fieldwork

Overview of Practice

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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.

Thesis Preface: Mnemonic Residues-The Curated Ruin as Fictional Trace

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Fig. 1: Film Still, Letters to the Landscape, 2025, Episode 1 Epistles, Branwell Brontë’s Desk, Installation by Simon Armitage, Brontë Parsonage Museum

Fig.1 depicts Branwell Brontë’s desk at the Parsonage, part of Simon Armitage’s installation.

The desk is presented not merely as an archival object, but as a curated scene.

While Emily Brontë’s writing desk inspired this project, its modest size and protective casing rendered it visually elusive. In contrast, Branwell’s desk is prominent, cluttered, tactile, and performative. It transforms the archive into an encounter, where memory is actively constructed rather than simply preserved.

However, this is not strictly Branwell’s desk. It serves as a symbolic object, representing both a failed legacy and a speculative presence. The surrounding items are deliberately arranged, their authenticity uncertain. What matters is not whether they are real, but what they perform: a residue of ambition, a trace of authorship unmade.

The desk functions as a surrogate archive, a site where silence is staged, absence made visible. It embodies not Branwell himself, but the concept of Branwell, a mnemonic placeholder in literary history.

My entire PhD could be characterised as an attempt to crack open this image—to deconstruct its rhetoric of display, interrogate the politics of preservation, the aesthetics of collecting, and the archive’s desire to hold what cannot be kept, to capture what cannot be retained.

This is where the work begins…

Let us go you and I, let us begin by walking, together, into the landscape.

The wind on the moor carries more than weather, it carries memory, sediment, and the ghostly residue of letters never sent…

Fig.2 Top Withens, reputed site of Wuthering Heights (1847), photograph by Samuel Vale

Dispatches 03/02/2024: Today, there is a 65% chance of precipitation. The temperature is 5 degrees, but it feels like 2. The wind direction is South, at a speed of 9 miles per hour. Humidity is at 73% and visibility is very good. The sun rose at 7.39 am and set at 4 pm.

This is how the day began, A weather report. A mood. A trace.

It’s not just data, it’s atmosphere. It sets the tone for a fieldwork that is not simply visual but experiential, even visceral. Not evidentiary, but affective.

In Letters to the Landscape (2025), I return to Brontë Country not to recover a lost past, but to trace the gesture of its dispersal.

This thesis begins with a walk: a slow, deliberate movement through terrain marked by literary inheritance and vernacular forgetting. The film, composed of fragments, postcards, voiceovers, and archival stills, does not seek to reconstruct history, but to perform its dislocation. Through a speculative feminist lens, I engage with the archive not as a repository, but as a site of haunting and (re)collection. Drawing on Derrida’s notion of spectrality (1994) and Schneider’s theory of the explicit body (1997), I ask: What remains when the archive is touched, not read? What kinds of knowledge emerge when history is felt rather than narrated?

These provocations set the stage for a research journey that is as much about unearthing as about unsettling, as much about absence as about presence.

These fragments, objects, weather, walk, and archive embody the approach this thesis will take, moving between the material and the imagined, the evidentiary and the affective, the archive and the field, they set the mood and method for what follows. In what remains of this introduction, I move from the poetics of encounter to the conceptual and methodological frameworks that underpin this research.

From here, I turn to map the conceptual terrain, outlining the research questions, and situating my practice within the intersecting traditions of chorography, speculative feminist historiography, and creative fieldwork. The following section introduces the research context and background, main aims, themes, and structure of the thesis, and describes how the performative and speculative methods evoked here will be developed throughout its sections and into Brontë Country and beyond.

This is also where the work begins…

Revised Artist’s statement based on PhD research

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Film Still: Letters to the Landscape, Moving Image, approx.25 minutes. Found photographs, polaroids and letters from the Director’s Collection, curated by Victoria Hermita, Keeper of the Collection, Editor and P.A to the Director, George Howlette

Denise Startin is an artist, writer, and researcher who stages an interdisciplinary and performative archival practice through embodied fieldwork, dramatis personae, and the politics of memory. Working across moving image, photography, installation, site-specific interventions, and performance writing, she explores how archival fragments, textual, visual, and artefactual, can be reinterpreted through sensory gestures and narrative slippage. Her work reframes the archive not as a static repository but as a haunted, migratory space, one that moves across media, bodies, and temporalities. Through walking, (re)collecting, re-enacting, writing, re-citing, reciting and remembering, she activates the landscape as a mnemonic terrain and the archive as a site of negotiation, where memory is contested, reanimated, and re-authored.

Central to her methodology is the use of dramatis personae who act as narrative interlocutors, structuring devices and speculative tools 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 space for embodied speculation, where gestures of citation are enacted rather than merely recorded. Her current research, undertaken as part of a practice-based PhD at the University of Leeds, is situated in Brontë Country, West Yorkshire, and investigates place as a medium of cultural memory and a terrain where bodies, landscapes, and narratives converge. The work privileges fragment, rupture, and affective resonance over institutional fixity, proposing 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 are preserved, and insists on the archive as a live site of encounter.