Jack Southern graduated from Falmouth University in 2001, and went on to complete an MA at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL in 2003. Southern continued at the Slade as research fellow between 2003-2005, before being selected for an Acme Studios residency in East London (2005-2010). Alongside Southern’s varied creative career, his passion for education and pedagogy have led him into a number of substantial teaching roles, including BA Fine Art Course Leader at the University of Gloucestershire (2011-2016), a role he took up after writing the new BA course. Southern has been invited into various intuitions as a visiting lecturer both nationally and internationally, and his writing has been published in a number of newspapers and magazines including AN magazine, the Guardian, and the Telegraph.
Southern’s creative work spans teaching, research, writing and publishing, as well as a significant exhibition history as an independent artist. He has also managed large-scale collaborative projects which draw on a fascination to bring Drawing theory and practice together through a diverse range of activities such as exhibition making, artists in-conversations, discussion and practical workshops. Key examples include Time / Image / Construction (2016) and ‘Drawing making, Making drawing’ (2014), which both took place at the Drawing Room Gallery, London. Southern devised, co-ordinated and curated these projects, working with Drawing room co-directors, Kate Macfarlane and Mary Doyle as well as artists Cornelia Parker, Charles Avery, Dryden Goodwin, Franziska Furter, Claude Heath, Tim Knowles, Gemma Anderson and Emma Stibbon.
These projects drew inspiration from ‘Drawing Projects’, (1st Edition published, July 2011 / by Black Dog Publishing), a major publication on contemporary drawing practice and theory (has sold nearly 100,000 copies worldwide) which followed the success of the ‘Guardian Guide to Drawing’ (2009). Southern’s further research into contemporary Drawing practice has been disseminated through conference/event contributions and published papers, including the Thinking Through Drawing conference (Drawing network) at the Metropolitan Museum and Columbia University, New York, US (2014).
As an independent artist, Southern has worked in a range of media including drawing, sculpture/installation, moving image, photography and web works. He has worked on a number of funded collaborations, site specific commissions and exhibited in galleries nationally and internationally including Courtauld Institute of Art, London, Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth, Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall, Slade Research Centre, London, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, Wyspa Institute of Contemporary Art, Gdansk, Poland, Peri Centre for Photography, Turku, Finland and Muu Gallery, Helsinki, Finland.