Art and travel workshops

 

Aims and Objectives

The workshops, five of which will be held at locations within the UK , and one in the USA , will address the subject of art and travel and their related histories.

For more details please go to the project summary document

Progress and Highlights

• The Art and Travel Workshops under the Landscape and Environment Programme have now concluded, to schedule.

• A review seminar involving the members of the steering committee and other key invited participants also took place on 5 September 2007 at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, in order to identify ways forward for the Centre for the Study of Art and Travel, now established (since July 2007) at the National Maritime Museum (NMM), London.

• The five workshops were structured around the presentation of a group of (usually three) ‘work-in-progress' papers relating to the given theme, for an invited audience.

• Papers presented at the workshops ranged from more conventionally academic examinations of little-known archival material to less conventional practice-led research as well as practice-based interrogations of the archive that have produced very different results from academic studies.

• Methodological approaches varied widely, ranging from perspectives rooted in literary theory to material cultural approaches centred on the direct handling of collections, as well as tthe variety of methods implicated in practice-led research.

• The workshops demonstrated that ‘art and travel' could offer a capacious but coherent theme through which to engage in research into landscape and environment, understood in both a historical and a phenomenological sense; through the analysis of visual imagery – or texts treating of visuality and visualization whether actual or imaginary – relating to the act of travelling through, to and between landscapes.