John Harvey
Professor of Art
BA (CNAA) MA (Wales) PhD (Wales) FRSA
Contact
Email: john.harvey@aber.ac.uk
Phone: 01970 622462
Personal Web Site:http://users.aber.ac.uk/jhh
Biography
Harvey is a historian of art and visual culture and practitioner in Fine Art. His research field is the visual culture of religion. His art-historical studies involve the visual imagery of popular piety, supernaturalist traditions, and working-class culture. He has written several books including Photography & Spirit (2007/10); The Appearance of Evil: Apparitions of Spirits in Wales (2003); Image of the Invisible: The Visualization of Religion in The Welsh Nonconformist Tradition (1999); and The Art of Piety: The Visual Culture of Welsh Nonconformity (1995). He has also contributed chapters and articles to books and journals including ‘The Bible and Art in Wales’ in Imaging the Bible in Wales (University of Wales Press, 2010) and ‘Framing the Word’ in Bible Art Gallery (Sheffield Academic Press, 2010). He has delivered scholarly papers at conferences held in the Europe and USA. Since 2005, he has initiated symposia and research projects, uniting art historical and biblical studies with the co-operation of the Department of Theology and Studies, University of Wales, Lampeter.
In art practice, his work explores non-iconic attitudes to religious art through an engagement with visual, textual, and audible sources, theological and cultural ideas, and systemic and audiovisualogical processes. The work exhibited in the UK and USA is discussed in The Pictorial Bible series publications (National Library of Wales, 2000; School of Art, 2007). Presently he is authoring Religion as Art and extending his investigation of textual-visual relationships. He is a member of the Advisory Board for the Institute of Studies in Sacred Architecture, USA (2002) and the International Advisory Board of the Material Religion journal (2005).
Teaching and research supervision covers: the visual culture of religion; image and text; religion and photography; religious architecture; contemporary art, art in Wales, and the practice of painting and drawing.