Denise Startin

Profile

I am an artist, writer, researcher and collector. My current practice and research are organised around four routes, place, memory, history and identity.  I am  particularly engaged with concepts of heritage, landscape, archaeology, performativity, representation, narrative, mapping and embodied entanglements. I studied at the Royal College of Art and my practice encompasses movement, image, photography, printmaking, site-based interventions, installation, critical and performance writing. I use various strategies of production including image and text, autobiography, polyphony, the intimate and fact and fiction, a continually recurring relation is the tension between public and private realms. During this process a historical figure, site, place, event, voice or voices are adopted to activate the work and produce a narrative arc.

Place has long been a theoretical, philosophical and practical concern woven throughout my practice. I am particularly interested in the concept of place as a dynamic network of relations that is co-created and continually mapped which contributes to and affects how autobiographical identity is situated. I am currently seeking to investigate a methodological tool and how it can be addressed as a form of mediating specific modes of cultural memory through the medium of place. This dialogue seeks to highlight the significance and complex character of visual, textual, artefactual and embodied experiences of place in constructing and mediating personal narratives of cultural identity and belonging in order to perform their retrieval, survival, communication and recreation. Sites chosen for their historical, national, symbolic or mythological significance include Brontë Country, West Yorkshire, The Devils Bridge, Aberystwyth and St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall.

Research interests

My research areas include contemporary art, site-specific art, heritage, archaeology, British Antiquarianism, chorography, cultural geography and cultural memory. https://rca.academia.edu/denisestartin

Qualifications

• MA Fine Art (Printmaking) Royal College of Art, 2011-2013
• BA (Hons.) Fine Art, Coventry University, 2003-2009