Arts research

Seedscapes: 2020 

Liz Wells

Seedscapes brings together five contemporary artists exploring global efforts to safeguard vital plant species from extinction. Plant diversity is rapidly declining, and faces threats from global warming, pollution and war. Yet without seeds and their potential for food and medicine, we cannot sustain ourselves. Featuring photography, moving image and sculpture, Seedscapes reveals how international artists, biologists and ecologists are responding to these challenges. This is the premiere of the exhibition before it goes on tour to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery in Exeter, and The Dick Institute in Kilmarnock, East Ayrshire, in 2021

Land/Water and the Visual Arts Network

Making a Masterpiece, Bouts and Beyond: 2019-2020

Chris Cook

Five works selected by York Art Gallery to provide a contemporary inflection to their major historical show, focusing on Flemish and Dutch painting, with ten works borrowed from the National Gallery. During the exhibition, five new works were commissioned to be made in response to works from York’s collection, and were incorporated in a rehang for the last month of the exhibition. The catalogue, “Golden Age” contained all 10 works, along with extended critical essay by curator Jeanne Nuechterlein. Extensive contextualisation: two gallery talks, three workshops, two University lectures. Newly commissioned work with contextualising video entered York Art Gallery permanent collection. One commissioned work won a national prize in 2020.

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Between Us, AR artwork (Magic Leap): 2019 – ongoing

Jane Grant

This body of research is situated within the realm of new materialism and draws on Karen Barad’s work on intra-action. Both artworks employ strategies of ‘inhabitation’, that of experiencing from within. Each artwork has a narrative about solar physics and desire, using Barad’s work as a starting point. Each work differs, the former is situated in a camera obscura and is multi-participatory, the latter’s predominant research questions are how to evoke senses of intimacy, presence and the feeling of touch in augmented reality via sound, narrative and visuals. The papers/articles act as an intellectual intermediary and place of reflection between the making of each artwork.

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More than Stories: A Film Trilogy 2019

Anya Lewin 

Lewin uses the medium of film, film sets and actors to reflect on the construction of identity through memory, fact and fiction. These trilogy of films bring an autoethnographic lens to explore her own family histories as they interweave with larger historical narratives of displacement. Each film has at its heart the haunted memories of Jewish life embedded in a particular story passed down to Lewin by her father. Combining personal memories, archival research and fictional recreations the three films (shown in both installation and cinematic spaces) open up questions about historical context, narrative and place.

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Pseudotachylyte - 2019 

Heidi Morstang

Filmed in the Arctic landscape of the Lofoten Islands, Norway, and in Electron Microscopy Centre, the feature documentary film Pseudotachylyte portrays a team of international geo-scientists investigating rock formations for evidence of earthquakes originating deep below the Earth’s surface. Morstang collaborated with a cinematographer, sound designer and geo-scientists from Universities of Plymouth, Liverpool, Cardiff, UK; and University of Padua, Italy. Investigating observational documentary cinematic and audio methodologies, the film intentionally amplifies gestures, collaboration and visual skills of scientists at work and aspects of scientific knowledge production and research methods that are not generally accessible outside scientific communities.

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Land/Water and the Visual Arts Network

Father-land, 2K digital film: 2018 

Kayla Parker

This 20-minute essay film, made collaboratively with Stuart Moore, was created via a research residency hosted by Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (NiMAC). Parker and Moore interweave personal narratives, as the children of military personnel who served in Cyprus, to examine patriarchal and colonial legacies in Nicosia, the only divided capital in Europe. The authors’ technique of structured improvisation builds on the legacy of Mangolte’s practice of ‘putting words in place’ to question the concept of home, reflecting on images of conflict and bringing together the personal and the political in our post-Brexit times.

Winner of the 2020 BAFTSS Practice Research Award: Essay/Experimental Film

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Sensing the Familiar: 2018 

Dr Carole Baker

My practice is socially engaged and investigative; positioned between art and documentary and employing diverse perspectives and strategies to dialectically traverse the territory, thereby uncovering synergies, contradictions and paradoxes in the socio-political fabric. It seeks to expand thinking about the non-human and to provoke challenges to social policy and practices. Photography, in its mimetic relationship to reality, suits this form of social critique; although not realistic in itself, it arises from reality, thereby inviting reflection on the nature of that reality. Together with dialectical fragments of text, the photograph can engage us in metaphysical, epistemological and moral thought and action