Dr. Anneké Pettican is an artist. She is co-director of Brass Art with Chara Lewis and Kristin Mojsiewicz. Their collaborative practice examines aspects of the uncanny and their critically acclaimed work explores the double, the shadow and the limen. In order to develop and realise their ambitious work, Brass Art regularly collaborate with other artists, digital media specialists, electro-acoustic composers, designers and scientists.

Their artworks and installations have featured in international exhibitions across the globe – including in Australia, Japan, China, Russia, USA, India, Germany, Portugal as well as the UK. Recent performative research explores Virginia Woolf’s writing room (Rodmell, UK) and continues Brass Art’s original Writer’s Rooms series. Working with expanded forms of image capture (3D Lidar and 4D Kinect on range-sensors), other projects in the series have developed embodied spatial encounters with museum sites including the homes of the Bronte sisters (Haworth, UK) and Sigmund Freud (London, UK). The former was featured as part of the HCMF (BBC3) and the later at the Freud Museum’s Festival of the Unconscious as well as many International exhibitions.

In 2018 Brass Art were the recipients of an Art&Heritage commission to create the first public art installation and exhibition inside the world-renowned Chetham’s Library (UK). This work continued the trio’s engagement with archival sites, which has included commissions for Grundy Art Gallery (2019), Barnaby Festival, Arts Council England (2013), Dark Matters The Whitworth (2012) and Tell it to the Trees, Meadow Arts (2008).

In 2016, as part of ISEA Hong Kong, Brass Art were selected for the artists-in-labs programme (organised by Zurich University of the Arts and City University of Hong Kong). Other residences have included the CCA Glasgow and V2 Lab Rotterdam. Brass Art are currently working on a new A-R project.

Brass Art have contributed chapters, journal articles and artefacts to a number of publications such as Contemporary Art in Heritage Settings (Routledge, 2020), Collaboration through Craft (Bloomsbury, 2014), Leonardo Special Issue ACM SIGGRAPH – MIT Press (2012), Tatton Park Biennial: Flights of Fancy (2012) and Skyscraping: Yorkshire Sculpture Park, (2008).

Anneké is the Subject Lead for Huddersfield’s Department of Art and Communication, ADA. She has previously held Course Leadership positions for a number of UGT and PGT courses and she regularly contributes to the Post Graduate research environment. She was the PI for an AHRC research grant Digital Doubles (2008) and is currently the CoI for an AHRC Network Award (2019) Barbara Hepworth: Material Practice, in partnership with University of York and The Hepworth, Wakefield.

My main research focus is centred on artistic practice and expanded forms of sculptural thinking. I am interested in the double, the shadow, metamorphosis and the limen in the context of the uncanny. I am particularly fascinated by pre-cinematic spectacle and light based technologies. This includes shadow play and 2D, 3D and 4D scanning, as a form of embodiment and their potential in relation to resonant spaces and places.

Other long-term research interests include:
Surrealism, feminism, performance.
Surveillance, big data, and ways of seeing.