photography, landscape, philosophy, contemporary archaeology, food heritage, archive
Gina is research-led practitioner who works within the landscape, exploring the relation between land, photography and text. Sceptical of ocularcentrism, she practices photography as writing, engaging with the landscape as a kind of archive. She has an interest in the physical and photographic encounter with landscape as spectral which has led to a preoccupation with time and landscape, and a sense that particular landscapes of ruination may lend themselves to experience and interpretation as places of competing temporalities. Early work which investigated the inscribed landscape has been developed to engage with notions of the hauntological landscape, landscapes which are haunted by the incursions of the past. Archaeological discourse, and the experience of different temporal frames overwmore...
Gina is research-led practitioner who works within the landscape, exploring the relation between land, photography and text. Sceptical of ocularcentrism, she practices photography as writing, engaging with the landscape as a kind of archive. She has an interest in the physical and photographic encounter with landscape as spectral which has led to a preoccupation with time and landscape, and a sense that particular landscapes of ruination may lend themselves to experience and interpretation as places of competing temporalities. Early work which investigated the inscribed landscape has been developed to engage with notions of the hauntological landscape, landscapes which are haunted by the incursions of the past. Archaeological discourse, and the experience of different temporal frames overwritten in the landscape, unsettled by the spectral have led Gina to explore the opportunities for practice offered by Karen Barad’s articulation of ontological indeterminacy, which necessitates that we consider matter itself to be haunted by the coexistence of all times and all places.
Running alongside these interests is an ongoing fascination with northern places which, in spite of the acknowledgment that the very term north is problematised by its constitutive haunting by south, she continually finds herself drawn to. Fieldwork undertaken in Iceland alerted her to the physical manifestations of the violent inversion of stratigraphic geological time and underlined the fact that here the landscape is in process. This happening of landscape has in turn encouraged her to think about experiences of and with the land as lively event encounters. For Gina, the emphasis on landscape photography as an entanglement of practitioner, apparatus and place means that, in these terms, practice can be considered as a confederacy of sorts.
With over two decades of teaching experience, she is also interested in pedagogic research around studio learning, and in her previous post with Moray School of Art at the University of the Highlands and Islands, she investigated the support of creative practice in a dispersed institution, arguing this demands that we comprehensively rethink the university. Gina has explored the merits of a porous university which enables learning to occur in place and across the institution, reimagining the ‘leaky’ university/art school in terms described by Clémentine Deliss as ‘an architectonics of mobility’.
Gina is an invited member of a number of research networks: Land2 (led by the University of Leeds), PLaCE International (led by the University of Dundee), Arctic Sustainable Art and Design Thematic Network of the University of the Arctic (led by Lapland University) and previously the AHRC funded Northern Peripheries Network (led by University of Northumbria). Gina is a n invited member of the RSE funded International Network for Contemporary Archaeology in Scotland (INCAScot) and the RSE and RIA funded Rural Reimagined network. Gina is also a member of the cross disciplinary Reading Landscapes research group at The Glasgow School of Art.
2011 Doctor of Philosophy, DJCAD/University of Dundee
Thesis title: Photographic Dissemination: iterations of difference in the text of landscape and photographic writing
2004 Master of Letters in Aesthetics by research, University of Aberdeen
Thesis title: The silvered surface: a philosophical enquiry into the nature of photographic images
1995 Bachelor of Fine Art with First Class Honours, Edinburgh College of Art/University of Edinburgh
Dissertation title: Joseph Beuys: the art of the individual