Amanda Ravetz

I'm a research fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University within MIRIAD, the research institute attached to the art and design faculty. A long time ago I did a painting degree at Central as it was then, and later a PhD in social anthropology with visual media.

I'm interested in observational cinema and recently made a film about the painter Ian Partridge. One of his works is included in Intuition, the new show at Whitworth Gallery Manchester curated by Bryony Bond (who Jordan knows from his Alchemy residency at Manchester Museum). Bryony has done a wonderful job of selecting work from the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection, recently donated to Whitworth. If Outsider Art doesn't sound very appealing - and its certainly a contentious term - you might just change your mind after seeing this show.

Brigitte Jurack (who teaches sculpture at MMU) and I were hoping to set up a project in Whitworth park for 7 Sights but sadly Whitworth said they were too taken up with other things to be our hosts, so we have to think again (they own the park, though they let it to the council on a peppercorn rent). Brigitte is at IMMA now doing a residency over the summer, so I need to have a scout around before she gets back and think about other possible places where we might do something. Brigitte's current work is about sculptural representations of youth, and since I did quite a lot of my anthropological fieldwork with young people we thought this was a good point of intersection between our two practices.

I'm looking forward to the meeting in September and seeing everyone there.