My research explores how the meanings we make with art objects and other cultural products are configured through the specific ways we encounter them.
I am interested in questions such as, what are the social settings, emotional textures, rules and regulations that permeate these encounters? And, what role do art objects themselves play in structuring the places we encounter them, and inviting certain responses?
I have mainly explored these themes through my doctoral work on the photobook, as an emergent, experiential, portable and multiple artistic form and commodity. My PhD thesis ‘Bindings, Boundaries and Cuts: Relating Agency and Ontology in Photobook Encounters' was supervised by Prof. Chris Whitehead and Dr Tina Sikka. The research gathered insights about how people and photobooks interact in various settings, ranging from book stores and international fairs, to private homes, to institutions/organisations including the National Art Library, The Photographers' Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum, George Eastman Museum and the New York Public Library.
I work with a combination of ethnographic and autoethnographic methods. In other research projects I have studied popular culture museum collections and paint by numbers art.
I approach these interests with a more-than-human perspective to look at other agencies and affects in art encounters. In particular, I am exploring how feminist new materialist ethico-onto-epistemology creates new understandings for products of creativity and collaboration.
I have a broader interest in ways of knowing, and particularly knowledges that have been marginalised in institutions. I worked as Postdoctoral Research Associate on the NERC-funded interdisciplinary project ‘Safety and inclusion in field-based environmental sciences research’, which used qualitative methods to investigate relationships between inclusion, diversity, safety and knowledge practices in fieldwork.
