Dr. Dawn Bothwell

I have worked as an artist, musician and curator, as an individual and collaboratively with groups: CIRCA Projects, Bad Spirits and Hen Ogledd. My research has focussed upon art history in a regional context, particularly focussing on the North of England. My practice explores site and context, using plural methods to produce art and understand art history.







Thesis Title: Regional Intermedia How Can Intermedia Approaches to Curating Art in 1970s North East England Inform Sustainable Strategies for Present-Day Small Arts Organisations?

This practice-based thesis examines intermedia approaches to curating art and asks how this can form new curatorial strategies for small arts organisations. It looks to the North East of England as a site of potential for new curatorial approaches. This responds to the government's recent redirection of public funding toward the regions. In relation to this background, Dick Higgins’ term ‘intermedia’ is re-evaluated. A set of four behaviours represent intermedia as a process, instead of a type of art. These behaviours are used to reinterpret 'intermedia'' as a methodology in finding sustainable curatorial approaches for regional small arts organisations. These are: i) existing between art and life media; ii) an active, dialectical interrelation between the form which a work assumes and the material of which it consists; iii). the contemporaneity of the artwork as a non-definitive conjuncture between the temporal present and the history of art; iv) rethinking intermediaries such as rostrums, organizations, criteria, sources of information. The historical case studies explore three small arts organisations in North East England in the 1970s. Learning from their methods, the curatorial project Giles Bailey and CIRCA Projects (2016-2018) was developed. Here, a contemporary curatorial practice works ‘instituently’ with collaborating organisations to find sustainable curatorial approaches for small arts organisations.

Awarded Date: 01/10/2019

Principal Supervisor: Professor Beryl Graham

Second Supervisor: Dr Alexandra Moschovi

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