After an Art PhD: Posthuman Excess
With Lucy A. Sames and Jason Waite
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Thursday 19 March 2026, 17:00-19:00
Exhibition Research Lab, John Lennon Art and Design Building L3 5RD (map)
Free and open to all
Booking preferred, via Eventbrite
Join Lucy A. Sames and Jason Waite for the second in a series of four events, each exploring the work of two art research practitioners with related interests who have completed doctoral study in recent years, to examine the possibilities and challenges of practice after an art PhD.
Lucy A. Sames will discuss her PhD research which proposes a feminist, queer and posthuman concept of ‘excess’ as a mode of practice in art and curating that is modulated by the materiality and metaphor of the liquid.
Jason Waite will present ‘When Practice Leads Theory: The Catastrophic Condition in Fukushima, Japan and Don’t Follow the Wind’. He will discuss the long-running collective project that he co-founded entitled Don’t Follow the Wind, an inaccessible exhibition inside the radioactive Fukushima exclusion zone in Japan, and its influence on his recent PhD finished in 2022. The talk will explore how curatorial practice, collaboration and staying with the trouble can inform cultural and ecological theory.
The event will begin with a short grounding exercise. Refreshments will be available from 20 minutes before the start time. Lucy A. Sames will attend in person; Jason Waite will attend online. The event is hosted by Jonathan Hoskins, Associate Researcher at the Exhibition Research Lab and organiser of this series.
Find more here about the whole series ‘After an Art PhD: Creative Uses of a Creative Work’.
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Speaker biographies
Dr Lucy A. Sames is a curator, activist, writer and researcher based in rural South Wales. Lucy was awarded her PhD ‘Wet Rest: excess as liquid praxis in art and curating’ from the Art Department at Northumbria University, Newcastle (2022) and she is now a Lecturer on MA Fine Art at Falmouth University. Lucy writes regularly for artists, journals, conferences and organisations, most recently contributing an introduction to Bridget Crone’s Liquid Bodies Liquid Worlds in The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures (Edinburgh University Press, 2026) and ‘Froath on the Sea’ in Aqueous Humours Fluid Ground (Goldsmiths, 2025). Lucy has been involved in many collaborative and interdisciplinary research projects, and was previously Co-Director and Co-Curator at both Res. (2015-19) and Enclave (2012-14), and Programme Director at The Old Police Station (2010-14), all exhibition spaces in Deptford, south London.
Dr Jason Waite is a curator, writer and cultural worker. His work focuses on collective practice, ecological critique and radical imaginaries emerging from sites of crisis. He is part of the collective Don’t Follow the Wind, which curates an ongoing exhibition in the Fukushima exclusion zone, and co-edited the book Don’t Follow the Wind (Sternberg Press, 2021). Waite was curator at Casco Art Institute in Utrecht and has organised over 50 exhibitions globally. He holds a PhD in Contemporary Art History and Theory from the University of Oxford, an MA from Goldsmiths, and was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum ISP. He was the 2024-25 Postdoctoral Fellow of the Arts at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Currently he teaches at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, is the editor of Art Review Oxford and is an affiliated fellow at the Panel on Planetary Thinking.
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Images (left to right): Jason Waite; Lucy A. Sames, ‘Froath on the Sea’, a reading with well water, Matt’s Gallery, London, 2025 (image: Kirsten Cooke).