Impact case study database
Changing perceptions of post-traumatic landscapes: influencing and raising the profile of artists and reinterpreting collections
1. Summary of the impact
Amanda Crawley Jackson’s work has formed the basis of serial collaborations with artists and arts organisations. Together they explore the contribution of creative practice to the understanding of post-traumatic landscapes, co-producing both art and academic responses to them. Building on learning from her 2013-2016 Furnace Park project, she has catalysed interdisciplinary thinking on damaged topographies, positively influencing the practice and profile of emerging and international artists and the curation of their work. Her research has led to the reinterpretation of items in the Sheffield public visual arts collection and the acquisition of new ones, including a special commission. Her work culminated in a high-profile international exhibition on post-traumatic landscapes - Invisible Wounds - introducing audiences to new artists and new audiences to the Graves Gallery in Sheffield.
2. Underpinning research
Crawley Jackson’s research examines how insights from contemporary literature, photography and theory from the French-speaking world can help us better understand the disruptive resurgence and unsettling latency of past trauma in landscapes of the present (R1). She focuses on the often ostensibly blank, neglected, and derelict sites where - for political, social, and cultural reasons - the healing that is promoted through acts of remembrance and collective commemoration has not been able to take place. Landscapes beset by such unresolved trauma, she argues, pose complex challenges to representation, re-use and re-occupation. Drawing on case studies from France and Algeria (R1, R2), she demonstrates how creative practice can articulate something of the intangible, affective connections people have with sites of trauma, as well as the profound sense of loss and disorientation such damaged topographies can invoke (R1, R2). Literature and art, she argues, can reveal - through patient memory work, inference, repeated walking practices and the creative use of bistable images and negative space - damage which may no longer be visible to the eye and is covered over by nature or erased through ostensibly benign processes of redevelopment and gentrification (R1, R3, R4).
Crawley Jackson’s innovative method has been extended from Francophone contexts and applied to the extractive landscapes and post-industrial topographies of South Yorkshire. Her walks with photographer Andrew Conroy, following the region’s abandoned mineral lines and visiting redeveloped coalfields, led to a co-authored article exploring how the medium of photography can be used to draw critical attention to the invisible violence and trauma that continue to scar present landscapes and memories (R5). Here, and in a paper delivered to the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference in August 2018, they demonstrated how time in post-traumatic landscapes remains ‘unsorted’. The mining past, Crawley Jackson and Conroy argue, intrudes uncannily in the sanitised neoliberal landscapes of the present, in the material form of contamination and stubborn industrial remains, and symbolically in resistant individual and collective memory. Elsewhere, with composer Adam Stanovic, Crawley Jackson explored how an immersive composition made from found sounds recorded in the Shalesmoor district of Sheffield might generate a renewed encounter for the listener with a deeply stigmatised, post-industrial landscape.
In her article on French Jewish writer Georges Perec (R2), Crawley Jackson avers that the erasure of the past through redevelopment and gentrification can perpetuate cycles of structural violence. Highlighting the lingering entanglement of hygienist and colonial spatial practice in post-war Parisian planning, she reveals how the construction of new apartment blocks and public parks was subtended by the destruction of Jewish and working-class homes and memories.
Furnace Park, a two-hectare post-industrial wasteland that was leased to the University of Sheffield by Sheffield City Council for the purpose of co-creating an outdoor community art space in 2013-2016, provided a crucible for interdisciplinary action research that explored the ways in which we might inhabit and re-present the damaged topographies that emerge from trauma (in this case, the intertwined histories of de-industrialisation, slum clearance, and redevelopment). With Luke Bennett (Reader in Space, Place and Law, Sheffield Hallam University), Crawley Jackson co-authored an article that took Furnace Park as a case study to show how everyday damaged topographies can be domesticated through artistic intervention (R4). Alongside the tangible gains of an arts-led temporary repurposing of a derelict site, the article sounds a warning note that a) creative art practice can be co-opted into neoliberal place-making agendas, contributing to the displacement of marginalised users of derelict space; and b) our critical and creative potential to imagine innovative futures for such ‘strange’ sites might also be diminished in the process of their physical re-making.
3. References to the research
Crawley Jackson, A. (2014). Retour/détour: Bruno Boudjelal’s Jours intranquilles. Nottingham French Studies, 53(2), 201–215. https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2014.0086
Crawley Jackson, A. 2019). ‘Islands, Camps and Zones: Towards a Nissological Reading of Georges Perec’ in Forsdick, C., Philips, R. and Leak, A., (eds.) Georges Perec's Geographies; Perecquian Geographies. UCL Press, London. Chapter 6. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787354418
Crawley Jackson, A. & Conroy, A. (2018). ‘“Memory Terrain”: Walking, Remembering, Representing the Abandoned Railway Lines of Paris and South Yorkshire’, in Leffler, C. & Crawley Jackson, A. (eds.) Railway Cultures. AHKE, Sheffield. Available on request.
Bennett, L., & Crawley Jackson, A. (2017). Making common ground with strangers at Furnace Park. *Social & Cultural Geography, 18(*1), 92–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1231835
McCallam, D. (2020). The Obverse View: Another Look at Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Le 7 décembre 1815, neuf heures du matin [The Execution of Marshal Ney] (1868). Dix-Neuf, 24(1), 82–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/14787318.2020.1721693
4. Details of the impact
Creating new work and raising artists profiles
Crawley Jackson’s transnational, interdisciplinary work with artists and creative practitioners has inspired and informed new, critically acclaimed work. French-Algerian photographer Bruno Boudjelal cites conversations with Crawley Jackson about her work as inspiring his Frantz Fanon series (2013), work which was exhibited internationally in London (2015) and Abu Dhabi (2017) [S1]. He adapted the title of her 2014 article (R1) and borrowed the phrasing of her critical understanding of this work for his 2015 exhibition in Paris, Détour/Retour which resulted in his Prix Nadar winning publication [S2].
Her long-standing collaboration with photographer Andrew Conroy resulted in his photographic series Uncoupled (2018), which documented the abandoned colliery lines of South Yorkshire [S3]. Photographs from the series were exhibited on the main concourse of Sheffield railway station in July-August 2018 and led to 13,750 unique interactions with the work.
Exhibition at Sheffield Railway Station of Conroy’s Uncoupled (photo taken July 2018); Conroy’s Val de Grâce installed next to Gérôme’s L’Exécution du Maréchal Ney at the Graves Gallery, Sheffield (photo taken March 2020).
The collaboration led to Conroy working with Crawley Jackson and David McCallam to interpret their research on Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1886 masterpiece, L’Exécution du Maréchal Ney, which is on permanent display in Sheffield’s Graves Gallery. Crawley Jackson identified the depicted execution site using historical and contemporary sources, which Conroy photographed on a joint visit to Paris in 2018. Conroy’s resulting artwork, Val de Grâce, was acquired by Museums Sheffield for the public collection, which Conroy considers to be “ ...a major - and quite rare - achievement for any artist” [S3].
Composer and academic Dr Adam Stanovic worked with Crawley Jackson on the Furnace Park project to create the soundscape Foundry Flux. He observes that “ the method employed in the composition process - that of plasticity - was informed by Crawley-Jackson’s research on Lefebvre and his idea of the “right to the city” [S4]. Foundry Flux gained an honourable mention at Musica Viva in Portugal in 2016, and won second prize in the Eleventh International Competition of Electroacoustic Composition and Visual Music in Argentina in 2018 [S4]. Stanovic has performed this work in Glasgow, Birmingham, Bristol, Karlsruhe, Vienna, Mexico City, Montreal, and San Francisco.
Museums Sheffield; influencing interpretation, acquisition, and exhibition.
Working with Museums Sheffield, Crawley Jackson’s research has facilitated the reimagining of their permanent collection. She has introduced them to new artists, enabled their staging of high-profile temporary exhibitions and encouraged the acquisition of new art for the public collection, including Conroy’s Val de Grâce.
Reimagining their permanent collection began with Crawley Jackson and McCallam’s work on interpreting L’Exécution du Maréchal Ney (R5). Their work on the broader history of the painting has a tangible and sustainable legacy in the form of a short interpretation film [S5], now on permanent display in the Graves Gallery. This, in turn, resulted in new work by Andrew Conroy which was acquired by the Gallery. Following this, Crawley Jackson co-curated the high-profile international exhibition Invisible Wounds (March 2020) [S6]. The exhibition explored the ways in which photography can draw critical attention to the often invisible damage occasioned by trauma and its impacts on our affective experience of place.
The exhibition combined Museums Sheffield’s permanent collection with loaned and specially commissioned work. The exhibition brought internationally acclaimed artists to Sheffield, including two World Press Photo winners (Denis Darzacq and Simon Norfolk), Zineb Sedira, Roberto Frankenberg, James Morris, Chloe Dewe Mathews and David Farrell. “ It was ‘wonderful to show such a range of internationally acclaimed artists at the Graves Gallery” Kirstie Hamilton, Director of Programmes, Museums Sheffield [S7]. This opportunity was used by Crawley Jackson to write new interpretation panels for works in the permanent collection which were exhibited alongside the loaned works. She enabled “ work from the gallery’s collection to be shown in new ways...Historic works have been connected with new interpretation [helping] visitors to understand the bigger issues presented by some of the works on permanent display” [S7].
The impact on Museums Sheffield has been made sustainable by this additional reinterpretation of the permanent collection and the acquisition of new work. It has added to the body of knowledge amongst those who care for and interpret the collection and also enabled the Graves’ 50,000 annual visitors [S7] to situate historic work within a contemporary context. Kirstie Hamilton asserts that “ Working in partnership has engaged specialist international audiences with Sheffield’s collection and the Graves Gallery that were new and not typical visitors” [S7]. The collaboration enabled the publication of a rigorous academic-led book to accompany the exhibition, which has further sustained Museums Sheffield engagement with wider audiences [S8].
5. Sources to corroborate the impact
Frantz Fanon series exhibition London (2015) https://autograph.org.uk/exhibitions/frantz-fanon and Abu Dhabi (2017) https://www.nyuad-artgallery.org/en_US/arts-center-project-space/abp-bruno-boudjelal/
Confirmation of research influence and impact from artist Bruno Boudjelal.
Confirmation of research influence and impact from artist Andrew Conroy.
Confirmation of research influence and impact artist Adam Stanovic.
Short interruptive film on painting The Execution of Marshal Ney, which accompanies the painting at Graves Museum ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pih8m5ievs)
Review of Invisible Wounds exhibition ( https://photomonitor.co.uk/exhibition/invisible-wounds-landscape-in-memory-and-photography/).
Confirmation from Director of Programmes, Museums Sheffield on Sheffield contribution to Sheffield Museums on collections, exhibitions and materials.
- Emily-Rose Baker and Amanda Crawley Jackson (eds.), Invisible Wounds: Negotiating Post-Traumatic Landscapes. The University of Sheffield.