PHD RESEARCH
PhD in Performance Art - Leeds University
Thesis title: “A Provenance of Performance: Excavating new art histories through a consideration of re-enactment and the perspectives of the audience.”
Supervisor: Professor Stephen Scott-Bottoms
Examiners: Professor Carl Lavery & Dr Lourdes Orozco
The research began as an investigation into public art, site and performance but moved on into a more considered focus on the historical context of my two case studies: Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave and Graeme Miller’s Linked along with the processes and procedures undertaken in the course of making them. This undertaking revealed the multiplicity of narratives and collaborators involved in the work. By using a specific kind of historical perspective, that of the provenance of the work, a term most often used in art history or archaeology to look at the detail of how each work was created, I was more fully able to think about the importance of re-enactment and different spaces of documentation in the work’s context.
I looked at how documentation of an event might expand and enable the revisiting and new understandings of the work in different ways. In addition, I looked at the role of audiences and why their memories of the event are an often under-used resource. In order to address this, both in relation to the investigation into how a provenance of performance might operate and as a method to raise the presence of the expansion of history through the transfer of knowledge through bodies, I use the opportunity to talk to audiences through qualitative methods. I also consider how a provenance of performance might engage practically with live art documentation. Using over 90k words of interviews from one-to-one discussions, focus groups and group screenings and tours, I’ve positioned the multiplicity of voices and stories as central to the way I’ve unpacked the work.
Image from archive of photos by Nicholas Middleton on the demolition of over 350 houses in Leyton and Wanstead as part of the building of the A12 link road extension.
My research was key in my consultancy work with Tate between 2018 - 2020 on the Strategy for the Documentation and Conservation of Performance work with the Time-Based Media Conservatoin Department and Head of Conservation - Louise Lawson.