environment in her work. Through moving images, text, and installation, she examines public space not only as a physical location but also as a place of stories, memories, and interactions. Her practice focuses on urban redevelopment, questioning how art can contribute to making both existing and often invisible communities more visible and empowered.
In this lecture, Verity-Jane Keefe engages in conversation with Irish graphic designer Paul Bailey, who approaches graphic design as a critical tool to unravel the complexities of contemporary culture.
During this Design Dialogue, both speakers explore the connections between art, design and urban development, the role of creativity in building meaningful connections, with a focus on interactions within communities, in a time when the relationship between people, space, and culture is constantly evolving.
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Speakers
Verity-Jane Keefe is a British visual artist working predominantly in the public realm to explore the complex relationship between people and place. She is interested in the role of the artist within urban regeneration and how experiential practice can touch upon and raise ambitions of existing and invisible communities.
Since 2003 she has been developing new models of practice within municipal, collaborative contexts – following long term residency approaches that produce outcomes that explore the politics of participation. Her practice takes many forms, but always starts with lurking, place and archives. The incidental, the overheard, the conversation, the observed. Working with text, moving image, site-based research, archives, installation, print, social structures and object. She is recently delivered a public commission with Towner Gallery (Eastbourne) and is the current Wheatley Fellow and Incidental Artist with Eastside Projects (Birmingham), and is a pre-doc candidate at ZHdK (Zurich). She is an associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins where she teaches on the BA Fine Art XD pathway and was formerly a Unit Master at the Architectural Association.
Paul Bailey is an Irish graphic designer, researcher and educator based in London (UK), exploring a practice that is made public through exhibitions, publications, performances, workshops, writing, teaching and curation.
He has collaborated with various artists, organisations and institutions such as Forensic Architecture, Victoria & Albert Museum, Royal Institute of British Architects and Irish Museum of Modern Art. His studio practice, teaching and research have been awarded, exhibited and published internationally. He has been an invited presenter, critic, jury member and examiner at a range of international institutions such as Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins, Goldsmiths University, Royal College of Art (UK); Icelandic Academy of the Arts (IS); National College of Art & Design (IE). He co-authored and directed the MA Graphic Media Design course at London College of Communication, UAL (2014-22), and was an advisor at the Jan van Eyck Academie (2015-18).
He is presently Professor for Communication Design & Research at HfG Karlsruhe (DE); pursuing a PhD in the Arts at KASK & Conservatorium (BE); and leads an independent design-research studio (UK). He recently published ‘I Shivered Violently / Don’t be Startled in the Night’ with Bryony Quinn (Set Margins’).
Design Dialogues
Design x Connection is part of the curated lecture series Design Dialogues organized by the design department of KASK & Conservatorium/School of Arts in Ghent and Design Museum Gent. Unique voices from the broad field of design are invited to reflect on the role, impact, and future of design in a changing world. Each lecture is a critical dialogue centered around a theme and concludes with an open discussion between the speaker and the audience. Our mission: to provide engaging perspectives that empower design students and enthusiasts to tackle the challenges of today and tomorrow.
