Calum Eccleston

Each month, we offer the spotlight to one of our researchers to exhibit their research projects in more detail.

The Featured Researcher for February 2024 is Calum Eccleston, with a project titled “Die to Self”. A practice-led investigation of the unseen in the Alastair MacLennan Archive

HEI: Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, The Alastair MacLennan Performance Art Archive

Supervisors: Dr Judit Bodor, Prof Maria Fusco, Dr Roddy Hunter

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Overview of Research:

My practice-led research project at the University of Dundee builds on my Masters work exploring archives conceptually and materially, redeveloped specifically for the unique context of the Alastair MacLennan Performance Art Archive, held at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD). I explore how contemporary performance making can add to existing approaches of working with the ephemeral and intangible heritage of historical performance art archives. In doing so, I engage with performance as a form of ‘embodied recollection’ and its capacity to materialise ‘the unseen’ in the archive – MacLennan’s holistic principles which, in their dormancy, bind the archive together. A key aim of the project is to develop a distinctive model of archiving performance, informed by my artistic engagement with MacLennan’s archival material.

Research Methods:

In constructing DIE TO SELF, my archive of unseen images, I identify and publicly share the unseen aspects of MacLennan’s archive. This approach, in keeping with MacLennan’s desire to ensure ongoing research and enquiry within his archive, an energy in transition, informs a system of generative research by which the archival residue of one performance informed the next, foregrounding the interrelationship between absence and presence, site, object, duration and body.

I conduct research in Dundee through a daily process of embodied writing with the archive, which serves both as a performance activity and the basis for textual outcomes. This extends to keeping sketchbooks as a means of working beyond the collection at DJCAD. I also work to build knowledge about the unseen through series of ‘embodied recollections’, recollection-as-performance works which fall into two categories: performing in the absence of MacLennan by focusing on my own subjective experiences with the archive and performing with him as the archival subject. In addition, I conduct interviews with MacLennan and his collaborators to engage with the principal contexts, ideas, and approaches in the artist’s practice. Fourthly, I write Case Studies as a means of scoping, mapping, and contributing toward the growing discourse of archival engagement. Each of these interconnected methods and processes inform and are informed by a ‘Three Voice’ method through which MacLennan’s holistic principles are accommodated within a research context.