Naomi Pearce

HEI: University of Edinburgh

Project Title: Every Contact Leaves A Trace: A Forensic Feminist Investigation into Women Administrators, Gentrification and the Artist Studio

 

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What was your research about?

In the early 1970s, artists in London worked together to create studios in former industrial buildings across the city. In the decades since, the role artists have played within gentrification has been well-documented. However, women administrators, often pivotal figures in the infrastructure of studio organisations, and the impact of their work, has been largely ignored. My research challenges this absence from the perspectives of Letty Mooring, Shirley Read and Rita Keegan; women working within studios who supported themselves financially through administration.

To carry out this investigation I developed a forensic feminist methodology. The aim of this approach is to cultivate a somatic knowledge of cultural memory, producing new forms of
interdisciplinary writing that trace encounters, working to impress feelings and sensations onto the reader as an act of commemoration.

To inform this inquiry, I observed cadaveric dissections and forensic anthropology practicals at a teaching mortuary in Scotland, asking questions such as; how might a cadaver offer new ways of thinking about gentrification? What can be learned through our body and our senses? Definitions of mortality and remodelling are transposed onto studio sites, whilst mortuary practices are used to question issues of visibility, ethical responsibility and agency in the archive.

The research has two written outcomes: a Casebook; made up of three case files and Martello Street; a mystery novella which fabulates material in the Casebook. These are companion texts produced from archival research, in-depth interviews and site writing at artist studio locations in London. By addressing the lack of critical scholarship on the role of women administrators in the artist studio, I propose tools for rethinking this site and its legacies in order to expand the category of what an artist and their place of work might be.