Critical Fragments

PGR Group Exhibition: Practice holds Discovery

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Date & Place
Private view: 6-9pm, Wednesday 18 June 2025
Exhibition open : 11am-4pm on 19 & 20 June, then 12noon-3pm on 21June
Location: Patrick Studios, St Mary’s Lane – Leeds LS9 7EH

Practice holds Discovery is a group exhibition featuring work by PhD researchers from the School of Design and the School of Fine Art, History of Art, and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. It brings together a variety of artistic and design practices shaped through distinct approaches to materials, methods, form, and critical reflection, offering insight into how practice itself can function as a mode of investigation and discovery.

The title expresses a shared belief in the capacity of creative practice to generate new insights and deepen understanding within academic research. Throughout the exhibition, the interplay between making and thinking is evident, articulating how discovery can emerge through the. specific processes and reflective approaches that inform each researcher’s work. Spanning a
range of disciplines and media, the exhibition highlights the diversity and continuing evolution of practice research.


Geographies of Englishness

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In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the notion of Englishness was widely debated in English art and cultural circles. Might there be a specifically English landscape and an English way of representing it? Was the history of the nation unique, and might there be a particular and resilient national character? This study examines the intersection of national identity, modernization and landscape in English art during the period from 1880 to 1940.

Landscape & Englishness

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“Landscape has been central to definitions of Englishness for centuries. David Matless argues that landscape has been the site where English visions of the past, present and future have met in debates over questions of national identity, disputes over history and modernity, and ideals of citizenship and the body. Landscape and Englishness is extensively illustrated and draws on a wide range of material – topographical guides, health manuals, paintings, poetry, architectural polemic, photography, nature guides and novels. The author first examines the inter-war period, showing how a vision of Englishness and landscape as both modern and traditional, urban and rural, progressive and preservationist, took shape around debates over building in the countryside, the replanning of cities, and the cultures of leisure and citizenship. He concludes by tracing out the story of landscape and Englishness down to the present day, showing how the familiar terms of debate regarding landscape and heritage are a product of the immediate post-war era, and asking how current arguments over care for the environment or expressions of the nation resonate with earlier histories and geographies.”

Text and image reproduced from Amazon

England’s Green

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Explores English national identity and the environment, spanning agriculture, nature and culture.

England is known as a ‘green and pleasant’ land, but what does this mean? England’s Green explores how the country’s connection with the environment has shaped and reflected English national identity since the 1960s, when pollution, pesticides, industrial farming and upset ecologies were presented as signs of a world gone wrong. This book examines English cultures of nature, land, farming and other ways in which humans engage with the natural world; or with a world whose naturalness seems increasingly pressured and in question. From agriculture to nature, leisure, climate change, the folkloric, the archaeological and the mystical, David Matless uncovers the genealogies of today’s debates over land and culture, showing how twenty-first-century concerns and anxieties have been moulded by events over the past sixty years. From government policy to popular music, and from ecological polemic to television comedy, England’s Green shows the richness and complexity of English environmental culture.