A multidisciplinary training programme for doctoral students across the CHASE consortium, based in The Courtauld Institute of Art’s Research Forum.
Throughout my first term as an undergraduate photography student at the Arts University Bournemouth, we were encouraged to put all digital technology away, to get in the darkroom, and to think about the very fundamentals of the medium: drawing with light. This was 2020, the same moment that the V&A presented the seminal exhibition Shadow […]
Like many of my fellow researchers working under the restrictions of the pandemic, I have come to view the upcoming training events in my diary with a mixture of excitement, yes, but also some trepidation. It is undeniable that we lose something over Zoom and similar digital platforms. A sense of immediacy, perhaps, or connection. […]
Elizabeth Brown, first year PhD student at Birkbeck (Art History) Photography is mythologised as a morbid medium, carrying the trace of lost presences. Attending the Material Witness workshop on black and white photography, I was surprised to find its materials dynamic and unruly, prone to change in live time. The workshop provided an opportunity to […]
Before I was doing my PhD – back when I was youthful and starting an undergraduate degree – a student a few years above me attempted to make an egg-tempera crucifixion painting for his final piece. I was fascinated; suddenly I was aware of the materiality of paint, I was thinking of how painters worked […]
This session of Material Witness, 3-4 October, 2019, was a linocut workshop held in Frome, Somerset, and hosted by Chris Pig, of Black Pig Printmaking Studio, and Amy Jeffs, who recently completed her PhD at Cambridge and whose work combines British history and linocut illustrations. Chris is particularly interested in fostering environments in which artists […]
On the afternoon of 17th May 2019 graduate students across the CHASE consortium gathered at Canterbury Cathedral for the sixth and final Material Witness workshop of the term. An impressive building of international significance, Canterbury has witnessed much since its founding by Augustine in 597, including the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170, the […]
This session of the Material Witness series saw a range of PhD students meeting in the Wellcome Galleries on Euston Rd. As we introduced ourselves, sat around a long table in the reading room of the galleries, it became apparent that our research topics were as diverse as the eclectic range of objects that surrounded […]
The latest #MaterialWitness session encouraged participants to interrogate the materiality of photography through a series of unique experiments in analogue image making with artist and lecturer Melanie King (Royal College of Art). Focusing on basal photographic techniques, including chemigrams and lumen prints, practical experiments developed in tandem with a philosophical debate over the ubiquity of […]
#MaterialWitness reconvened for 2019s third session at the Tate Archive in the basement of Tate Britain. Secluded from thronging exhibitions, a door opens onto the world’s foremost collection of documentation on post-1900 British art. This hoard includes more than 900 artists’ personal archives, 100,000 documentary photographs, 3,500 audio-visual recordings and 2,500 artist-designed posters, among other […]
The second of the #MaterialWitness 2019 events took place at the Horniman Museum, a hidden treasure in South East London and home to Frederick John Horniman’s extraordinary collection of objects. Ranging from anthropology to musical instruments, as well as an acclaimed aquarium, a butterfly house and natural history collection, there aren’t many museums that can […]
