Practising Place: Creative & Critical Reflections on Place – Publication featuring contribution by Joanne Lee launches on Thursday 07 March at Whitworth Gallery

Joanne Lee (Visual Communication) has contributed to Practising Place: Creative & Critical Reflections on Place, a publication developed by the In Certain Places research project based at the University of Central Lancashire.

 

The book will be launched on Thursday 07 March at an event at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.

Practising Place – Event and book launch
Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
Thursday 07 March 2019, 3PM – 5PM
Please book tickets on Eventbrite

Lee has developed “A conversation about forms of inscription” with Dr Paul Wilson (Design, University of Leeds). Reflecting on her work essaying the everyday through the Pam Flett Press, and Wilson’s investigations into the typographic cultures of the northern Working-Men’s Club, this is a written and photographic essay structured to share the to-ing and fro-ing of conversation, through which five threads – on the north / east, surfaces, inscription, tools, amateurism – reveal shared interests. With sections written in relay and/or in response to one another it enables an experiment in associative writing where two voices orbit and pass each other. The essay begins and ends with the recognition of being situated at points of marginality – of being and working ‘there’ – and of a kind of freedom which is made possible at such apparently unremarkable points in time and space.

“The Practising Place book explores our relationship with place through a collection of co-authored texts, visual essays, creative projects and conversations between artists and academics. Featuring new and existing artworks and covering a range of themes, including rural mythologies, urban noise, boundaries and seaside nostalgia, this highly visual book demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary discourse and presents an approach to the study of place as a creative and critical practice. The publication, which features a foreword by Lubaina Himid CBE, includes creative explorations of places across the north of England – including a Cumbrian Center Parcs resort, Stanlow Oil Refinery, working-men’s clubs, Manchester Central Library and the edgelands of Preston and Sheffield ­– as well as more general themes, such as urban planning and digital space. The book is the latest project within the wider Practising Place programme, which explores the meanings and production of places through interdisciplinary conversations. Since 2013, the programme has developed relationships between artists and academics from fields such as human geography, landscape archaeology, history and sociology, with a view to generating new understandings of places through the sharing of ideas and approaches.”

‘A superb visual and textual anthology of interdisciplinary dialogues which explore different relationships with place. This book is in itself a special place where art crosses paths with geography, archaeology, history and sociology in timely and playful ways.’

Joanne Lee is a Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Sheffield Hallam University. You can follow her at @generalistjo.

Images courtesy of Joanne Lee.