geodesic arts was an organisation formed specially to bring together the diverse and complementary skills of its members Kirsty Halliday (Arts Management); Mark Hildred (Interactivity, Technical Production and Realisation); Damian Murphy (Artist and Researcher in the field of sound and music computing); John Oxley (Video and Photography); Kippa Matthews (Photography); Julia Davis-Nosko (Poetry and Prose); Paul Elsam (Performance). The team produced workshops, exhibitions and installations that inspire and engage. The organisation closed in January 2022.
Kirsty, Mark, Damian, John and Kippa all worked together previously in various collaborations as part of Sightsonic, York’s festival of digital art, and Mark, Damian and John collaborated on a number of projects including the very well received sound and light installation, A Sense of Place, exploring and interpreting aspects of York’s history, archaeological and architectural heritage.
Find out more about the geodesic arts team below, our backgrounds, skills, experience and interests, not to mention the other projects we have worked on, both together and individually.
Kirsty Halliday
Kirsty is a freelance arts development manager. She supports arts organisations to think strategically, create new programmes, tell the story of their impact and reach new audiences.
Kirsty’s passionate about developing opportunities for people to learn new creative skills, develop their artistic practice and get involved in projects that both challenge and inspire.
Involved in developing arts projects and organisations since 2004, she’s been an Arts Development Officer for a local authority, director of a youth music development charity, produced an award-winning community opera and worked on dozens of projects and festivals.
Mark Hildred
Mark Hildred is a freelance consultant, working to enable children and adults with special needs to access music through the use of technology. His work includes the use of sound, light and video projection to create interactive environments, something that has lead to him working on a wide range of arts projects. Many of these have placed young people at the heart of the creative process.
Mark was Chair of the SightSonic Special Needs Group for four years and a core member of the Steering group, helping shape the progression of the festival and establish a strong educational program. This work included three national conferences on Creative Technology and Disability. In 2004 he was selected to be on the York Renaissance Group and over the following two years helped select a number of artistic interventions to invigorate the City, culminating in the Illuminating York event.
Mark has worked on a variety of artistic installations, these have included: Coming to our senses, Sarah Taylor (2001); Rhythm and Blues, Jerwood Awards, Sarah Taylor (2002); First, Last, Everything, Helen Storey (2002); Inside Story, British Library (2005-06); A Sense of Place, York Renaissance Project (2006); Interactive Textiles, Jenny Mason (2006).
Kippa Matthews – 1962-2016
Kippa Matthews, a founding member of geodesic arts, was a freelance photographer whose work covered news, features and cultural events.Kippa originally trained as a sculptor but met a photographer while travelling in his early twenties who he worked alongside, learning the craft first hand. He was offered his first professional job at a press agency in 1988 and didn’t look back.
Working for national and regional publications, his eye for a photo and his laidback, easy-going approach helped him create an incredible body of work. Images of the great and the good sit alongside candid studies of everyday life, telling the story of life in Northern England.
His photographs have been published and exhibited nationally and internationally, including in The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph and The Times, as well as more locally for The Heritage Lottery Fund, The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York Minster and the National Railway Museum. He was also involved in various arts projects in recent years, including The York Millennium Mystery Plays, The Illuminating York Festivals, SightSonic and the visual arts festival, YoMu.
As a member of geodesic arts, Kippa documented our creative process and created stunning images for exhibitions and installations. He was also the heart and soul of every party. Kippa died suddenly in 2016. We miss him.
Damian Murphy
Damian Murphy is Professor in Sound and Music Computing at the Department of Electronic Engineering, University of York, where he has been a member of academic staff since 2000, and is the University Research Champion for Creativity. He started his career in the Performing Arts Department at Harrogate College and has previously held positions at Leeds Metropolitan University and Bretton Hall College.He has been principal investigator on a number of AHRC and EPSRC funded projects relating to virtual acoustics, auralisation and the creative application of sound, and published over 130 journal articles, conference papers and books in the area. He is a member of the Audio Engineering Society, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a visiting lecturer to the Department of Speech, Music and Hearing at KTH, Stockholm, where he specialises in spatial audio and acoustics. He has held visiting researcher status at a number of universities internationally.
Prof. Murphy is an active sound artist and in 2004 was appointed as one of the UK’s first AHRC/ACE Arts and Science Research Fellows, investigating the compositional and aesthetic aspects of sound spatialisation, acoustic modelling techniques and the acoustics of heritage spaces. His work has been presented in galleries nationally and at festivals and venues internationally and has resulted in varied collaborations with visual artists, photographers, poets, archaeologists as well as artists and technologists working with interactive digital media.
John Oxley
John Oxley lives in Scarborough and since 1989 has have earned a living as an archaeologist with the City of York Council. He originally comes from Darlington and has lived and worked in Liverpool (where he studied history and archaeology), Durham, Southampton, and York. He has published and lectured extensively on the archaeology of Roman and post-Roman towns (in particular York and Southampton) and on the management of archaeological deposits in towns.
He started to exhibit his artwork in 2002. His artistic practice draws on his professional background as an archaeologist and his work revolves around the concepts of context and documentation, and includes explorations of the layering of images within images and the interplay of aperture and light. Images are captured both on film and with digital sensors. This work generally takes the form of digital prints, digital video pieces or multi-media installations.
Recent exhibited works include: Northern Lights, Saltaire Festival (photography) (2008); 54degrees 28minutes, YoMu Arts Festival (video/text/photography installation) (2007); A Sense of Place, York Renaissance Project, Bootham Bar (light, projection and sound installation with Damian Murphy and Mark Hildred) (2006); Six reflections, Gateway Digital Cafe (video/text/photography) (2004); And I Dreamt I felt your skin close to mine, SightSonic International Digital Arts Festival (video) (2003); Hearts and Minds, Beyond the Walls, ROTA Exhibition, York College (photography/text) (2003); About me About You, City Screen, York (solo exhibition – photography/text) (2002).
Julia Davis-Nosko
Julia works across disciplines; as poet, performer, ceramicist and researcher, developing different approaches to both artistic practice and project management.
She has participated and developed work for indialogue at Nottingham Contemporary exploring the nature of collaborative working. Performance and publishing includes Demarco European collective pieces, performance with Lemn Sissay (Lincoln Arts Festival), and a series of pamphlets published through Belle Vue Press; Mirrorland and Half Asleep Tree. Work in ceramics includes research for claytransformations. She was recently shortlisted for the international Future Lights 2018 competition.
She is a Trustee at Commonword in Manchester, managed the British Library Inside Story programme working alongside Mark Hildred and has worked with the RSA programming across the North of England.
Paul Elsam
Paul trained as an actor in Manchester, and has appeared in BAFTA- and Olivier-nominated work on screen and stage. He is an Associate Director of troublehouse theatre, and has written and directed work with student and professional groups in the UK and the United States.
Paul is the author of two books by Bloomsbury: Acting Characters, which teaches performance versatility, and Stephen Joseph, which analyses the work and legacy of the theatre maker. In 2017 he co-curated a touring exhibition on Joseph.
Paul holds a PhD in Drama from the University of Hull, and has shared research via journals and at events in the UK, in the USA and in France. He was on the steering committee of the CreST Network, which brought together speech scientists and speech practitioners.
Paul recently co-wrote a new degree in Acting, which will launch in 2019 through a partnership between Coventry University (Scarborough), and the Stephen Joseph Theatre.
