Catherine Spencer

My research and teaching from the 1960s to the contemporary moment explores art’s relationships with political formulations, with particular interests including intersectional feminisms, internationalism and transnationalism, technologies of mediation, and abstraction, focusing on the Americas and Europe.

Current writing examines the constructs of the border and the trace in connection with art using abstraction in Britain since the 1970s, looking at the practices of Rasheed Araeen, Diego Barboza, Sonia Barrett, Frank Bowling, Rita Donagh, and Veronica Ryan, among others. Supported by an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellowship, in 2021 I co-organised (with Amy Tobin) the event series Grassroots: Artmaking and Political Struggle with Kettle’s Yard Gallery, and co-curated (with Caroline Gausden, Kirsten Lloyd and Nat Raha) the exhibition Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism at Glasgow Women’s Library. A growing strand of research focuses on feminist photographic practices.