Situating Practices Situating Practices is a group exhibition showcasing the work of postgraduate research students at different stages and from different creative disciplines. Nine practitioners were selected through an open call, to explore different configurations of (art) practice as research or research as (art) practice. The exhibition seeks to engage in a dialogue about what it means to do research in, with and through practice. It explores what kinds of situated and tacit knowledges are produced in practice, how different narratives, making processes and spaces are negotiated within these practices, including how research is embedded within all kinds of creative practice. The works in the exhibition draw on different research methodologies and modes of communication in their enquiries, from methods that embed practice within different research sites, such as auto-ethnography and field diaries (Christian Petersen, Beth Morgan), to fieldwork within making spaces and communities (Julia McKinlay, Susan Carron Clarke). Others have used their creative practice to uncover and illuminate tacit knowledges (Laura Harris) or reveal narratives and histories that would otherwise remain concealed (Adrian Evans, Caitlin Kiely). Other practices in the exhibition seek to intervene in, and activate public space, using satellite space within Queensgate Indoor Market as a place of further exploration (Charlotte Eagles, John Carney). Situating Practices is concerned with how you can come to know through making, doing, creating and showing. What knowledges are produced and how can they be communicated to an audience? By situating research practices within a gallery space, this group exhibition not only considers how the artefacts of practice-based research function, it also asks what new knowledge can encounters with this work generate?
Claire Booth-Kurpnieks, Curator
A Walk in Scarborough (2019) Beth Morgan University of Huddersfield (MRes)
Beth Morgan’s creative practice is focused on giving her own personal, remembered experience of walking through landscape a visual form. Overly saturated colours, biomorphic shapes and layered forms build up as she recollects her experience of a specific walk in a particular site, transforming and shifting until it inspires a sculpture. Her paintings and sculptures are complete abstractions yet the shapes remain familiar due to their organic nature. Her practice-based research concentrates on understanding her relationship with the landscape, considering how it is transformed through the act of walking and how memory distorts and abstracts, forming new experiences. Walking is an important part of her practice, the more she walks the more responses she creates, giving her a greater understanding of how walking informs and encompasses who she is as a creative practitioner. The series of works on display are developed from a walk Morgan has undertaken along the long stretching coastline of South Bay Beach in Scarborough, walking amongst thriving rockpools, barnacle covered sea walls and craggy rocks, across barren sandscapes littered with seaweed cast onto the shore by a violent sea. Her practice is situated within these natural environments, immersing herself within them, considering the ways in which the weather alters the colours around her, how the wind caught a certain leaf, how the sun distorts the view or tiredness disrupts focus. No photographs are taken during the walk, only notes and quick sketches in her ‘field journal’. These are used in the studio to prompt a memory or feeling. The artworks are personal to Morgan and her experience of that particular walks in particular sites. Within the gallery setting, the works themselves take on a whole new phenomenological experience for the audience, prompting feelings of the strangely familiar as most people will have, at some point in their lives, taken a similar walk in an English landscape.