Duncan Bullen is an artist and academic with a primary interest in drawing. He studied at Great Yarmouth College of Art & Design and then Fine Art at Leeds Polytechnic in the mid 1980s, before completing his MA in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in 1991. He was then a recipient of a Rome Scholarship, spending 1991-‘92 at the British School at Rome. After this he undertook a series of residencies at the Eremo di Santa Caterina, a former hermitage on the Italian Island of Elba, where he held two exhibitions Lumen (with Lorry Eason) in 1998 and Night Prayers in 2004. Other residencies have included the Experimental Printmaking Institute, PA, USA in 2005, Art at Wharpuke, NZ 2011 and at Gordon House, Margate 2018-19, Between 2010-20, Duncan collaborated with the composerJamie Crofts (aka Jim Simm) on Chromatic Fields, first published as an artist book in 2011 and later as a box set CD/DVD, by ANTS records, Roma in 2020. He has had several solo exhibitions, primarily at the Jill George Galley, London, between 1993-2004 and has participated in many internationally recognised shows in the United Kingdom, United States, Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe. Many of his recent exhibitions, have been through Saturation Point, a curatorial platform for systems, non-objective and reductive art, mainly in the UK.
He works at the University of Brighton (UoB), where he is currently Associate Dean: Research and Knowledge Exchange in the School of Art and Media. Previous to this he has been Deputy Head of School, Subject Leader for Fine Art and Course Leader for Printmaking. He the founding Director of the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Duncan's research interests are grounded in the materiality of manual drawing. He is concerned with tactile, repetitive, reductive, non-representational drawing strategies which he aligns with the practice of mindfulness meditation. Duncan is interested in how drawing mindfully may communicate spatially and physically as a means to trace the immediacy of lived experience, through tactile, sensory and contemplative engagement with the world. He has presented papers at conferences, and written about his practice-based research in book chapters and journal articles. He also co-curated Methodology of the Edition,an international printmaking project with Nagoya University of Art (NUA) and King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology, Ladkrabang, (KMITL) Thailand, Drawing Dialogues a drawing exchange between UoB and NUA and Marks Make Meaning: drawing across disciplines, with Philippa Lyon at UoB.
https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/persons/duncan-bullen