My research is concerned with 20th and 21st century art and visual culture in Britain, its critical discourses and institutions, and with the processes and practices of cultural landscapes and environments. I have strong interests in the social and historical relations between forms of cultural production, and in this spirit was founding editor of the Routledge journal Visual Culture in Britain.
My initial focus on early 20th century landscapes and cultures of ruralism began with my book British Artists and the Modernist Landscape (Routledge, 2003) and The Geographies of Englishness, Landscape and the National Past, co-edited with David Peters Corbett and Fiona Russell (Yale, 2002). More recently I have been concerned with the imagining, representation and experience of the UK rural north, especially of island locations and the English- Scottish border region as registered across diverse forms of visual and material culture from post-1945 to the present.
With emphasis on rural modernity and a border-crossing geographical and conceptual focus, I am currently developing a monograph examining visual artists’ responses to, and interactions with, the material resources of cross-border locations and communities in evolving social, cultural and environmental contexts.
Recent publications include:
2020, ‘Place on the Border and the LYC Museum and Art Gallery’, in Ares, Kalandides, Uma Kathari and Tim Edensor, eds.,The Routledge Handbook on Place, Routledge Publishing, ISBN 9781138320499
2020, Co-editor with Maija Makikalli and Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja, The Meaning of North in Art and Design, University of Lapland Press, ISBN 978-952-310-931-5
2019, Co-editor with Rupert Ashmore, ‘Layered Landscapes: Cultural Investigations of Northern British Edgelands’, special issue, Arts, 2019, 8, (3), https://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special_issues/landscapes_northern_british_edgelands
2018 Co-editor with David Martin Jones and Owain Jones, Visual Culture in the Northern UK Archipelago: Imagining Islands, Series: British art: histories and interpretations since 1700. Routledge Publishing, ISBN 9780815374275
2018, ‘Borderlands: Art, Craft and Textiles in the interwar Anglo-Scottish border’ in Bluemel, K and Michael McClusky, eds., Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention, Edinburgh University Press, ISBN 9781474420952
2017, ‘Performing the Anglo-Scottish Border: Cultural Landscape, Heritage and Borderland Identities’, Journal of Borderland Studies, ISSN 0886- 5655, https://doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2016.1267586
2013 Co-editor with Angela McClanahan, ‘Northern Peripheries’ special issue of Visual Studies, Vol. 28, no. 3, ISSN 1472-586X