Biographical Notes on Participants

There are two prongs to Felicity Callard's current research: 1. The various 'shapes' that anxiety takes, particularly in relation to the city. She has addressed this by researching the history of agoraphobia from the 1870s onwards, in terms of the intersection of urban, psychiatric, psychoanalytic and architectural narratives that describe fears about entering, traversing and inhabiting public space. This research has been particularly interested in uncovering male agoraphobic narratives - a fairly invisible body of work because of the common associations between femininity and agoraphobia in current medical and lay understandings of the disorder. 2.The relation between bodies and machines, in particular fin-de-si�cle conceptualisations of the body-machine nexus - particularly in the pathologies produced by bodies' interactions with machines. More broadly, she is interested in how current, 'post-modern' visions of this nexus often return to visions of body-machine interactions most characteristic of the late nineteenth century, and what is at stake in this often nostalgic replaying of what is deemed to be so central to our understandings of the industrialised individual.

Much of Juan Cruz's work has been concerned with the relationship that places have to the narratives that might unfold in and around them. Importantly, these narratives include the act - or performance - of Cruz engaging with these places as an artist: an identity which he describes himself as 'assuming' when he sets out to make the work. Cruz has worked with a variety of media including video, photography, sculpture and installation, but it is the activity of writing that has most frequently underpinned his practice. Recent solo projects and exhibitions include: Portrait of a Sculptor, Matt's Gallery London; Application for Planning Permit, Melbourne Festival. He has also exhibited at Witte de With, Rotterdam and Serralves Foundation, Porto. Cruz has been a recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists 1999/2001 and was Kettle's Yard/Girton College Artist Fellow, Cambridge 1999/2000. Juan Curz lives in London, is currently a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, London and is represented by Matt's Gallery, London and Galeria Elba Benitez, Madrid.

Phil Crang's research addresses questions of cultural difference and consumer cultures in Britain. This has focused especially on cultural import of the popularity of so-called 'ethnic' cuisines, and how they get packaged and presented for the market. Most recently, this has involved in a project looking at foods and clothing stylised as South Asian for British markets. Part of this project has looked at the 'Indian restaurant' as a cultural form in London and in Bombay / Mumbai. In more abstract terms, he is interested in the 'cultural geographies' of everyday products or 'commodities': how they come to represent the differences between peoples and places (constructing visible exhibitions of 'multiculturalism' and 'exotica'); how these things take on different meanings in different times and places - both intimate and domestic space and very big - as things connect together the lives of people (consumers, designers, producers) distant in both time and space; and what any of us know about the geographies of everyday objects and products.

Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion have worked in collaboration since 1993, and during that time have produced a significant body of work that has been shown widely in the UK and abroad. Their work centres on the complex relationship that contemporary mankind now has with the 'natural' world. Dalziel & Scullion have previously exhibited projects at the CCA, Glasgow, The Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, The Ikon Gallery Birmingham and The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, as well as the Venice Biennale, Young British Artists in Rome, ACCA, Melbourne and The Meguro Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Dalziel & Scullion live and work in Dundee and are represented by Holdsworth Fine Art, London.

Jeremy Deller works with different communities as a way of exploring and participating in various current 'folk' and popular culture phenomena. This has ranged from the commissioning of a brass band to play acid house music, and working with elderly people to produce their own music. He has exhibited widely in the UK and Europe. Recent exhibitions include Intelligence: New British Art 2000 at Tate Britain. He has also curated a number of exhibitions including Unconvention at Centre for Visual Arts, Cardiff (1999). An ongoing project is his collection of contemporary British folk arts (see folkarchive.co.uk). In 2001 he produced the performance Battle of Orgreave (commissioned by Artangel), a 1000 person re-enactment of a clash between police and pickets during the 1984-5 miners strike. During 2001-2002 he was Capp Street Resident Artist at the CCAC Wattis Institute of Art in Oakland California. Jeremy Deller currently lives in London.

Vandana Desai is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway. Her research interests are in slum housing, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), gender, social capital and community participation in India. She has worked on NGOs in Bombay exploring the meaning and scope of community participation, the potential benefits for the actors involved, practical obstacles, shared responsibilities and related questions. Her recent research addresses and evaluates the social and economic impact of economic liberalisation and globalisation on the urban poor women in India. The main focus of this work is the changing role of women and the subtle strategies they adopt to cope in this changing environment, the changing dynamics of the household relations and the informal networks and organisations that have been formed encouraging the participation of women in both informal and formal politics. This work is being piloted through the British Council Higher Education Link Scheme with Mother Teresa Women's University, Kodaikanal, India.

Felix Driver is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Blackwell, 2001). He is particularly interested in tracing the histories of geographical knowledge through the sites and spaces in which it is produced and consumed. He has written on cultures of fieldwork, visualisation, geographical education and empire. He is currently working with Luciana Martins on an AHRB research project on views and visions of the tropical world, drawing on a wide range of materials from log books and journals to finished works of art.

David Gilbert's current research and teaching concerns the modern city, and particularly the development of London in the twentieth century. His work on London has a number of dimensions: the diverse influence of London's 'imperial city' status as capital of the British Empire on its physical, social and cultural landscapes; the ways in which the city is understood and commodified for the 'tourist gaze', particularly through its guidebooks (this work also considered the emerging tourist landscapes of New York City in the early part of the twentieth century); the intersections between fashion and the city; and the changing status of suburbia in modern London. Most of his work is archival, but the physical presence and his personal experience of the city is also an important source of ideas and inspiration.

Jacqueline Jeffries is an artist and also designs gardens. A central concern of her art practice is to question how analytical any visual study can be. Working almost exclusively in graphite in recent years, Jeffries' primary subjects for investigation are rock and soil as represented in print through photography and etching. Her interest in gardening has resulted in a number of contracts for private gardens in London, and in 2001 she was commissioned to design a garden for Frimley Hospital, Hampshire. She has exhibited in the UK and Europe and currently lives in London.

Rob Kemp's research interests centre on the properties and features of soils from different parts of the world (e.g. Europe, China, South America). In particular, he concentrates on the ways that these properties and features may provide a record of changing climatic conditions over the past thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years. A key technique involves the viewing under a microscope of very thin (0.03 mm) blocks of soil attached to glass slides (thin sections). The different images and patterns frequently observed may be interpreted to provide information on soil processes and associated climatic controls. He is Professor of Physical Geography and Head of the Geography Department at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Often taking the form of plans or studies, Janice Kerbel's work is generated out of the rigorous application and interrogation of existing systems and logics in order to explore the relationship between the real, the ideal and the illusory. Recent exhibitions include: Touristic Gazes, Kunstverien Wolfsburg; Art at the Edge of the Law, Aldrich Museum, Connecticut; Really!, Artists' Space NY; and BANG, Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris. Her book 15 Lombard Street was published by Bookworks, London 2000. She is currently developing a new series of Home Climate Gardens. Janice Kerbel lives and works in London.

Luciana Martins worked as an architect in Brazil before doing a Masters and a PhD in Geography at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her interests in the design and representation of landscapes as an architect was reflected in her choice of PhD topic - images of the landscape of Rio de Janeiro made by British travellers (principally by naval surveyors, naturalists and artists) in the early nineteenth century. The PhD brought her to England and resulted in several articles (on art, science and cartography) and a book. Her work on image-making and the experience of travel through the tropics has resulted in a collaborative research project with Felix Driver (funded by AHRB) on Visions of the Tropical World, 1750-1850, which is concerned with the role of views and visions in the making of knowledge about tropical regions. In this work, the sailor's log and the artist's sketchbook are of as much interest as the published chart or finished painting.

Catherine Nash lectures in cultural geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. Much of her research has focused on the creative construction of different versions of national identity and senses of cultural location in Ireland through ideas of gender, place, nature and the body. This has involved addressing the postcolonial geographies of cartography, placenames and the visual arts in Ireland. She curated Irish Geographies: 6 Contemporary Artists in 1997, (Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham). More recently she has been addressing popular engagements with place, identity and belonging in the local history movement in Northern Ireland and in the diasporic genealogies through which descendants of Irish migrants trace their 'Irish roots'. This work on ideas of Irish ancestry has led to her new area of research exploring ideas of origins, ethnicity, inheritance and descent within popular genealogy and population genetics.

Nils Norman's work usually exists as scale models or computer generated diagrams, and occasionally as functioning objects or structures. His work is informed by local urban politics and ideas on alternative economic and ecological systems that work within the city, merging urbanist utopic alternatives with a humorous critique of the history and role of public art. His work often takes the form of fictive proposals that critically highlight what city design and public sculpture mean in terms of their participation in the process of gentrification of city space and its exclusionary nature. Norman's recent exhibitions include Debut of the Gerrard Winstanley Radical Gardening Space Reclamation Mobile Field Centre and Weather Station, LŸneberg, (2000); The Cruel Dialectic New York, (1999); and Why Don't You: Proposal 11, for Cubitt Artists and Gallery, London (1999). Nils Norman lives in London and is represented by American Fine Arts, New York.

As a laboratory assistant, Adrian Palmer works with a variety of sediments and sediment analysis procedures. These involve the preparation of sediment samples through washing, sieving, treating and the cutting of thin sections for analysis using petralogical microscopes (specialised for the analysis of soil) and digital image analysis to examine and describe sediment structures, composition and particle size. The departmental laboratories also contain equipment and facilities for work on pollen, fossilised microscopic life forms and bones and has access to a scanning electron microscope. The results of these processes are visualised as geomorphological maps, slides, tables and diagrams.

Kathy Prendergast works with the notion of place and identity. In her recent investigation of emotional placenames, she has reworked existing maps. This work has come out of a longer interest in cartography and other ways of representing landscape which has included her on-going series of City Drawings and her earlier works which considered the relationship between landscape, mapping and the body. In September 2003 she will complete her three year Research Fellowship funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board Award. Based in London, Prendergast is represented by the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

Gillian Rose is Senior Lecturer in the Geography at the Open University. Her current research involves a critical engagement with the notion of visual culture. She is interested in the ways in which social subjectivities are pictured or made invisible, and how those processes are embedded in power relations. She has a long-standing interest in feminist film theory and Foucauldian and feminist accounts of photography and is particularly concerned to ground these theoretical approaches by undertaking specific empirical studies and has written about methodologies for interpreting visual images. She is especially interested in the intersecting spatialities of images, audience subjectivities and the specific social practices entailed in viewing particular sorts of images in particular sorts of places. At the moment she is addressing these concerns by talking to adult men and women with children about how they produce images of themselves and their kids, how they store those images and how they display them.

Jean-Luc Schwenninger is a scientist who looks at the past to interpret the present. He has a special interest in palaeoenvironments and his research draws its source material from disciplines as diverse as archaeology, biology, climatology, ecology and geology. His studies are focused on the Quaternary, the most recent geological period of the earth's history, roughly spanning the last two million years. He is particularly interested in dating past climatic events, reconstructing spatial and temporal variations in Quaternary landscapes and studying the causes and consequences of environmental change. With its emphasis on variations in natural and cultural processes across space and through time, Geography is particularly well suited to such a synthesizing venture.

Ingrid Swenson is a freelance curator who, since 1998, has been Director of Peer, an independent commissioning and initiating organisation that has worked with visual artists, filmmakers, musicians, composers, writers and philosophers. Recent projects include Lars Arrhenius' A-Z (an exhibition and an artist's book) and Mike Nelson's The Deliverance and The Patience commissioned for the Venice Biennale (2001). Last year Peer also produced the book Art for All? Their Policies and our Culture (guest edited by Mark Wallinger and Mary Warnock). She has worked with many international contemporary artists in a number of galleries and museums in London since the late 80s, including the ICA, Serpentine, Camden Arts Centre and last year as the curator of the Raymond Pettibon exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

Richard Wentworth works mainly with photography and sculpture and has exhibited widely both in the UK, and internationally for more than 20 years. Wentworth's subject matter is the man-made, usually the urban environment. He is particularly attracted by the slipperiness of objects and language that exist within it. This is perhaps best demonstrated in his long term investigative photo-essay of the Caledonian Road (the area where he lives in London). Wentworth is also an avid collector of things which may be incorporated into his own work, or will be 'curated' together into larger projects such as his Arts Council National Touring Exhibition Thinking Aloud. In Autumn 2002, An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty (commissioned by Artangel), a large-scale installation that took place in a disused plumbing supply outlet in King's Cross. In April 2002 Wentworth was appointed Master of The Ruskin School of Fine Art at the University of Oxford. He is represented in the UK by Lisson Gallery, London.


"The texts themselves are very, very dry in terms of who the individuals could possibly be. Yet the discussions we've had here have been so illuminating; they've been so creative. I think that it would be a real shame if you continue to be pigeon-holed by those sets of words and those descriptions when what you actually are doing is something fascinating. It is nothing I would have ever dreamt of reading through some of the -without being rude - little bits of dry text about what all the different scientists do. And I think that, if anything, what should happen is that the scientists should be made to be more juicy and colourful and interesting. Because I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about what an artist is, what a scientist is, what a mathematician is, and potentially it's all so exciting. It is developing and changing and it's this beast that you don't quite know. And the text is just 'it'. It is like a full stop and it just doesn't let you in at all'
Jaqueline Jeffries Workshop 3, 9 May 2002