Benjamin Jenner

My research explores the relationship between embodied experience and its re-presentation as a form of perceptual ecology. I make work with and alongside others that employs verbal, textual, and extralinguistic dialogue to question the role of the senses in the formation of subjectivity.  

 I completed my practice-led PhD in the school of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds in March 2024. Working as part of the collective Local Senses, I developed a site-based writing practice involving perambulatory spatial reasoning and the embodied imagination, that I termed ‘visual deprioritisation’.  My thesis, titled Embodied Blindfolded Navigation as Perceptual Ecology: The Re-Markable Space of Poetic Form, employed this experience to inspire a peripatetic reading-as-writing orientation facilitated by videographic editing techniques. 

My current research explores how these process-based methods can function as a vehicle for reflection-in-action for people living with neurodiversity.  

I disseminate my work nationally and internationally at conferences, symposia, and gatherings, via workshops and performative presentations. In October 2024, I presented the workshop ‘Lin[e]guistic Diagrams: Scripting the Workshop from Beyond the Visual’ at Drawing Across x Along x Between University Borders hosted by the University of Porto. In Autumn/Winter 2024 I will begin the research project ‘reaching for… open ending…’, working with people living with neurodiversity as part of Margate Festival of Design; and collaborate on the project ‘Drawing as Slow Conversation’ at The Writers’ Room, London. I am a member of the Language Based Artistic Research Group and their Special Interest Group Words as Matter. I sit on the editorial board of CePRA Journal at the University of Leeds.  

I teach History and Philosophy of Art at The Margate School, an independent art school in Margate, southeast Kent, UK.

Teaching areas

Drawing, Notation, Movement, Embodied thought, Spectatorship, Criticality, Performativity, Practice.  

Qualifications

PhD Fine Art Practice, University of Leeds;  

Associate Fellow of Advance HE;  

MFA Fine Art, Slade School of Art;  

BA Hons Fine Art – Wimbledon School of Art.