Derek Horton is an artist, writer and teacher. Following an early career in school and community-based arts education and social activism, he has exhibited, traveled and taught widely during the last twenty years. He established an innovative and successful new art and design degree course, now under the title Contemporary Creative Practice, at Leeds Metropolitan University where he is currently Director of Research in The Leeds School of Contemporary Art and Graphic Design. He works with language and manufacture, an extension of his doctoral research investigating the embodiment of memory and history within sculptural objects. He is currently interested in investigating art practices as (morbid?) symptoms of their social, economic, political and ideological contexts of production and exchange, and in ephemeral, immaterial, nomadic and improvisatory approaches to cultural production.