Professor Hedley Roberts

Bio

As Provost, Hedley leads the University's academic portfolio: teaching and learning, research and knowledge exchange, academic quality and the student experience. He works with colleagues across UCA's campuses and schools to connect academic direction with the University's strategy and with how it operates day to day. 

Hedley has worked in creative higher education for more than 30 years, across art, design, architecture, media and digital practice. He has led art and design schools at several UK universities, including UCA, the University of Bedfordshire and the University of East London, and has taken schools through mergers, restructuring and curriculum renewal. 

His institutional work spans academic workforce and career frameworks, quality, and learning and teaching. He has led doctoral programmes, directed externally funded research and innovation projects with civic, heritage and industry partners, and supported many colleagues to professional fellowship, doctoral awards and career success. 

Across his career Hedley has initiated and developed transnational education, subcontractual provision in the UK, strategic alliances between higher and further education, and partnerships with city and regional councils and their communities. He has led and taught postgraduate and undergraduate programmes overseas as flying faculty, held visiting professorships across China and Southeast Asia, and given more than 40 lectures in the region on creative practice. 

Supporting communities has been a constant for Hedley. The first in his family to go to university, he began at a Saturday art school and has spent his career widening access to creative education. That has meant progression routes from school and college, graduate careers initiatives, and a doctoral programme designed to link research with community engagement and regional development. He has worked with cultural forums, festivals, heritage bodies and charities to connect universities with the places they serve, in cultural regeneration and in creative health and wellbeing. He has led regional cultural networks and served as a trustee of arts and heritage charities. 

Hedley is a practising artist and has kept a studio since 1994, with sustained periods earning his living from his work. After Falmouth and Central Saint Martins he won scholarships to the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Royal College of Art, and went on to hold the Stanley Picker Fellowship and the RCA's Printmaking and Computing Fellowships. He holds a Professional Doctorate in Fine Art from UEL. He was part of the early wave of artists working with digital technology, moving from teaching fine art to creative technologies and presenting at ISEA, the International Symposium on Electronic Art. His early research explored art, AI and consciousness. He then returned to drawing, painting and printmaking as a way to explore the challenge of otherness. The Conjoined Kiss and Conjoined Embrace series and his 'non-portraits', which rework images circulated on social media, draw on psychoanalytic ideas to look at how people are seen and how they see one another. Visibility Cloaks, funded by Arts Council England, took this enquiry into wearable sculpture. 

He has shown in more than 200 exhibitions and has been represented by galleries in the UK, Europe, Australia and Southeast Asia. His work has been exhibited in Denmark, Germany, Greece, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and China, and at venues including Somerset House in London, PierMarq Gallery in Sydney, Det Ny Kastet Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and the British Embassy in Beijing. He founded and directed Directional Forces, an international residency programme that brought more than 100 artists to work and exhibit in Europe, including in Venice. His practice and research have been supported by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Arts Council England, by fellowships and by funded international residencies. Instagram: @HedleyRoberts 

At the heart of Hedley's work is a belief in the universality of creativity. He understands creativity as ontologically human: a capacity everyone holds and the means by which people make sense of the world and imagine it otherwise. For him it belongs to science, health and civic life as much as to the arts. He sees creative education as the place where this capacity can be studied and developed most deliberately, with lessons that reach well beyond the art school. As generative technologies take on more creative production he argues that universities have a particular responsibility to protect and cultivate human creative agency. His own life as a working artist grounds that conviction.