Photographic artist Michele Allen will be speaking about her practice and recent projects.
Programmed in partnership with NGCA.
Michele Allen is a photographic artist and researcher based in North East England. Her artistic and academic work is broadly concerned with sense of place, and is created in response to specific locations incorporating photography, video and oral history. Her practice often involves some degree of collaboration with communities in its production, and she has exhibited work as site-specific installations and more conventional gallery exhibitions.
She is interested in revealing hidden histories, or unfamiliar views of places and is fascinated by the variety of different perspectives that can exist in connection to any given place or situation. She regularly presents papers about her work at conferences across the UK and has exhibited nationally. Her work has been supported by the AHRC and Arts Council England.
For this talk she will discuss her current exhibition at Sunderland’s City Library & Arts Centre ‘Public and Private’, a series of photographs, texts and a video piece that was produced whilst she was artist in residence at Durham Castle (a UNESCO world heritage site). The work responds to the castle’s history as a site of government and current use as a home to students of University College, tapping into the heritage site’s relationships to the wider region. Originally conceived as a site-specific installation in the castle, the work will be reconfigured in the library building, bringing images of artefacts and texts from the Castle’s collection to Sunderland (a historical province of County Durham) to further reflect on the relationships formed between Durham and the wider region. She will also discuss a new body of work ‘For the Elevation of Man’ exploring changes to public space, which will be exhibited in the Library & Arts Centre this May.
Public & Private opens on 9 April and runs up until 11 May 2016 (Private view 15 April 6-8pm, all welcome).
For the Elevation of Man opens 14 May until 18 June 2016.
www.michelle-allen.co.uk (projects 2004-2010, new site currently in development)
https://vimeo.com/160511369 video produced during Durham castle residency ‘Aesop’s Feast’