Opening at the University of Leeds on 4th November, the exhibition, curated by Louise K Wilson and Andrea Thoma, brings together work by artists affiliated with the Land² network to explore how we understand, experience, and shape place today. It asks the central question of what place is, surveying the field of responses and practices around current conditions – ecological, social, technological, political – to reframe sites as fluid, contested, and evolving. Through a range of media and processes, from sculpture, painting, drawing, and time-based practices, the exhibition explores how place is sensed, constructed, and transformed, generating new perspectives on environment, belonging, and spatial knowledge.
Land² Symposium: Friday 4th December, 10 am–5 pm, paper presentations, performances and provocations from artists across the network. The exhibition, opening event and symposium are all free and open to everyone.
I will be exhibiting my Postcard Fieldnotes at the Field Station Exhibition (part of the LAND2 network), University of Leeds 4th November until 4th December. These fieldnotes are drawn from a fictional correspondence between two figures that animate my research and are part of the pseudonymous research team and film crew. The postcards document the fieldworker Phyllis Dare writing to the film Director George Howlette about her field trips in Brontë Country. Whilst George never replies, his silence is generative; the exchange is asymmetrical, atmospheric and performative. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s concept of correspondence (2021), fieldwork here is not extraction but attunement. The fictional personae move through the archive—walking, writing, touching, misstepping and (mis)guiding.
Postcard Fieldnotes from the psuedonymous fieldworker Phyllis Dare to the Director George Howlette
Letters to the Landscape investigates the entangled relations between Brontë Country and the imaginative terrain of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), situating the moorland as a site where cultural memory, literary inheritance, and embodied fieldwork converge. Operating at the intersection of autobiography, polyphony, and archival drift, the project examines how landscapes function as repositories of memory and projection, and how they mediate the unstable boundaries between fact, fiction, and historical imagination.
The research develops a mode of performative archival practice that reframes the archive as a haunted, migratory space rather than a fixed repository. Through the gathering and reanimation of postcards, letters, photographs, and field notes, the project mobilises archival fragments as gestures — provisional, affective, and resistant to evidentiary closure. These materials are activated through a choreography of walking, (re)collecting, re‑enacting, writing, reciting, and remembering, producing a form of speculative historiography in which remnants refuse to settle and meaning remains in motion.
The film adopts an episodic structure that mirrors the temporal and spatial logic of fieldwork. Its meditations and detours on place, collecting, pilgrimage, and return enact a methodology grounded in drift, repetition, and the recursive labour of remembering. The moorland is approached as landscape as witness — a terrain that absorbs and refracts cultural narratives, and a medium through which memory is contested, re‑authored, and felt.
Central to the research is the fictional artist duo Vale & Howlette, who operate as narrative interlocutors, structuring devices, and speculative tools. Their pseudonymous perspectives enable a slippage between researcher and archive, past and present, document and invention. As explorers, (mis)guides, and mnemonic surrogates, they facilitate a mode of inquiry that is materially grounded yet imaginatively expansive, allowing the archive to function as a site of resonance, resistance, and re-imagination.
The project privileges fragment, rupture, and affective resonance over institutional fixity, proposing a methodology of situated refusal — a way of inhabiting the archive and the Brontë imaginary without claiming it. Letters to the Landscape contributes to practice‑based research by articulating how embodied fieldwork, fictional apparatus, and archival speculation can generate new modes of historiographic thinking and new forms of artistic knowledge.
Film Still: Episode 1, Epistles, Letters to the Landscape 2025. Moving-image, approx. 32 minutes
Contemporary artists are increasingly challenging the boundaries of the archive and authorship through fictional strategies and non-traditional materials. This paper offers a methodological reflection on the use of fictional personae as narrative interlocutors within my practice-led PhD research, demonstrating how non-traditional archives can challenge, extend, and reimagine art history’s archival practices. I argue that the strategic adoption of fictional personae forms a critical methodology for reimagining archival practice and opening historiography up to the speculative. Here, fictionalisation functions as ‘de-archiving’, investigating silences, absences and contested narratives within memory and history. Drawing on theoretical perspectives such as Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, Donna Haraway’s speculative fabulation, and Hayden White’s conception of historiography as poetic and philosophical, I demonstrate how fictional personae developed in my project Letters to the Landscape, 2025, through the pseudonymous artist duo Vale & Howlette facilitate a performative, polyphonic engagement with a physical archive assembled from eBay. These materials instigate embodied fieldwork as détournement and processes of archival reinvention, challenging what constitutes an archive and whose histories are preserved. My approach resonates with artists such as Erika Tan, Walid Raad, Susan Hiller, and The Otolith Group, who use found or fabricated archives to critique dominant histories. By asking how using fictional personae and digital archives like eBay can reshape narrative and memory in art history, I argue that integrating fictional methodologies with non-traditional archives constitutes a form of critical, speculative historiography, one that not only reimagines narrative, memory, history and identity but also offers a transferable model for artistic and scholarly enquiry.
