Abstract
Abstract In this article we reflect upon the many advantages of collaborations between academic historians and artists, as a method for presenting our work, communicating with different audiences and, most importantly, beginning conversations which cause us to think about our research in new and creative ways. We argue that collaboration allows us to rethink the boundaries of expertise, it opens up both historical knowledge and the process of knowledge creation to different audiences in more egalitarian ways, and it provides innovative ways of doing historical research.
Highlights
‘If you research the everyday lives of ordinary people, why wouldn’t you present that research back in a form that’s of the everyday?’ asked Bethany Wells, designer and artist, as we stood in the grounds of Kirkstall Abbey, Leeds, hosting a picnic as part of the artistic project Journey with Absent Friends
The project allowed us to reflect on whether books and articles, or even museum exhibits and television programmes, are the best way to present the research of academic historians who study the ‘ordinary’ and everyday. (Fig. 1) The medium of a very ordinary domestic caravan and the most everyday experience of eating meant that the historical research could be fitted into the everyday lives of all sorts of different people
Perle the caravan is a space in which a range of emotions and experiences are valued, and the journey has taken the artistic and historical content away from institutions and into communities
Summary
The historical research that contributed to the project emerged from an AHRC-funded project entitled ‘Living with Dying: Everyday Cultures of Death and Dying in Britain, c.1900–50s’.3 This research has involved investigating the ways that families deal with death, dying and the dead, and has turned its attention to how families remember their dead. Microhistories can help us to question our ideas about norms and taboos in relation to death, grief and remembrance and, as this article will show, Perle the caravan encouraged visitors to explore this tension between public narrative and individual experience in emotional and productive ways This is certainly not the first project that has brought together historians and artists, collaboration is more common in literature and the performance arts than with visual artists.[10] Karen Harvey’s work as ‘Academic in Residence’ with Bank Street Arts, Sheffield (between 2011 and 2016) was a collaboration which demonstrated the ‘value of art’s expressive power and its ability to pose new questions and provide new answers for our understanding of the past’, its power ‘to materialize intangible human emotions and motivations’.11. We argue that collaboration allows us to rethink the boundaries of expertise, it opens up both historical knowledge and the process of knowledge creation to different audiences in more egalitarian ways, and provides innovative ways of doing historical research itself. (Fig. 5)
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