My research project seeks to explore the possibility that Britain’s current cultural climate is deeply informed by regressive eighteenth century values, aesthetic, political and moral. By considering Edmund Burke’s influential eighteenth century text, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, (1757) I intend to explore this hypothesis. Burke is credited with creating a psychology of fear which had a profound effect upon British landscape depiction and the aesthetic of the Sublime. Burke also contributed to the wider British eighteenth century zeitgeist via his successful aesthetic correlation of the need to make social stratification natural and meritorious. Burke’s example fed the Sublime’s ability to evoke terror, especially amongst the middle classes, which derives potency from an instinct for self-preservation and enjoyable hatred of the Other. This psychology of fear, now as then, must have some positive critical purpose to account for its popularity and it is this purpose which my research seeks to explore and explain.
Original contributions to knowledge will be made through site specific investigations of landscape in relation to the cognitive dimensions of the Burkean sublime and the creation of my own artworks. These artworks will explore the Burkean conceptions of the sublime and the beautiful and analyse the extent to which the contemporary experience of the natural sublime is being replaced by man-made interventions as a primary source of sublime feeling in Britain. Qualitative interviews with artists associated with the sublime and a critical reinvestigation of the aesthetic history of the British sublime will add depth to these investigations.
This PhD is a combined practice and theoretical exploration that aims to identify and document photographically the nature and consequences of this economic decline in the form of a visual narrative that will raise awareness of these problems and the potential for regeneration.
This research project seeks to interrogate and reframe the thinking of horror through a rigorous engagement with its formal limits.
Jonathan P. Watts (he/him) is a fully-funded PhD candidate at Norwich University of the Arts supervised by Professor Simon Willmoth and Professor Jo Melvin at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London.
A love of secondhand clothing lies at the core of this research project.
This PhD by curatorial practice focuses on a group of embroidered textile testimonies made at the turn of the twentieth century by an inmate of the Female Lunatic Ward of Great Yarmouth Workhouse.
Roger Ackling – Work and Teaching 1969 to 2014 This PhD by curatorial practice focuses on the work of British artist Roger Ackling (1947 – 2014). Ackling’s career is notable for his artistic practice and his long and influential teaching career. The research aims to understand his work in relation to Land Art, Minimalist and Conceptual Art movements and the impact of his practice on artists he worked with and taught.
New perspectives on VJ practice: The art of performing moving image
The Work of Richard Seifert & Denys Lasdun: A Comparative Study of Their Buildings and Reputations.
Interrogating Artist-Teacher identity formation in Adult Community Learning
Spectral Shores: vanishing places and haunted spaces. Coastal Erosion and its effect on perceptions of time and the cultural construction of coastal landscapes
In Transition: People, landscape and nature in the East Anglian edgelands
