In contemplating our contemporary epoch and the complexities of human experiences, I am thinking about how ‘wildness’ can be experienced? Taking the idea of the ‘wild’ as something beyond the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us, in which the encounter ultimately heightens and transforms our human perception, bodily and emotional response, creating new meanings on our relationship to the world and the unknown future, beyond.
My practice goes between my direct sensory encounters of places and people, looking between the elemental and urban life and through the mediation of technology, I gather an amalgamation of material, recordings and photographs. I then undertake a purposeful wilding to unfix the photographic image from one static representation, cohering with other messy mutable matter, creating lively, sensuous mixed media objects, installations and performances.
The work looks to construct new immersive situations that become a visceral journey, revealing multiple perspectives on environments of perpetually slippery, shifting, hybrid encounters of nature, material, technology, human and geographical locations, which simultaneously create and de-stabilise worlds.
Alexandra Hughes is an Artist, living and working between Newcastle upon Tyne and London (UK). Hughes has exhibited widely and includes upcoming exhibition Liquid Land at the Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge (May 2018) and Assembly; a collaborative work generated from a cross-discipline network of Cultural Geographers, Artists, Art Historians, Curators, Dancers and Musicians, exhibited at Baltic 39, Newcaslte upon Tyne (April 2018). Hughes was a recent speaker as part of the PH: Photography Research Network, at Birkbeck, University of London (2017) and in panel Artists’ in the Field, at the Royal Geographical Society, London (2017).
Hughes is a PhD candidate at Northumbria University (Practice-based Fine Art Year 3). Hughes has been conducting a reading group that explores contemporary meanings for the ‘Feminine Sublime’, as well as being a contributing member of Geo Studio, which includes exploratory research on ‘The Geologic/ Material Turn’ in Contemporary Culture, Post Human Nature, The Anthropocene and ideas around Subjectivity and Desire. Hughes is a MFA graduate from Slade School of Fine Art (2008).
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FIELDWORK Q&A – April 2018
How is fieldwork part of your practice?
My practice has fieldwork’ at its core. My work begins with my sensory encounters of environments. I spend time visiting, responding and migrating into specific locations, which can lead to becoming the physical foundation on which to build and construct an artwork. Field work is also about being acutely aware of my everyday surroundings and about working with people, including friends and within cross-disciplinary research networks.
How would you describe your fieldwork activity?
Experiential, relationship building and labyrinth forming.
How are you currently sharing your fieldwork?
Through my exhibition based practice as well as within symposiums, lectures and cross-disciplinary research networks.
FIELDWORK
*** Coming soon ***
TSOEG 