Events
Research seminar
Dr Simon Standing and Dr Kayla Parker, 24 February 2021
Contemporary British Housing – Dr Simon Standing
Architecture and urban development continue to hold a major fascination for me. In a new photographic series, which I'm referring to as Contemporary British Housing, I explore a fascination with the way in which a particular form of housing development has been appearing in the British landscape. A number of major developments have emerged in the late 20/early 21 century that draw on periods of architectural history and new planning and construction ideologies such as the New Urbanism movement. Within these developments there is a sense of accelerated place-making that I find fascinating, and at the heart of which are individual homes built in a variety of architectural styles from across the centuries, arriving in a matter of months.
Surveying the Laira -
Dr Kayla Parker
A presentation by artist filmmaker, Kayla Parker, about her recent explorations with filmmaker and sound artist Stuart Moore, on foot and by kayak, of the Laira, the upper tidal estuary of the River Plym, on the south west coast of Britain.
Over the centuries, discharges from the tin mining and china clay works on nearby Dartmoor to the north have silted up the estuarine channel so it is now only navigable by small boats at high tide. From the early part of the 19th century, successive reclamation projects have reduced the width of the Laira, with embankments along the east and west sides of the estuary shore removing the large tidal creeks at Lipson Lake, Tothill Bay and Chelson Creek, and the more recent creation of Blagdon’s Meadow, designated a Country Wildlife Site.
Parker and Moore have been making work in the area around the Laira’s southern shoreline since 2004, using 16mm and 35mm film and digital technologies, and will reflect on the precarity of this zone of land, whose existence and habitats are threatened by encroaching tidal waters and the impacts of increased human activity.
