Processional State

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Dr Louise Bell, Dr Laura Rosser and Dr Laura Hopes are three early career researchers and artists who were contemporaries on the same PhD programme between Plymouth and Falmouth Universities.

As artists, they playfully engage with the archaeological strategies of Identification, Excavation and Interpretation and its speculative potential.

"Since March 2024, we have recognised and foregrounded the commonalities of our intersecting creative practices and research interests. This has been situated within an ongoing collaborative project concerned with ideas of care, slowness, knowing, not and un-knowing, empathy, relation and receptivity.

Our shared methodology emphasises sensitivity, participation, and responsiveness, allowing for a porous exchange of ideas and a rejection of rigid academic expectations. Our practice mirrors archaeological behaviours, focusing on artefacts and documentation as we engage in this evolving experiment.

We present ‘Processional State’, a residency and exhibition of ongoing slow research made at and of Maker Heights, Cornwall."

July 2025

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Artists' statements

Dr Louise Bell, School of Art and Design, University of Plymouth

louisebell.co.uk, @_louise_bell_

My multimodal practice includes image-making, object-making, writing, walking and curation. This is used to attempt to come-to-know the experience of an absent other through empathic encounters with objects, images, and place. Driven by embodiment, experimentation, and feminist examination, I negotiate absences and partial knowing in response to the experience of being ‘in’ place.

My approach to, and production of, artistic practice for our project Processional State is characterised by exploratory observation, invested attention and taxonomic systeming. Ordering principles and methods are often used to elicit understanding and to present data with clarity. This practice illustrates a methodological borrowing however, a simplification to the point of abstraction of images with a lack of contextual labelling creates an ambiguous visual communication.

While I may appropriate ways of working from disciplines that attempt to unpick, elucidate, or ‘resolve’ a site, as an artist I am interested in demonstrating how the inherent unruliness of a site will always subvert such ordering by what Massey describes as the ever-evolving “constellation of trajectories”.

Dr Laura Rosser, Falmouth University

laurarosser.com, @laurarosser_artist

My research investigates the uncertainties and tensions between analogue and digital spaces and places. The conceptual entangling of a print-based practice and liveness, with writing and diagramming facilitate a process of mapping and reimagining technologies and systems that focus around the non-human.

My individual enquiry for this project is informed by a mesh of experiences including camping at Maker since moving to Cornwall in 2008, a curiosity for the sites unsettled social, cultural and political past, and my artistic interest in relationships, diagramming, systems, low-tech print-based processes, and liveness as creative strategies.

Taking Maker’s complex history with its boundaries as a catalyst (and also this collaboration with Laura and Louise) my relational focus attempts to de-code and rethink ideas of borders and edges. Hito Steyerl's Free Fall provides me with a conceptual portal through which we might lose perspective of – and blur – boundaries. She proposes when “perspectives are twisted and multiplied. New types of visuality arise”. My experiments with printed matter and reproduced conversations between the three of us begin to collapse edges and reimagine maps of Maker, and rethink ideas of above and below, of before and after, of human and non-human binaries.

Dr Laura Hopes, School of Art and Design, University of Plymouth

laurahopes.com, @laurahopes

I work in multiple forms, often collaboratively attempting to invert traditional models of the sublime to decenter the human and foster a collective vulnerability which could afford different relationships to place.

It is a strange thing to try to identify one’s individual approach, particularly within a distributed research and practice triumvirate where one person suggests a theme and you feel a certain piracy in carrying it forward. The visual acuity of Louise’s images and the spiralling leaps that Laura’s thought processes have led to have buffered, challenged and held my uncertain impulses to perform, to write, to draw.

Walking with circuitous intention provided an instantaneous response to the idea of a Processional State, linked to my existing work into labyrinths and the tradition of parishes ‘beating the bounds’. These ritual practices of communities and sacred spaces were in turn reflected in the sacred geometry present in geodesic domes and the stepping out of time and society that they can signify.

The work I have made reflects these shared endeavours and the ideals behind them, the potential perfection of the forms and the shakiness often witnessed in their realisation.