Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities Annual CAMC Conference: ‘Creative Climates’
Conference / Exhibition
Event details
CAMC is a vibrant research centre within Coventry’s research theme of Creative Cultures. Our transdisciplinary research pursues three strands, each involving outward-facing collaborations with partners and beneficiaries. Staff and students in Critical Practices fosters and investigates visual, aural, haptic and textual materials to negotiate contemporary societal primacies. Cultural Memory explores how transdisciplinary histories shape constructions of memory, belonging and identity. Well-being and the Arts seeks to enhance well-being, sustainability and inclusion through art and design theory and practice.
This conference addresses how creative thinking and practice can transform our experience of and responses to the urgent social, political and environmental conditions in which we live. How can the arts and humanities help us to reimagine and re-engage cultural and critical domains that cannot be entered by exclusive disciplinary routes? How can we capture the potential of the arts and humanities to contextualize scientific and technological innovations in cultural terms, and the ability of the arts to bring attention to the effects of technological change on natural, social, and cultural ecologies?
The conference brings together international speakers and artists to respond to these questions. Panels consider themes including memory and rememory, alternative valuations of biodiversity, social justice, and our responsibilities for vulnerable others.
The accompanying exhibition invites us to imagine new ways of representation, question the roles of children, play and care in creative practices, explore the repetitive nature of domestic rituals, and consider the role of contemporary art practice in providing critical recordings of and responses to current crises.
An extended lunchtime session gives delegates the opportunity to attend a panel discussion about the exhibition or a workshop exploring the possibilities of creative writing in practice research.
Keynote
Professor Jessica Malay, University of Huddersfield
‘Anne Clifford’s Archives: Challenging past narratives of female power through the creative curation of family archives.’
The Lady Anne Clifford not only fought a decades long legal battle to inherit the Clifford hereditary lands in the North, she also battled narratives of authority that sought to undermine her determination to secure her land rights, and once secured, to deny her the authority to manage these lands. She responded to these challenges by curating her vast family archive which spanned 600 years and included documentation from Kings and Queens, as well lords and commoners, over centuries. The narrative she constructed embedded her authority in the landscape and through the bodies of her ancestors, through which she powerfully established her authority in the North.
Jessica Malay is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Huddersfield. She has edited Anne Clifford’s Great Books of Records, and her Autobiographies. She has published widely on Early Modern Women and Culture, and is presently the principal investigator of the Leverhulme funded Project, Autobiographical Acts in England, Wales, Scotland, and New England.
*Image: Hannah Honeywill, ‘A Place that is not knowable’ (detail), 2022.
