archives

Overview of Practice

startind

This research is grounded in an interdisciplinary, practice-led approach that stages chorography as both methodology and mode of inquiry, privileging process, embodiment, and creative experimentation. In practice, this approach is realised through a body of work spanning moving-image, photography, installation, site-specific intervention, and performance writing, all situated at the intersection of embodied fieldwork, archival play, and speculative narrative. Through these forms, I interrogate how archival fragments, textual, visual, and artefactual, can be (re)collected, reinterpreted, and reanimated via sensory gestures, narrative slippage, and acts of embodied citation. Central to this practice is the activation of dramatis personae who act as narrative interlocutors, structuring devices and speculative figures that enable a slippage between researcher and archive, past and present, fact and fiction. These rhetorical figures operate as explorers, (mis)guides, and mnemonic surrogates, enabling a mode of fieldwork that is both materially grounded and imaginatively expansive. Through them, the archive becomes a vehicle of resonance, resistance, and reimagination, staging historiographic instability and opening up space in the archive for embodied speculation, where gestures of citation are enacted rather than merely recorded. In doing so, my work reframes the archive not as a static repository but as a haunted, migratory space that moves across media, bodies, and temporalities where landscapes, bodies and narratives converge.

A significant aspect of this approach is the construction of a vernacular archive sourced from eBay, whose algorithmically curated collections of letters, postcards, and photographs stand in deliberate contrast to institutional archives. This contingent, everyday archive both initiates and shapes the fieldwork, foregrounding the fragmentary, ephemeral, and unpredictable nature of memory, collection, and research. Through a performative archival practice, walking, (re)collecting, re-enacting, writing, re-citing, reciting and remembering, the landscape is activated as a mnemonic terrain and the archive as a live site of negotiation, resonance, and resistance, where memory is contested, reanimated, and re-authored. This project is situated in Brontë Country, West Yorkshire, a landscape dense with literary, historical, and affective resonances. Here, I privilege fragment, rupture, and affective encounter over any claims the archive might have to institutional fixity or control by adopting a methodology of situated refusal, a way of inhabiting the archive without claiming it. This approach foregrounds the politics of memory, whose stories are told, whose gestures preserved while advancing chorography as a feminist, performative, and practice-led methodology for reimagining place, history, cultural memory and the performative construction of identity.

Art + Archive

startind

Art + Archive provides an in-depth analysis of the connection between art and the archive at the turn of the twenty-first century. The book examines how the archive emerged in art writing in the mid-1990s and how its subsequent ubiquity can be understood in light of wider social, technological, philosophical and art-historical conditions and concerns. Deftly combining writing on archives from different disciplines with artistic practices, the book clarifies the function and meaning of one of the most persistent artworld buzzwords of recent years, shedding light on the conceptual and historical implications of the so-called archival turn in contemporary art.

Text and image reproduced from Amazon

About Letters to the Landscape (2025)

startind
Title still

Letters to the Landscape brings together haunting, de-archiving, and displacement as interwoven strategies of resistance, contributing to ongoing conversations around feminist historiography, embodied research, and the politics of cultural memory. This work is a cinematic essay, practice-led investigation and situated methodology grounded in the archival practice of (re)collecting, framing vernacular archives as dynamic social agents and sites of affective transmission. Structured as episodic meditations across the moorlands of Brontë Country, the work interrogates how landscape, literature, and the female body intersect through archival gestures including letter writing, re-citing, reciting, remembering, walking, appropriation, and fictionalisation. Drawing on the epistolary form, found materials, and multimodal image-making the artist-researcher is positioned within both the physical terrain and the symbolic archive, enacting an embodied traversal that resists institutional fixity and foregrounds fragment, rupture, and affective resonance (Taylor, 2003; Schneider, 2011; Kämpfe, 2023). The project performs a recuperative act, (re)collecting postcards, letters, voices, and family photographs whilst acknowledging the impossibility of full recovery. Echoing Derrida’s (1996) notion of the archive as search and longing, the archive is conceived not as a fixed repository but as a haunted porous space: a séance, where Brontë, Gaskell, and the artist’s voice (in the guise of fictional personae Phyllis Dare) converge, interrupt, and overwrite each other. This polyphonic layering becomes a strategy of de-archiving, resisting singular authorship and re-situating memory as a shared unstable terrain.

Displacement emerges as both theme and method. The journey to Top Withens, reputed site of Wuthering Heights (1847), is framed as reluctant encounter rather than literary pilgrimage, with the landscape enacting estrangement and resistance (Rosenberg, 2007; Sebald, 2013). Archival materials are (re)collected, redistributed, and misremembered, the gesture of collecting is transformed into a metaphor for unrequited desire. In this way, the archive migrates across bodies, media, and temporalities, a travelling entity whose meaning remains unstable and contested (Bal, 2002, Slaymaker, 2023; Carter et al., 2022). By foregrounding social performances of memory through walking, writing, (re)collecting, remembering, this project proposes a methodology of situated resistance: a way of inhabiting the archive without claiming it. Letters to the Landscape challenges dominant memorial frameworks by expanding how vernacular memory objects are read and activated across non-institutional sites. The project ultimately unfolds as a speculative feminist historiography re-situating memory as a living and embodied terrain. The work has been constructed through the interaction of several pseudonyms, operating under the fictional artist duo Vale & Howlette. By foregrounding these dramatis personae, the project interrogates authorship, authenticity, and the performance of identity within a speculative narrative framework. The use of performance, voice, and multi-modal forms foregrounds how vernacular archives carry social memory in ways that challenge existing interpretative structures, resisting containment through affective rupture. The work ultimately unfolds not to restore a lost narrative or reconstruct a singular past, but to re-situate memory within a living and embodied terrain where archival gestures become vehicles of resistance, resonance, and reimagination and landscapes, bodies and narratives converge.

Dust – The Archive and Cultural History

startind

In this witty, engaging and challenging book, Carolyn Steedman has produced a highly original and sometimes irreverent investigation into the development of modern history writing. Dust is about the practice and writing of history. Dust considers the immutable, stubborn set of beliefs about the material world, past and present, inherited from the nineteenth century, with which modern history writing attempts to grapple. Drawing on over five years worth of her own published and unpublished writing, the author has produced a sustained argument about the way in which history writing belongs to the currents of thought shaping the modern world. Steedman begins by looking at the attention paid to the archive by those working in the humanities and social sciences in recent years, what has become known as the practice of ‘archivisation’. By definition, the archive is the repository of ‘that which will not go away’, and the book goes on to suggest that, just like dust, the ‘matter of history’ can never go away or be erased. Historians who want to think about what it is they do will find this work enlightening, and this book is essential reading for all undergraduates and postgraduates studying historiography, and history and theory.

Text and image repsoduced form Amazon (acccessed 29/10/25)