Chris Meigh Andrews

Currently Professor of Electronic & Digital Art at the University of Central Lancashire, Chris Meigh-Andrews is director of  the Electronic & Digital Art Unit (EDAU), a centre for post-graduate research. Born in England in 1952, Meigh-Andrews lived in Montreal, Canada from 1957-75. On his return to the UK, he studied photography, film & TV at the London College of Printing (1976-79), Fine Art at Goldsmiths (MA, 1983) and  the Royal College of Art. (PhD, 2001)

Working with video in a fine art context since 1977, his single channel video tapes have been widely screened in the UK, Europe, the USA, Canada, & Brazil, Australia and Japan. Establishing an artists’ post-production facility and independent video production company, he worked as a freelance director and cameraman, video editor and animator for BBC TV to fund his experimental video work throughout the 1980′s. An active member of London Video Arts from 1980, he was chairman of LVA’s Council of Management, 1987-89.

Since 1990, Meigh-Andrews has specialised in sculptural and projection video installations, including commissioned and site-specific works that have been shown in the UK, Europe, the USA and Canada. He was Resident Artist in Electronic Imaging at Oxford Brookes University (1994); Artist in Residence at Saw Contemporary Arts Centre in Ottawa, Canada (1994); Video Artist in Residence at the Middlesbrough Gallery, Cleveland (1995); Video Artist in Residence at the Prema Arts Centre in Gloucestershire (1995) and Arts Council of England International Artist Fellow at Galeria Sztuki Wspólczesnej, Krakow, Poland (2003-04).

His installations include Mind’s Eye (1997), a five-screen   installation featuring fMRI brain scans, produced in collaboration with the Institute of Neurology at the Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology; Mothlight (1998), and Mothlight II (2001), which featured halogen lamps, solar panels and video monitors in delicate counter-balance; Merging/Emerging (1999),  a site-specific digital installation featuring video projection for the Bath International Music Festival and A Photographic Truth, a digital projection for the Canon Photography Gallery at the Victoria & Albert Museum, (2001.) In 2002, his solar-powered digital video installation For William Henry Fox Talbot (The Pencil of Nature) was featured in “Digital Interventions”, a year -long exhibition at the V&A, London.

In 2003 Meigh-Andrews was commissioned  by Huis Marseilles Foundation for Photography to produce Temporal View in Amsterdam, and in 2004 he completed a NESTA/ACE funded research project to create  Interwoven Motion, an outdoor “self-powered” video installation for the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology (FACT), with support from Grizedale Arts and the Forestry Commission.

In 2005-06 he exhibited Resurrection, a solar-powered video installation in “Digital Discourse”, an exhibition of new work by 8 international artists for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference (CHOGM), in Valletta with support from the British Council.

Meigh-Andrews recently completed The Monument Project (Si Monumentum Requiris Circumspice) (2009-2011),  a site-specific digital image installation, commissioned by Julian Harrup Architects as part of a major restoration of the Monument to the Great Fire of London which was made in collaboration with Sandbox at the University of Central Lancashire.

In May 2011 Meigh-Andrews produced Sunbeam, an outdoor digital projection event in collaboration with the astrophysicist Dr Robert Walsh, featuring high definition images of the sun from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.

He is currently developing In Darwin’s Garden, a multi-perspective time-lapse installation at Down House, the former home of Charles Darwin, in association with English Heritage.

Meigh-Andrews was co-curator of “Analogue: Pioneering Artists’ Video from the UK, Canada and Poland (1968-88)”, an international touring exhibition (London, Liverpool, Norwich, New York, Valletta, Toronto, Ottawa, Berlin and Warsaw: 2006-09), funded by Arts Council England, the Polish Cultural Institute, and the Canada Council; “The Digital Aesthetic” (2001) and “Digital Aesthetic 2″ (2007) in collaboration with the Harris Museum, Preston; “Analogue & Digital” for the Fieldgate Gallery, London (2008); “Yes Snow Show”, (2008-09) at the British Film Institute, London.  In 2010 he received a Daiwa Foundation travel grant to research early Japanese artists’ video.

He is currently working with the Harris Museum to develop “Digital Aesthetic 3″, the final exhibition in the series, scheduled for Oct 2012.

His book, A History of Video Art: the Development of Form and Function was published by Berg (Oxford and New York)  in  2006 and will be published in Japanese by Sangensha (Tokyo) 2012. Meigh-Andrews is currently working on an extended 2nd edition of the book, which will be published by Berg in 2013.