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Staff Profile

Dr Julia Heslop

NUAcT Fellow: Cities and Place

Background

I am an artist and a Newcastle University Academic Track (NUAcT) Fellow working in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. I have a BA in Fine Art: Painting and Printmaking from the Glasgow School of Art, a Master of Fine Art from Newcastle University and a PhD in Human Geography from Durham University. Before undertaking the role as a NUAcT Fellow I held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Architecture at Newcastle University.


My work takes the form of large scale architectural installation, painting, printmaking and film/audio. The potentials for deep participation in (re)creating the urban realm are at the centre of my practice and I often work in collaborative, slow ways with groups and communities. My work prompts questions about land and property ownership, housing precarity, urban planning and local democracy.


My commissions include Lines of Enclosure (2022) for Lancaster Arts, Lancaster, Grains to Tyne (2022) and the architectural installation Protohome (2018) for BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, the public installation Traversing the Round (2013) for Maison de la Culture, Amiens, France, which formed part of the Art, Cities and Landscape Festival and You Can Take It With You (2011), a sound and visual installation for Up the Wall Festival of Live Arts, Chester Castle, which then travelled to the Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool for the Everyword Festival and to The NewBridge Project, Newcastle. I have presented work in public space and in galleries, including: Felling (2021) - a project about trees lost as a result of new development in Shieldfield, Newcastle and the installation One Hundred and Thirty Million Pounds of Earth (2019) at Shieldfield Art Works, the architectural installation Gathering (2018) at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, the self-build housing project Protohome (2016) in the Ouseburn, Newcastle, the video The Spider Web City at Art Kontakt Festival, Porto Palermo Castle, Albania in 2014, The 100 Gram Cycle – a plan for a wheatfield in Rome - at The Nordic Embassy, Berlin in 2014 and the audio piece No Map Only Memory at Lisbon Architecture Trienalle in 2013. My curatorial projects include Urban Organisms, an exhibition/events programme at The NewBridge Project, Newcastle in 2015, which examined urban food sustainability. I have undertaken residencies including: Festival van het Andere Theater (FAT) Residency (2022) in Leiden, Netherlands and BALTIC Bothy Residency (2018), Isle of Eigg, Scotland.


Working within a context of austerity and rising homelessness, my PhD aimed to translate knowledge across borders, mobilising methods of participation in housing and planning from an informal neighbourhood in Albania to the UK to examine whether participation in the urban realm can trigger processes of collective learning, skills building and politicisation for low income groups. My PhD culminated in the participatory build project Protohome which I initiated. Protohome was a collaboration between Crisis, the national charity for single homelessness, xsite architecture and TILT Workshop. Working alongside an architect and a joiner, a group of individuals who have experienced homelessness developed a timber-frame self-build housing prototype. Once the building was constructed it was open to the public and hosted a programme of events and exhibitions examining the collaborative design-build process and wider issues to do with housing and homelessness in an austerity context and participatory housing alternatives.


Since 2017 I have been working on the long term participatory action research and social arts project 'Dwellbeing', based in the neighbourhood of Shieldfield, Newcastle. Dwellbeing began as a response rapid urban development in the form of new student accommodation in the area. Residents had been sidelined in the development process and the project aimed to understand and activate community-led responses to this. The initial project has since grown into a Community Benefit Society and co-operative led by residents.


I have also worked on research projects including: ‘Brexit Futures’, with Prof. Ben Anderson and ‘Disposal: the housing crisis in Horden’s numbered streets’, with Prof. Rachel Pain. In 2018-20 I collaborated with In Certain Places at the University of Central Lancashire on the project 'Expanded City' which examines the potential for participatory social space in the new North West Preston housing development.


I co-founded the Community Benefit Society and co-operative Dwellbeing Shieldfield. I am a trustee of The NewBridge Project, an arts organisation in Newcastle, where I also have a studio, and I am on the steering committee of the Collective Studio, with The NewBridge Project and Newcastle Institute for Creative Arts Practice (NICAP) and of the North East Community Led Development Network. I am also a member of Newcastle University Social Justice Advisory Group.


Website: www.juliaheslop.com

Twitter: JuliaHHeslop


Research

My research involves a range of methods from studio practice and live build projects to ethnography working with groups/communities. It uses the creation of the art object as a research tool, as well as a mode of dissemination.


In my role as a NUAcT Fellow: Cities and Place working in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape I am developing a project on Socio-spatial Justice and the Rights of Nature within Urban Planning. The acceleration of global urbanisation is having significant detrimental impact on human and non-human species and environments, damaging local biodiversity and the social and nature-based bonds between people and place. This is an intellectual and practical challenge in cities globally as governments struggle to meet the needs of growing populations with increasing demands on natural resources.  This research will use a participatory creative methodology to explore this issue with communities facing urbanisation pressures internationally.


I am currently an affiliated researcher on the Translating Ferro/Transforming Knowledges (TF/TK) project across the UK and Brazil. This project explores and translates into English the work of Brazilian–French historian, theorist, and architect, Sérgio Ferro. Ferro's work demonstrates that architecture’s very existence is predicated on the separation of design from the construction site. In the context of the depletion of resources and ever worsening conditions of contemporary construction workers across the globe, TF/TK looks to Ferro’s work to advance the critical understanding of relations between architectural design and the production and labour of building, with the aim to foster responsible and just alternatives.

 


Teaching

I currently teach on the Master of Architecture and Urban Planning.


I have taught on modules including:


Masters of Planning: Planning Linked Research

Architecture: Design

Architecture and Urban Planning: Visual and Creative Practice Research Skills

Architecture and Urban Planning: Alternative Practice Histories and Theories

Human Geography: Urban Geography

Human Geography: People, Participation and Place

Planning: Urban Poverty

Engineering Experience

Human Geography: Geographies of Everyday Life

Painting Strand

Publications