Nicolette Barsdorf-Liebchen is Lecturer in Legal Practice at Bournemouth University. She practised as a lawyer in commercial litigation for over 10 years, before returning to academe and completing her PhD in the Department of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University entitled Strategies of Visualisation: state-corporate-military violence and post-photographic interventions. She has a multidisciplinary background traversing, inter alia, law, philosophy, social, critical and literary theory; psychoanalysis; art history; media studies and visual culture. She is currently conducting research into the transmedial and performative articulation of abstract theoretical concepts, using the detection of Dark Matter in underground research facilities as a pilot project.
Fiona Crisp is an artist and is Professor of Contemporary Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle where she co-leads the research group, The Cultural Negotiation of Science. She works with photographic and film installations that engage with our visual, political and philosophical construction of ‘view’ as seen in her installation Negative Capability at Matt’s Gallery, London or within the exhibition Looking at the View at Tate Britain. Also working with remote sites that sit beyond our imaginative capacity or visual reach, her touring exhibition Subterrania launched at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and her installation Material Sight, centred on the spaces of fundamental science, was shown at the NGCA, Sunderland and Arts Catalyst, London. Her work is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London.
Alexandra Hughes is an artist with an exhibition-based practice that brings the photographic image together with sculptural material, performative gesture, and painting. She describes her processes as ‘wilding’; material-led, tactile, instinctual, disruptive, and intimate. Hughes received her MFA (Fine Art Media) at The Slade School of Fine Art (2008) and PhD from Northumbria University (2019); her practice-based doctorate being titled, Wilding Photographs: Exploring the Turbulent and Affective Qualities of the Material Phenomenon of Photography. Solo exhibitions include: Sticky Together, Jakob Kroon Galeri, Worthing (2019), Letting Things Be Uncertain, South Hill Park, Bracknell (2017), figuring it, Roaming ROOM Artspace, London (2016), Arrangements, Siobhan Davies Studios, London (2010).
Olga Smith (Newcastle University) is a historian of contemporary art, writer and curator. She writes about photography and new imaging technologies, interchanges between art and intellectual ideas, cultural memory, exhibitions and ecology. She is the author of Photography in France: Between Theory and Practice (Leuven University Press, 2022), and a sole editor of Photography and Landscape (Photographies, 2019), among other publications. Her current research includes a project with a focus on ‘landscape’ as a form of picturing nature in the Anthropocene, and a book of ecocritical methods for art history.
Chris Townsend is professor in the Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway College, University of London. He is the author of numerous books and research papers on photography and experimental film, including the first monographic study of the American artist Francesca Woodman, and co-editor of the collection Across the Great Divide: Modernism’s Intermedialities from Futurism to Fluxus.
