Becky Shaw
| An artist, researcher and leader of the art, design and media arts PhD programme at Sheffield Hallam University. Becky Shaw makes live, collaborative artworks to comprehend or re-imagine how material, social, natural and man-made are formed or entwined together. Artworks arise through long periods of time spent in situations, working with communities. She is passionate about how artists’ processes and knowledge can contribute to research or professional collectives.
Becky is fascinated by infrastructure and its assemblage of natural and man-made, and the deep problems and potential that it generates. She spent 2016-2019 as a Watershed plus artist, working with City of Calgary leak locators to see leaks as a way to understand or experience the entire watershed. She is currently the artist lead on Justheat, a CHANSE funded project exploring communities’ experiences of historic heating change to address the possibility of just transition. Becky is particularly interested in understanding the flux between individual experiences and institutions or other large systems and how practices of care, confinement and resistance are at work. This has generated a body of work made to explore healthcare contexts critically (e.g. ‘Transfer’, where she removed all of the Manchester Royal Infirmary’s art collection, and ‘Hiding in Plain Sight’, where she and a group of midwifery and nursing students played hide and seek in a learning ward. As both teacher and researcher, Becky is also fascinated by the education environment and has made works that explore this, including ‘Reception’, where she became the receptionist to the artist in residence (me) at the University of Bath ICIA, and her ongoing work in schools, exploring how difference can be understood qualitatively. This was developed in the project ‘Odd: Feeling Different in the World of Education’- a collaboration with education researchers, visual anthropologists and artists. For more information about Becky’s work, explore the links below |
| https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/c3riimpact/tag/becky-shaw/
https://www.beckyshaw.net/About https://www.shu.ac.uk/art-design-media-research-centre/archive/how-deep-is-your-love https://www.mmu.ac.uk/research/research-centres/esri/projects/the-odd-project https://www.shu.ac.uk/art-design-media-research-centre/archive/hiding-in-plain-sight https://www.calgary.ca/arts-culture/public-art/watershed-dynamic-environment-lab.html |