People

Harriet’s research is focused on the advancement of the GeoHumanities, a field that sits at the intersection of geographical scholarship with arts and humanities scholarship and practice. Empirically, she explores the geographies of artworks and art worlds. She is interested in the elaboration of core humanities concepts of aesthetics, creativity and the imagination from a geographical perspective. Much of her recent work has explored diverse relations between creative practice and research (in all its forms).

Collaboration underpins Harriet’s research practice and alongside written research, she has worked on artist’s books, participatory art projects, performance lectures, installations and exhibitions with individual artists and a range of international arts and science organizations including Tate, Arts Catalyst, Iniva, Furtherfield and Swiss Artists in Labs.

Read more about Harriet here

Flora is an artist and researcher. Her doctoral research titled 'Knowing the Underground: Science, Exploration and Embodied Engagements with Subterranean Spaces' was inspired by experiences of caves and caving. The artistic work looks at notions of the subterranean, experiences of darkness and the restructuring of the sense. Flora is an artist working in print, sculpture and textiles, she trained in Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art. A key focus of the practice is interdisciplinary collaboration; working with experts from other disciplines to create rich and experimental programs to accompany visual arts exhibitions. 'I'm In the Bath On All Fours', a project made in collaboration with South African writer, Lindiwe Matshikiza has recently been shown at Eastside Projects in Birmingham as part of Sonia Boyce’s ‘In The Castle Of My Skin’, going on to MIMA Middleborough in 2021. Flora has exhibited nationally and internationally at spaces including: Kupfer Gallery, Well Projects, Arbyte Gallery, Oi Futuro, Brazil, Projecto Fidgalga, Brazil, Museum of GeoScience University of Sao Paulo, Oriel Myrddin, The Bluecoat, Tintype London, Nottingham University Park, Wysing Arts Centre, The Herbert Gallery.

The contribution to Thinking Deep is a project titled ‘Using artistic inquiry to think through 4 depths’. The outputs will consist of three exhibitions with a focus on 'a shallow groove', 'an everyday subsurface' and 'a grand, yearned for depth'. The development process will be recorded in research diagram which tracks the wide-ranging influences of the project.

Read more about Flora’s work here.

Instagram @floraparrott

Will's research project for Think Deep is entitled 'Territory's Plot Holes: Geoliterary excavations of the Anthropocene in Singapore'. It proposes Singapore as a site for theorising territory’s plot holes through the aporias and contradictions of Singapore's model of global city and relentless geographic expansion. It will examine the city-state's subsurface turn, typically conceived of as a speculative innovation in its urban development, as part of a longer history of its territory, charting a trajectory from colonial entrepot, to postcolonial city-state, to Anthropocene global city. It will employ geoliterary methods of critical and creative writing to probe these continuities through genre-spanning works of fiction and creative nonfiction, and ultimately connect Singapore’s historical, contemporary, and future extraction of the subsurface through its plot holes.

Eva is a writer and post-disciplinary artist whose research and writing explores cultural histories of language, place, and embodied and experiential knowledges. She works with languages, archives, maps, charts, images and historical materials to re-weave the stories of the past from the perspectives of different worldviews and older ways of knowing.  

Her PhD research explores ways in which we experience and know the unseen. How can we observe that which must be experienced to be known, and what does it mean to use language to create, open, access and understand such spaces? Her research is practice-based, including training in traditional systems of travel to the sub-surface. She works with archival materials, Elders, Speakers, apprentices and the spirit world to understand the geographical, cultural and historical structures of non-standard reality. Her work pulls from linguistics, religious studies, anthropology, indigenous knowledge systems and yogic philosophy.

She is the author of the Object Lessons: Magnet, a cultural history of magnetism, and has published several essays on language, culture, experience, and meaning. 

Wayne is developing a geophysical art practice: a place-sensitive performance of geophysical processes at scales - spatial and temporal - that make them legible to human beings (although not always without xenophenomenological augmentation). His PhD work is centered on the caldera complex of the Campi Flegrei, the quiescently active super volcano west of the urban core of Naples, Italy. In the context of re-thinking the place — and “place” more generally, to better account for how meaningfulness gets bound up - metaphysically - in the physical - geophysical - complexities that constitute and condition it — Wayne is attempting a post-disciplinary re-integration of physical and human geographies with geology and the experimental sciences. For purposes of this project, he has selected three (mature, but undertheorized) methods from outside human geography – photogrammetry, radar, and seismography – to theorize, critically situate, and apply to human geographical questions in the context of his practice.

Una is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher. Her contribution to Think Deep is the project ‘Spirits of Place: thinking through subterranean subjectivities’, which looks to the underground in mythic and folkloric narratives in Norway and England through the lenses of animism, ecofeminism and the more-than-human. This will include communing with stone people and engaging with the ambivalent notion of ‘deep’ England. Through sensory approaches, deep listening, speculative re-imaginings and artistic collaboration, the project will navigate the slippery subjectivities of humans, non-humans, genius loci and place to ask how we can remake an ecologically located kinship that is both reciprocal, enchanted and inclusive through a creative process that leaves room for trial and error. 

In addition to a written thesis, the outcome of the research will conclude with a number of creative responses realised as exhibitions, sound works and artist publications. 

Recent projects include ‘Becoming the Forest: Issue IV’, a zine on black metal and ecology she publishes biannually, ‘All Flesh is Grass’, an exhibition based around plant sentience for Kim? Gallery in Riga, a site-specific sound installation made for Epping Forest in London and ‘Playing With Deep Time’, an Environmental Humanities project at the University of Oslo where she acted as LARP consultant. As one half of Legion Projects she recently curated the touring UK exhibition ‘Waking the Witch’ and edited a monograph about the visionary artist Monica Sjöö. 

You can read more about Una at http://www.unahamiltonhelle.co.uk 

Instagram @uncashh

Twitter @unaoslondon

Cinzia is a project management professional experienced in delivering value-driven projects with a focus on Agile methodologies. Her role is to support PI Harriet Hawkins and the wider Thinking Deep team in managing project activities and milestones in Administration, Research, Finance and Human Resources in line with the Thinking Deep grant agreement.