CAMC Curates is the newsletter for the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities with updates, news and events from our expert and engaged researchers.

The PGR Special

For the August edition of CAMC Curates, we would like to celebrate our community of Postgraduate Research students. We are proud to showcase some of their work in this PGR Special issue and invite you to join us in congratulating them on what they have achieved so far.

David Beauchamp is working on the Communicating Covid: messages from the Downing Street briefings project with Professor Sheena Gardner and Dr Benet Vincent. In her PhD, entitled Sculptural Reconfigurations of the Kitchen Utensil: A Poetic Chaos of Domesticity, Carole Griffiths offers a poetic reflection on making by revisiting everyday objects. Rachael Hughson-Gill is looking into the role of design in the adoption and usability of self-management interventions for young type-one diabetics, and recently presented at her first conference. Hannah Honeywell is using practice-based research to critique memorial making through queer methodologies. Shaniece Martin is exploring the relationship between Indian poets and the English language from the 1857 War of Independence to the modern day. Stacey Moon-Tracy is researching the ethical dilemmas faced by healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic through arts-based practice. Rebecca Ryder-Caddy's research aims to develop wearable artefacts that promote wellbeing in children. 

Find out more about each project in more detail below. 

David Beauchamp

Image: Illustration for Corpus Linguistics, courtesy of David Beauchamp

David Beauchamp is a linguist with a background in corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. He is currently working on the Communicating Covid: messages from the Downing Street briefings project with Professor Sheena Gardner and Dr Benet Vincent.

This project will take large quantities of texts from institutions which have communicated messages to the public during the covid pandemic.  By subjecting them to linguistic analysis of form, structure and content, the project is uncovering the underlying values and strategies of public discourse at a time of national crisis.

Research outputs have been promising so far, with presentations at the CL2021 conference, and upcoming presentations at BAAL and SFLIG events later this year.

Carole Griffiths

Image: Photograph of Carole Griffiths' work

Carole Griffiths' research, Sculptural Reconfigurations of the Kitchen Utensil: A Poetic Chaos of Domesticity, offers a poetic reflection upon both the process and content of making, allowing the viewer to observe and encounter surreal, and complex relationships between objects, subjects, and language.

Her work investigates the nuances of everyday experiences which are uncovered through revisiting and exploring social spaces such as the kitchen. Carole repositions and reconfigures kitchen objects in a response to a place of memory and contemplation. The kitchen is a space that can be 'homely' where observations and questions relate to both the making process and the familiarity of the everyday object, resulting in new material expressions of body, self, and form. These components become a catalyst for harmonious, struggling, symmetrical, opposing relationships within her domestic artistic arena.

Image: Photograph of Carole Griffiths

Rachael Hughson-Gill

Image reads: What does it feel like to live with type one diabetes?

PhD researcher Rachael Hughson-Gill recently presented at her first conference, Precarious Futures: Towards (un)known (unknowns) organised and run by Birmingham City University’s PGR Studio. This conference was themed round precarity and unknowns within research, design and artistic practice. Rachael presented on researching and designing out with one’s own cognitive and physical lived experience, and the complexity that comes with this.

This ties into Rachael's current work looking into the role of design in the adoption and usability of self-management interventions for young type-one diabetics.

You can read more about the conference in this booklet.

Image: Photograph of Rachel Hughson-Gill

Hannah Honeywell

Image: Photograph of Hannah Honeywell at work, making a recent sculptural memorial commission called Vera

Hannah Honeywill's research is entitled (Art)efact as memorial: a queer interrogation of the material embodiment of loss during pandemic. As witnessing national death tolls of the COVID-19 pandemic became a daily routine for Hanna, her attention, as an artist-researcher, turned to how artwork can embody this loss and question whether the traditional terms and conditions of memorial making are expansive enough to embody the ubiquitous loss of COVID-19 pandemic. 

Through art practice-based research, she will critique memorial making via queer methodologies, challenging and disorientating the monument from binary classifications beyond the concept of the counter-monument (Young, 1992) developing the provocation of a new Queer Monumentality.

Shaniece Martin

Image: Photograph of Shaniece Martin

Shaniece Martin's practice-based research explores the relationship between Indian poets and the English language from the 1857 War of Independence to the modern day, in which Indian English poetry has evolved into the world of social media. She is researching poets, namely: Rabindranath Tagore, Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das & Rupi Kaur. Her final thesis will include an Indian English poetry collection that will reflect her own identity as a British-Indian woman.

Stacey Moon-Tracy

Image: Photograph of Stacey Moon-Tracy

Stacey Moon-Tracy, who began her PhD in January, is exploring the experiences and ethical dilemmas faced by healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic through arts-based practice.

The focus of her research is to examine the stories of female identifying ITU Nurse’s and what they reveal about how they relate to their role, and of the relationships within their role, and whether these has been affected by their lived experience of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the UK. The aim is to explore those experiences further through leading ITU nurses through creative writing workshops resulting in the co-creation of a stage play, and to reflect on the impact that this has on their wellbeing.

Rebecca Ryder-Caddy

Image: Rebecca Ryder-Caddy's research, a wearable artefact

Rebecca's research project, entitled Fashion Beyond Clothing: Practice Led Exploration into Supporting Child Expression through Fashion and Textile processes, makes use of standard textile and fashion-related processes and techniques, but applies them in a novel manner.

The project aims to develop wearable artefacts for the benefit of child wellbeing through facilitating creative expression and communication. Rebecca argues that much of the research published in the last ten years that aimed to support the childhood experience has been written in consultation with parents and medical professionals, and rarely with children themselves. This study aims to address this by learning from children to assess how to better design products to support their needs.

Reconstructing Coventry Early Modern Grammar School

Image: Alice Leonard's photograph of the old oak desks (c. 1342)

The CAMC Research Fellow, Dr Alice Leonard, has been awarded the ‘Trailblazers’ funding, which provides full scholarships for exceptional PhD candidates to undertake trailblazing, transformative research alongside our outstanding early-career researchers. The Trailblazer PhD studentships have been devised and developed by leading early-career researchers at Coventry University. The scheme provides successfully appointed doctoral researchers with an innovative and dynamic intellectual space in which to undertake transformative research, whilst being fully supported by a team of experienced supervisors.

This interdisciplinary project entitled ‘Reconstructing Coventry Early Modern Grammar School’ reveals the lost history of Coventry’s early modern Grammar School and uses digital tools to secure its place in the public understanding of Coventry’s unique cultural heritage.

Founded by Henry VIII, the original building still stands at the heart of the city centre, on Hales Street. The School housed an exceptional library that also survives. Yet the site has never been systematically studied. This project shines light on the School, using Historic Building Information Modelling to produce a virtual reconstruction embedded within an interactive online archive. Using open-source software, the building will be reproduced as a 3D model, enabling the user to enter the Library and take books off the shelves. It brings to life the founders, pupils, schoolmasters and donors through a user-orientated interface.

This timely project contributes to the international focus on Coventry heritage as part of City of Culture 2021. It forges new partnerships with Coventry Archives, the Grammar School, and Cambridge University Library. The virtual reconstruction reveals the School’s rich past and secures its heritage, situating Coventry as a site of nationally significant history.

The supervisory team includes: Dr Alice Leonard, Victoria Northridge (Coventry Archives), Professor Patricia Phillippy (CAMC), Professor Jacqueline Cawston (Postdigital Cultures), and Professor Paul Botley (Warwick University).

More information on the grammar school is available here. 

Image: Yellow House, by John Devane