Talk #100

Mik Godley

Growing up half German in the West Yorkshire coalfields, drawing since the age of four, Mik Godley graduated in Fine Art at Leeds Polytechnic in 1982 and gained a Distinction for the EU funded research MA Creative Collaborations: New Media in the Visual Arts from Nottingham Trent University in 2006. He has taught in art schools for over thirty years and was part of the team that established Primary in Nottingham.

His project Considering Silesia, which began when he got his first computer in 2003, is a painters’ exploration of Anglo-German identity, a search engine journey through internet to canvas across his mothers’ contested land, examining conflicting heritages, cultural history, and displacement with contemporary social and political resonances. These themes are observed in the context of our evolving relationship with the internet and accessible technologies (the mixed reality of our digital “way of seeing”) focusing on ‘virtual expeditions’ to his mothers’ homeland and the analogue activity of painting – or on his iPad and mobile phone.

Considering Silesia has been exhibited from Baltimore to Bangkok, San Francisco, London and Zagreb, receiving significant critical acclaim. Mik recently staged a large solo show of the project at the Attenborough Arts Centre of the University of Leicester, but probably a lot more people saw his phone drawings on Nottingham City Council’s 12 LED screens in the tunnel between the bus station and Victoria Shopping Centre.