Home and Away: Home, Migrancy, and Belonging Through Landscape Photographic Practice

The thesis consists of six bodies of photographic visual works: the exhibitions Self Evident, Regarding the Frame, and Oceans Apart, the publication Hidden in a Public Place, an artist-curator project, TradeWinds-LandFall and the video Belonging in Britain. The works are primarily lens-based practice and have been published and exhibited during the last ten years. The overall field of enquiry across the six works is concerned with the issues of Place, situated within the key themes of Home, Migrancy, and Belonging. The accompanying text details the development of the works through multiple readings of the relationship between material practices and ideas of landscape, Britishness and race. By taking a historical, but not chronological examination of the works the chapters examine aspects of the visual politics of landscape aligned with cultural experience and explore how these are expressed across a range of media and theoretical strands.

The vital discussion of visual and material practice within the commentary is indicated and accompanied by extensive Supplementary Evidence, Appendix A (page 99). This appendix includes exhibition catalogues, research publications, and audio, music CD and DVD video extracts. This evidence positions the theoretical concepts within the parameters of the practice based research.

The thesis also assigns authority to ‘other voices’ for a more nuanced response to the complexity of archive work. The thesis challenges and complicates ideas of rootedness to examine the possibilities of meaningful immersions and interactions within communities related to personal biography, history and diaspora as a practice method. In this sense the work locates ways, through practice, which have challenged conventional thinking about identity that limit the discourse and communication around race with the historical classification of ‘black arts’.