Staff Profiles

Alexandra teaches topics on art theory and practice, covering Modern, Postmodern, and Contemporary art.

Modules taught

Undergraduate

Major Project (3rd year, Theory element)

Critical Essay (3rd year, Extended essay supervision)

Modernism and Avant-gardes (1st year)

 

Postgraduate

Fine Art Theory 1: Topics in Contemporary Fine Art Culture

Fine Art Theory 2: Extended Critical Essay

Research grants and awards

Kahoon Projects, funded by Oxford Brookes University and Arts Council England.

Duncan Grant's Scoll, In Focus project, funded by Tate.

Research projects

Alexandra is Principal Investigator of 'Kahoon Projects', a platform for examining class identity in C21st Britain. In 2019 this included a series of contemporary artist residencies, community engagement, and performance, poetry and music events. This was hosted by SET Centres, and organised in collaboration with Roland Fischer-Vousden.

As part of this examination of working-class identity and cultures, Alexandra is also co-editor of 'The Working-Class Avant-Garde' (OLH Special Collection, forthcoming 2019), with Dr Leon Betsworth and Dr Nick Lee.

Alexandra recently completed a collaborative research project examining Duncan Grant's Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting. This was part of a Tate 'In Focus' commission.

Books

• Bickley Trott A, Betsworth L, Lee N., Ed., The Working-Class Avant-Garde, Open Library of Humanities (OLH) (2020)
  Abstract

  The idea of a working-class avant-garde may seem a contradiction to some. The avant-garde, so often an elite realm of the arts, has proved to favour those with the requisite social, cultural and economic capitals to succeed in this competitive arena. Indeed, studies such as John Carey’s divisive text, Intellectuals and the Masses, have understood the high intellectualism of the twentieth-century avant-garde to have developed in response to the improved education of the mass populace: a means to retain the divide between the masses and the elite. Its obscurity has furthermore been thought inconsistent with working-class cultures and collective ideals. This collection confronts this perceived divide by examining the avant-garde artists and writers who were born to the conditions of the working-class. The scope of figures is broad – from DH Lawrence and Robert Colquhoun, to Garth Evans and Mark E. Smith – and the definition of ‘working-class’, of ‘avant-garde’, and of ‘British’, naturally adapt within this collection according to the nation’s changing cultural, social and political landscape. This collection highlights not only the diversity of working-class voices within the twentieth-century British avant-garde, but also examines the changing conditions that provoked, influenced and inspired them. This Special Collection has been guest edited by Dr Leon Betsworth, Dr Alexandra Bickley Trott, and Dr Nick Lee.
  

  Website 
• Trott A, Ed., Across the Great Divide: Modernism's Intermedialities from Futurism to Fluxus, Cambridge Scholars Press (2014)
  ISBN: 9781443854788
  

Book chapters

• Trott A, 'Hydropathe caricature: Satirical portraits in France's early Third Republic' in Meijer Drees M, de Leeuw S (ed.), The Power of Satire, John Benjamins Publishing (2015)
  ISBN: 9789027202291 eISBN: 9789027268556
  Abstract As a young ‘bohemian’ collective, the Cercle des Hydropathes was characterised by frivolous humour indicative of the liberal social changes in France’s early Third Republic. This chapter considers how the Cercle des Hydropathes’ republican community was personified in humorous portraits on the cover of its journal L’Hydropathe. It argues that in satirising the club’s collective image, Georges Lorin’s caricatures coherently portrayed the artists through an image that promoted Republican liberty as a stable ideal. Instead of rallying support for liberal social progression, their club created an environment allowing Parisian intellectuals to engage with the way of life that Republican liberties made possible.Website 
• Alex Trott, 'Dynamism and Design in the Ballets Suedois's 'L'Homme et son desir'' in Christopher Townsend, Alex Trott, Rhys Davies (ed.), Across the Great Divide: Modernism's Intermedialities from Futurism to Fluxus, Cambridge Scholars Press (2014)
  

Other publications

• Bickley Trott A, Fischer-Vousden R, de la O Garrido M, Short S, Tipping M, Vowles M., 'Kahoon Projects'
  

  Kahoon Projects was a collaborative, practice-based research project, examining contemporary working identity. In two consecutive artist residencies, four contemporary artists developed original art work, all exhibited in public art exhibitions. The first exhibition, 'Do the Twist', involved socially-engaged artist Shonagh Short and filmmaker Maria de la O Garrido. This complex installation explored  . The second exhibition, 'Word of Mouth', included films by artists Mitch Vowles, and Morgan Tipping. The exhibition explored representation of traditional working class voices from marginalised towns across the South of England. 

  Work was developed with the support and guidance of curators and project leaders, Alexandra Bickley Trott, and Roland Fischer-Vousden, and the project was run in collaboration with SET Centres (London). Academic and Industry mentors also provided additional guidance and feedback, and brought in additional voices that helped to shape the work and the response to the topic. 

  Kahoon Projects also involved a wider programme of outreach events, working with local communities as a central part of each residency. Performance and poetry events presented work by a range of artists and poets on the subject of class, and a series of public talks (with support of the Peckham Pelican, London) further engaged a public discussion around the wider issues of class identity, as explored through the exhibitions. 

  (2019)
• Alexandra Trott, 'Waves of Painted Stone: Abstraction and Materiality in the Art of Duncan Grant'
  (2016)

Areas of expertise

Alexandra has previously worked with contemporary artist Eloise Hawser to help produce exhibitions for Tate Britain (Weight of Data, May-October 2015), the New Museum, New York (2015 Triennial: Surround Audience), and the ICA, London (Lives on Wire, June-September 2015).

Membership of professional bodies

External Examiner for the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art and Deisgn at Sotheby's Institute of Art.

 

Trustee, SET Centres, arts charity.

Conferences

Selected Conference Papers

September 2019, 'Kahoon Projects: contemporary art residencies examining class in 21st century Britain’, Working-Class Studies Association conference, University of Kent.

 

June 2018, 'La Société du Bon Bock: Caricature, Beer and the Franco-Prussian War', New Geographies of Cultural Satire, Christ Church Oxford.

 

June 2017, ‘Bloomsbury’s Kinetic Body: the Ballets of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell”. International Virginia Woolf Society Conference, University of Reading.

 

June 2017, ‘“A Demon Dwelt in Him”: Madness, Consumption, and the Intangible Art of Fumisterie’. The City as Modernist Ephemera Conference, School of Arts & Creative Industries, LSBU. (Invited Speaker)

 

February 2017, ‘Transit Vans and Origami Swans’. Visual Cultures Research Forum, Queen Mary, University of London. (Invited Speaker)

 

December 2016, ‘“A Lion in the Skin of an Ass”: Fumist Paris and the Birth of Anti-Art’. Historical Modernisms symposium, Senate House, University of London

 

August 2014, ‘The Cercle des Hydropathes: A Liberal Utopia?’. European Network of Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, University of Helsinki, International Conference

 

April 2014, ‘Your Body as My Canvas: Collective Identity and the Hydropathe Body in the Early Third Republic’. Modernist Communities International Conference, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III

 

January 2013, ‘Humour, satire and the denial of political cause in Parisian bohemian art’. University of Utrecht, Faculty of Humanities, Satire Across Borders International Conference

 

September 2012, ‘Battle in Bohemia: The Hydropathe Club as Social Protest in the Early Third Republic’. University of Kent, Centre for the Study of Social and Political Movements, Theory, Action and Impact ofSocial Protest.

 

Selected Event Organising

'The Working-Class Avant-Garde', LSBU London, 22nd June 2018. In collaboration with Dr Leon Betsworth (LSBU) and Dr Nick Lee (Royal Holloway, University of London).

 

‘Modernism & Ritual’, Research Panel at the European Network of Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM), hosted by the University of Helsinki, Finland. Organised and chaired with Dr Essi Viitanen (UCL), August 2014.

 

Conference Panel organiser: ‘Modernism’s Intermedialities from Futurism To Fluxus’, Research Panel at the Association of Art Historians (AAH) conference hosted by the Open University, Kent. Co-organised and chaired with Professor Christopher Townsend and Rhys Davies (RHUL), March 2012.

 

Convenor of ‘Future of Arts Research’, postgraduate conference, funded by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, RHUL, held at the British Library, November 2011.

Other experience

Teaching Fellow, Department of French, Queen Mary University of London, 2013-2015.

Associate Lecturer, Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2011-2015.

Further information

Insta: @brookesfineart

Twitter: AAlexTTrott