BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS

Richard Hooper was born in Liss, Hampshire and moved in his early life within Sussex, Devon, Wiltshire and Buckinghamshire later moving to Cheshire, Manchester, Liverpool and Leicester before returning to Liverpool where he now lives and works. He has both undergraduate and masters degrees in Design and is currently Senior Associate Lecturer in Fine Art and Design on the Bachelor of Design Degree Course at Liverpool Hope University College. Richard has his own studio practice and is represented by Contemporary Applied Art in London and del Mano Gallery in Los Angeles. He has exhibited at the ‘Collect 2005’ exhibition at the V&A in and at SOFA (New York) in the USA. A Crafts Council Selected Maker, Richard’s work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Mint Museum of Craft and Design in Charlotte North Carolina as well as many private collections around the world.

He is a regular contributor as both artist and commentator within the field of woodturning and was an invited international observer for the retrospective exhibition Woodturning in North America since 1930 initiated by, and held at, the History of Art Department at Yale University. His conference paper there argued for the significance of the influence of the Bauhaus in general and Max Bill in particular on the development of studio woodturning in the USA. Richard’s recent paper Nurbs, Splines and Boolean Curves; the poetics of virtual form made flesh was delivered at the Challenging Craft conference at Grays School of Art at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen contextualising his research into the use of CAD/CAM in his own practice. Most recently Richard has had a paper accepted for the inaugural World Design Conference at Yunlin University where he will present proof of concept evidence of his research work into the application of CAD/CAM methodologies in the production of complex geometric forms.