Restretching the Canvas

‘Restretching the Canvas’ is a chapter in the book 'Unframed', which investigates painting as a practice re-considered within feminist theoretical discourse in a post-feminist climate. In my chapter I discuss my work and that of artists Susan Treister and Rachel Garfield, and propose and demonstrate the influence of painting in their more recent media works.

My chapter explores the ethics at stake in undisclosed or suppressed histories of a generation of artists who have grown up in the changing cultural landscape of post WW2 Britain. Griselda Pollock refers to ‘the revelations of the problems of memory’ and what has been called an interpenetrated subjectivity – ‘a transgenerational transmission of trauma’. I discuss and demonstrate how artists Treister, Garfield and myself, in paintings, video and digital works, attempt to exorcise personal ghosts, but also move beyond these to discover new strategies for investigating how marginalised histories in Britain may still operate across boundaries of time, race and identity.

The troubled histories of the Shoah and Diaspora are in the process of constant re-negotiation. The interactive video ‘Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky’ uses theories of psychoanalysis and science fiction, while Rachel Garfield addresses racism within ‘Enlightenment’ thought in order to disturb stereotypes and certainties. My own video ‘Ghost Town’ is a work that archives the history of the ghetto in the streets of today’s Warsaw and uncovers a disturbing disjunction between reconstructed history and architectural evidence.

Pam Skelton

Research Interests

Spatial and temporal displacement, the expanded archive, memory, history, conflict and space that explores the interface of private and public memory in still and moving media.

Current Research

Current research activity includes a Speculative AHRC project ‘Archive of Exile’ with Cultural Geographer Jessica Dubow. This project explores the theoretical and creative possibilities of two apparently contradictory concepts: the exile (understood as a mode of thought informed by radical spatial mobility) and the archive (figured as a key institution of a national or territorial political imaginary. Ongoing research includes ‘Dwelling in the Space of Conspiracy’ an extended examination that has emerged from the recent AHRC project ‘Conspiracy Dwellings, the Stasi Ring Unveiled’. This project began with a study of the topography of surveillance in a former East German city and extends its parameters by investigating the ethical and cultural boundaries that impact on political archives and citizens. I am co-editor with Outi Remes on the book forthcoming Conspiracy Dwellings – Surveillance in Contemporary Art, in 2010. Currently, I am researching a new project that focuses on an Anglo Soviet archive and asks how can it contribute to our understanding and interpretation of ideas and culture and prevent certain histories from being marginalised or lost.

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