Podcast: Download (36.6MB)
Broadcast: 6.30pm – 7.30pm, Tuesday 6th July.
How do metropolitan centres construct the rural, and what effects does this have on the people living in non-metropolitan regions? How does the rural speak back? The history of art provides a way of thinking through these questions, from tourism to changing attitudes towards landscape and the pastoral.
The speakers were Dr. Ysanne Holt, Rosemary Shirley, and Helena Bonett. The show was hosted by Seph Rodney.
Speaker biographies:
Dr Ysanne Holt is Reader in Art History at the University of Northumbria and editor of the Routledge journal ‘Visual Culture in Britain’. Much of her research has focussed on early twentieth century British art history, especially the representation of landscape and the development of ruralist cultures. Her book ‘British Artists and the Modernist Landscape’ (Ashgate) was published in 2003 and she continues her research in this area. More recently she has also become concerned with past and present day northern landscapes. She organised a conference last year - ‘Ideas and Images of North in Visual Culture’ and is currently developing collaborative projects involving arts practice, curators and academic researchers at Northumbria University and North Uist in the Outer Hebrides.
Rosemary Shirley’s research looks at everyday life in non-metropolitan places, especially as it is registered in aspects of visual culture. Recently she has been focusing on the history and meanings of litter in rural landscapes. She is completing doctoral research at the University of Sussex and teaches in the Visual Cultures Department at
Goldsmiths and the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck. She is Editor of Interface – a contemporary art reviews website, part of a-n Magazine.
Helena Bonett is the Research Coordinator for the Camden Town Group Online Research Project at Tate Britain. She completed an MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck College in 2008 and a Graduate Diploma in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2006. She has written two educational guidebooks for the exhibitions Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill (2009) and Vilhelm Hammershøi: The Poetry of Silence (2008) at the Royal Academy of Arts, where she worked before taking on the role at Tate Britain.