DR Garry Doherty

Garry Doherty has evolved an interdisciplinary creative practice that exhibits work over a range of display platforms such as painting, sculpture, installation, video and photography. His works mobilise the dialectic concerns of the Sublime tradition contesting terror with beauty. He chooses historical subjects and attempts to redeem terror and trauma from socio-political themes featuring Muslim communities mediated to a western audience. 

The work addresses his own cultural perspective as a Muslim and acknowledges the necessity to foster an effective spirituality that activates compassion, in order to redeem traumatic events in history. His strategies oppose imminence with transcendence, a paradox that endeavoured to forge salvation with trauma, recovering its redemptive power through beauty.
 
Beauty acquires an antithetical position in which it attempts to liberate pain from terror, beauty necessitates order, and seeks wholeness. The work endeavours to invoke catharsis in the audience by detaching the passions from the viewer and simulating a conscious wisdom that restores empathy 3 and redeems a moral fortitude through self-awareness. – Doherty attempts to create transcendent works of art that galvanise the experience of the sublime as a force for change. 

Currently working on AHRC Funding Proposal entitled: Aesthetics of Citizenship.: examining the concept of active citizenship through contemporary visual art practice and production.
The Aesthetics of Citizenship is a 24-month practice-led research project (Feb 2020-Jan 2022) that examines how contemporary artistic practice can embody and engage with understandings of ‘active citizenship’: seen in this project as the responsibility for personal involvement in the negotiation and resolution of current political and societal challenges. Bridging the disciplinary gap between artistic and socio-political forms of academic enquiry our research asks: How do artists understand and express their role as active citizens within a Western democracy and what aesthetic forms and impacts arise from this activity?

The topic of citizenship in Europe has never commanded so much interest, controversy and concern as it does today. The decision to withdraw the UK from the EU has intensified and made more urgent long-standing issues such as: immigration and rights of residency; cultural and religious difference; devolution and the national distribution of investment and economic growth. However, little research exists that considers how artists respond, through their practice, to the responsibilities of ‘active citizenship’ in relation to these issues. Even less work has been done to explore this question from the perspective of visual artists based in the UK and to date, no research has been conducted in this subject since the Brexit referendum.

Our project aims to address this gap in research, by bringing together the creative practices and social perspectives of three established visual artists whose work engages with questions of citizenship, cultural identity and contemporary politics: Prof. Wolfgang Weileder (PI) and Joint Profs. Jane & Louise Wilson (CIs) at Newcastle University (NU), and Dr Garry Doherty (CI) at the University of East London (UEL). This creative practice-based team is joined Dr Bernadette Buckley (CI) Lecturer in International Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London who is a specialist academic working in the field of art and politics, and by Dr Rebecca Farley (Research Associate) who is an Early Career Researcher with specific expertise in qualitative and practice-led research, visual arts commissioning, and research project coordination and sector collaboration.

Additional scholarly activities

SUFISM: Representative of Shaykh Hazrat Azad Rasool, Naqshbandi- Mujadiddi Order.
Director of a Muslim charity –School of Sufi Teaching. Co-ordinate and teach weekly meetings and lead retreats throughout the year. 2017 Completed writing preliminary teachings for new students for School of Sufi Teaching.

 

Funding

Funding £720,000 purchase of building in Bethnal Green, London, for Islamic Meditation Centre. £300,000 fund raise for restoration and design inauguration opening October 2018

My two main areas of interest are: Contemporary initiatives in drawing and curatorial practice. With a specific interest in developing new spaces or platforms for artworks to exist in.
I am the Director of a Muslim charity The School of Sufi Teaching with a particular remit in promoting cross-cultural education and dynamic spirituality.

Fine Art Professional Doctorate Supervisor, 2015 to current.

Manager of Art & Design studios and workshops.