The Glasgow School of Art

Jane Topping is a Scottish artist and academic, currently Lecturer of M.Litt Fine Art Practice at The Glasgow School of Art and previously Associate Professor and Programme Leader of Fine Art at the University of Cumbria Institute of the Arts. Her post-digital interdisciplinary practice draws from subjects including sci-fi, feminism, the archive, intertextuality, the screen and the life and works of writers Naomi Mitchison and Philip K. Dick. Her PhD thesis is titled The Peter & nou Handbook: A Field Guide to an SF Practice (So Far).

Recent projects include Peter & nou - an on-going body of work, consisting of multiple, interconnected works, comprising videos, publications, prints and an online artwork. Peter & nou utilises methodologies of collage, intertextuality and the ‘science fictioning the real’ (O’Sullivan, 2017) to interrogate contemporary concerns of authorship and power, of our relationship to ‘the poor image’ and of technology’s effect on storytelling. The work often flagrantly appropriates popular science fiction films such as Blade Runner (1982, Dir. Ridley Scott) using them as material, alongside the biographies and speculative fictional works of both Philip K. Dick, Scottish socialist writer Naomi Mitchison and Topping’s autobiography, creating new narratives, new beings and incorporating previously unheard voices.

Topping’s video Peter won Best PKD Short at The Fifth Annual Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Film Festival, New York, 2017. Topping was a recipient of the summer residency (2017) at Hospitalfield, Arbroath and was on the jury of the No Budget Competition at the 32nd Hamburg International Short Film Festival (2016).