Marita Fraser

Name

Marita Fraser

ORCID

https://orcid.org/0009-0004-3591-6286

Job title

UG Programme Director and Interim Head of Sculpture and Environmental Art,

Email

m.fraser@gsa.ac.uk

Biography

Research areas include;
• Feminist methods of creative practice
• Feminist writing methods including correspondence, autofiction, and writing the self
• Notions of Care in artistic practice and research
• Scores as artistic practice
• Refusal as a method of artistic production
• Sculpture, Performance, Movement and Film practices and their intersections
• The legacy of Margaret Macdonald and her relationship with the Vienna Secession

Central to Marita Fraser’s research practice outputs is a methodology which she has named ‘Speaking With’. This methodology is understood as an awareness of ones proximity and subjectivity in coming into research relationships with materials, bodies and archives through making and writing practices. Fraser understands this practice to be a Feminist practice and works with developing new research through this method as well as identifying where we might find traces of this method in the writing, research and making of others. Her research outputs include: exhibitions of painting, videos, installations and performative texts; published research writing in journals and anthologies; and organising and presenting at research events and conferences.

Fraser’s research examines Italian feminist Carlo Lonzi’s construction of herself as ‘nothing’, as a cultural body acting through and within refusal, as a starting point to ask how does ‘nothing’ speak. Her research considers the writing of Carla Lonzi; the poetry and essays of Anne Boyer; the writing and performance of Yvonne Rainer. Marita has written on the role of scores in the practices of Carolee Schneeman, Beatrice Gibson, Florence Peak amongst others and considers the role of the score in her own writing, performative and painting practices. Her research examines the score as embraced by feminist art practitioners through the 1960’s and onward as an important method of making work which enabled a space ‘off the page’, between text and its reading/performance via endless mutable repetitions, to be activated. Fraser's research tracks the scores as a slippery form of writing and performing and its role in the contemporary, as a vital form in text, film, painting and performance practices.

Her solo exhibition (after) parts of a body house 2019 included paintings, sculpture, installation, writing as art practice, performance and video, drawing out from the text by artist Carolee Schneeman, parts of a body house. Fraser’s recent essay ‘Careless Reply’ is published in Care(less) 2021, Blackshaw, G. and Kivland S. (eds), MA Biblioteque. She was editor and contributor to the research publication I Care By… (2022) Research Communiqués: RCA and editor and contributor of the research journal PROVA 5. In 2021 she was an invited to present a response to the event Calling All Occupants for a larger research event Inside/inside convened at UAL. In 2019 Fraser co-organised and presented work at two research events: Speaking With included invited contributors Carol Mavor, Nadia Hebson and Juliette Blightman; and AUTO//FICTION included invited contributions from Beatrice Gibson, Sally O'Reilly and others. In the same year she presented a paper at the research event Say Something Back, Merton College Oxford, and was a co-convener and presenter at the NAFAE conference for 2019. Her monograph Marita Fraser, Love of Diagrams (2010), was produced by the Stadts Museum Engen, Germany, for my solo exhibition of the same name.

Her painting, film making and writing practices draw on many of her research concerns 'speaking with' materials, archives and other artists, working with scores and creating spaces of refusing from which to think and to work. Fraser has had solo shows and performances with Moore Contemporary, Perth; Schneiderei, Vienna; RIAT, Vienna; Kerstin Engholm Gallery, Vienna; Gallery 9, Sydney; Engen Stadt Museum, Engen; Kunstlerhaus, Vienna amongst others. She has participated in group shows with, Fundación Mapfre, Tenerife; Alaska Projects, Sydney; Leyendecker Gallery, Tenerife; Narrative Gallery, London; PS Amsterdam; Pumphouse Gallery, London; Austrian Sculpture Project, Vienna; Josh Lilley Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; Vesch, Vienna; Atelierhaus Salzamt, Linz; Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch; PICA, Perth; Kunstbeuro, Vienna; MU, Eindhoven; Pavement Gallery, Manchester amongst others. She has completed sculpture in public place projects for the city of Tulln, Austria and at Praterstern for the city of Vienna.

Her PhD by practice (RCA 2016-2022) was funded by an AHRC TECHNE Doctoral Award.