Current Students

Marjolaine Ryley

Time, Image, Archive: Visualising gardening communities through auto ethnographic photographic practice:

My PhD research will investigate how photographic narrative, informed by ethnographic methods of critical self-reflection, can represent gardening communities in the North East. Using an auto-ethnographic photographic practice combined with archival research undertaken at Wallington Heritage Garden, it will explore different modes of narrative representation in order to analyze the garden as both a micro personal and socio political space. In these ways the research will contribute to the developing field of archival photographic practice and will lead to new understandings of the history and cultural significance of the heritage garden in North East England. The research aims to show how arts practice can produce critical social commentaries, enabling better understandings about the role of gardening communities and their relationship to social history, politics and ecology. It will explore to what extent a photographic archival practice can reframe the cultural, social and political narratives implicit in gardening history. It also questions whether the medium of photography can be used to visualize the political narratives inherent in gardening communities and
in what ways auto-ethnography might lead to new understandings of community?

Supervisory Team: Uta Koglesberger, Fine Art (Newcastle), Dr Ian Thompson, Architecture, Planning and Landscape (Newcastle), Dr Duika Burges Watson, Health and Society (Newcastle).

Start Date: September 2017