Peter Hatton is the Programme Director for Creative Events: Design & Production and the Admission’s Officer, Chief Examiner and Director of Undergraduate Studies. Peter joined the University of Kent in 2006 as lecturer on this newly formed course. Previous to coming to Kent, Peter was an associate tutor on the Design & Public Art course at Chelsea College of Art and an artist educator at Tate Modern.

He studied Fine Art and had his first solo exhibition at the Bluecoat Art Gallery in Liverpool in 1979. Since then he has continued to exhibit both in the UK and internationally and worked as a part time and visiting lecturer.

Working with a number of important theatre companies in the 80s including Welfare State International, IOU and Impossible Theatre was formative in developing his interest in large scale cross disciplinary work and very importantly collaborative working. After instigating and curating a number of site related, non gallery exhibitions a collaborative group TEA was formed in 1987 and continues to work together. Peter has continued investigating the possibilities of new media forming a new collective e space lab who use web casts as a means of creating international events.

TEA has made projects in St Petersburg at the Red Banner Factory and e space Lab have worked in Shanghai, Poland and Damascus.

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Exhibitions and Installations

2010 “Spinning A Yarn”

In Spinning A Yarn Tea played with time to explore the layered identities of three buildings in Manchester that are associated with cotton: Royal Mills in Ancoats, Platt Hall in Rusholme and the Whitworth Art Gallery. Elements of Spinning A Yarn were presented in each of the three locations: large scale projection at The Whitworth, curtains and video at Platt Hall and tea towel distributed to residents in the apartments at Royal Mills. A 1950s fabric was re-worked for each venue.
A limited edition of an artists’ ‘fabric sample’ book was created.

Commissioned by the Whitworth and funded by Renaissance North West.  

5m x 2m projection of fabric; video sequences played in sequence throughout the pattern. More

2010 “Living and Working on Sheppey”

The project team for Living and Working on Sheppey includes Tea, academics from the University of Kent, and the University of Southampton, and the community group, Remember Bluetown, whose members are also involved in the Bluetown Heritage Centre.

Tea has made a video “walk” through past, present and future along Bluetown High Street ‘Back and Forth on High Street, Bluetown’. This 15 minute pan has been constructed from a photographic panorama inserted with images of buildings which used to be there, imagined ones which could be there and live incidents. Voices have been added which describe the street as it was. A DVD is in preparation and an archive and a website are being built.

The project is funded by the South Eastern Coastal Communities programme (SECC). This is an innovative funding stream from HEFCE.

A first strand of the project engaged with people with different experiences of work (paid and unpaid, formal and informal) asking them to record and reflect on their working lives, and sought out people who have a connection to Bluetown and to the former naval dockyard at Sheerness. Academics have trained local people to undertake this reminiscence work directly. A second strand of the project has engaged with younger people – via teachers and community group leaders - asking them to imagine their own working lives into the future. The third strand of the project has re-visited (with members of the Bluetown Heritage Centre) archive material held at the UK Data Archive, at the University of Essex, from Ray Pahl’s study of Sheppey published in the 1980s. More

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Peter teaches students on all three years of the Creative Events course, most modules are studio practice based investigating an aspect of the design and realization of events. First year students work with Peter on a foundation module exploring creative strategies in visual, spatial and performance design and a more traditional Humanities seminar based module researching regional event’s provision and the cultural policy and politics affecting their realization. In the second year Peter convenes Celebratory Performance and Street Arts and in the third year convenes the Independent Realised Project in the Spring Term, students realize an aspect of an event in their specialist area or area of interest. These are often on locations of the students choosing relevant to the project context  including a farm, Rochester High Street and a woodland.

“Place Making” is an example of a collaborative project between the School of Arts and the Kent Architecture Centre and the Crafts Council of student professional development. Students worked with Architects and established crafts people and designers on a “live” redevelopment brief in the Historic Dockyard.

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My practice has become increasingly collaborative; central to collaborative practice are collective ownership and dialogue, maintaining a discursive element within the structure of the work through production to presentation is an imperative. Participation in the dialogue by particular publics and individuals on both personal and professional levels is encouraged through the structure of a project which in turn is informed and modified by these encounters.

This is a spatial practice that engages with particular publics in particular sites to produce video installations or performances/events; sometimes presented within the site of production (Jane Rendell has coined the phrase “Critical spatial practice – between theory and practice”).

These installations and events contribute to expanded definitions of place, as complex, multilayered interactions between the physical realities of the urban fabric, lived experience, the image and virtual space. The key concern is the representation of the relationship between people, places, spaces, identity, history and change. The work predominantly with two long term collectives; TEA, Val Murray and Lynn Pilling [formed in 1987] and e space Lab with co-founder Philip Courtenay [formed 2002] contributes to and offers a critique of the notion of “public art” and questions the institutional basis of Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics.

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