Mary Modeen is an artist/academic whose research links creative practice with interdisciplinary academic studies in the humanities, particularly philosophy, literature, feminist and indigenous studies. Her research has several threads: perception as a cognitive and interpretive process, and place-based research, which tends to connect cultural values, history and embodied experience. As such, this work usually combines creative art practice and writing.
Her PhD supervision is also characterised by these interdisciplinary investigations, linking studio practice with academic enquiry. International research networks, three of which Modeen co-convenes, are central in conducting the critical discourse which address, challenge and strengthen these research insights. She is also the DJCAD Associate Dean (Internationalisation).
Mary
Modeen
A collaborative multi-media installation.
As a collaboration, Professor Iain Biggs, Professor Christine Baeumler, and Modeen, contributed work to the exhibition In The Open, which took place at Sheffield Hallam University.
The installation In Praise of Wetlands is a hanging fabric piece that is an image constructed of 3 wetlands: the wooded bog of northern Minnesota, the rich peaty bog of Exmoor, and light on a Scottish moorland.
It is printed on lightweight fabric and hung slightly away from the atrium wall with the aim of creating movement through air drafts and the motion of passersby.
As an evocation, it works like memory: insubstantial, multi-layered and more about a changeable and complex remembrance than any single depiction. A soundwork completes this work: its ambient bird calls and wind underlie a remembrance of wetland places, a reflective recall of ‘when the snow melts along the Mississippi’, or somewhere, or ‘manywheres’…
An artist book also accompanied the installation.
