Thinking Through Things ECR Project Support Scheme
Introducing the recipients of the Thinking Through Things ECR Project Support Scheme:
Lucy Carolan, Newcastle University
Project: ‘The Stereoscopic Atlas of Agnes Osias’
Lucy’s award will support the creation of an artists’ book as object of her practice-based PhD at Newcastle University. Entitled ‘The Stereoscopic Atlas of Agnes Osias’, it was initially inspired by a chance encounter with Victorian publication ‘The Edinburgh Stereoscopic Atlas of Anatomy’ at Wellcome, and further research into medical usages of stereoscopic imagery in its collections.
Stereoscopy is a photographic form that produces illusions of 3D spaces, into which thoughts and ‘voice’ can be projected. Her Atlas combines material drawn from historic sources with creative intervention, blending medical imagery and discourse with lived experiences of the agnosias (‘unknowings’) in dementia-related neurodegeneration.
Dr Morven Cook, University of Liverpool
Project: ‘Deathbeds Revisited: Imagining Death in Visual Culture and Fiction’
Prior to starting my PhD, I completed an MA (Hons) in English Literature at the University of St Andrews, graduating in 2015. During my third year as an undergraduate, I was awarded a URIP Fellowship which allowed me to undertake research on Douglas Dunn using archives held at the University library.
In 2016, I began studying for my PhD at the University of Liverpool. My PhD was funded through The Centre for Health, Medical, and Environmental Humanities (CHMEH). Over the course of my PhD, I was awarded two international fellowships: a month-long residency at the Brocher Foundation in Switzerland and a week-long visit to Franklin-College at the University of Georgia.
The core output of my project will be a chapter for an edited collection. This chapter will develop sections of my thesis which examine how contemporary fiction and visual culture endorse the familiar image of death popularised in Victorian images and fiction.
Dr Finola Finn, Durham University
Project: ‘The Heart and Melancholy in Seventeenth-Century Spiritual Experience’
Finola Finn is a writer, researcher and editor. She completed a PhD in History at Durham University, where she continues to be an Honorary Fellow. Her research focuses on health and religion in early modern England, as well as artistic approaches to exploring the past. She will use the grant to complete an article that explores the heart and melancholy in seventeenth-century spiritual experience. Using a varied source base, the article will demonstrate that the heart was understood by godly Protestants to react physiologically to religious duties, and that visual and material conceptualisations of this organ were crucial to their accounts of melancholy.
Olivia Turner, Newcastle University
Project: ‘Objects of Voicing: The Gloved Hand’
Olivia Turner is an artist and currently in her final year of a practice-led PhD at Newcastle University. As part of her ECR Project Support Grant, Olivia will create a new artwork – a pair of ‘voicing’ gloves and a performance – and asks how can objects articulate bodily authority and uphold boundaries to reclaim autonomy in a clinical context where one does not feel able to use their voice? Inspired by the TTT programme and 3 ‘things’ from the Wellcome Collection, this project seeks to create insights on object relationships to bodily autonomy, voice, and materiality within the clinical encounter.
Dr Imogen Wiltshire, University of Leicester
Project: ‘Art Objects in Psychiatric Spaces: Art-Making and Therapy at Northfield Military Hospital (1944-46)’
Dr Imogen Wiltshire is an art historian specialising in modern and contemporary art. During this fellowship, she will work on a book chapter, ‘Art-Making and Art Objects in Psychiatric Spaces: Creative Practice at Northfield Military Hospital (1944-46)’ which explores how art operated in the gendered context of this military medical institution. It will analyse the multiple functions that patient-made art objects had in this ‘non-art’ space, informed by the concern of Thinking Through Things to consider the plurality of meanings generated by objects and their relations, as ‘things’, to agency and affect. This grant will also enable Imogen to undertake initial work on ‘Alina Szapocznikow (1926-73): Sculpture, Trauma and Fragmentation.’