fieldwork

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.

Re-citing the Archive: Fieldwork, Fiction and the Politics of Memory

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Fieldwork as Fiction: Phyllis Dare, explorer, travel guide, writer, and photographer

This paper proposes a speculative feminist historiography that re-cites the archive through embodied fieldwork, fictional personae, and the politics of memory. Drawing on site-specific research, situated within Brontë Country, West Yorkshire I explore how sensory gestures—walking, touching, re-enacting—activate archival fragments and reframe landscape as a mnemonic field. The archive here is not a static repository but a haunted space—one that migrates across media, bodies, and temporalities. By foregrounding the performative dimensions of archival practice — writing, walking, re-collecting, recollecting, reciting, re-citing and remembering, the archive, in this context, is a multisensory terrain and a site of negotiation, where memory is contested, reanimated, and re-authored.

Central to this inquiry is the figure of Phyliss Dare, a fictional persona who enables a methodological slippage between researcher and archive, past and present, fact and fiction. Dare operates as both structuring device and speculative method, enabling a mode of citation that foregrounds absence, polyphony, and narrative slippage. Her presence as explorer, travel guide, writer, and photographer allows for a reframing of fieldwork as fictional encounter, one that destabilises linear historiography and opens space for embodied speculation. Through Dare the archive becomes a stage for performance, where gestures of citation are enacted rather than merely recorded.

Rather than reconstructing a lost narrative or a singular past, the work proposes a historiography in which archival gestures become vehicles of resonance, resistance and reanimation. By triangulating fieldwork, fiction, and citation, I argue for a historiographic practice that is both materially grounded and imaginatively expansive. This method foregrounds the politics of memory, whose stories are told, whose gestures are preserved, and insists on the archive as a live site of encounter. In doing so, it offers a framework for engaging with historical material not only recovered as evidence, but re-situated within a living, shifting terrain where bodies landscapes and narratives converge.