Extract from Letters to the Landscape Intro Artwork

Denise Startin is an artist, writer, researcher and collector. Her current practice and research are organised around four routes, place, memory, history and identity. She is particularly engaged with concepts of heritage, landscape, archaeology, performativity, representation, narrative, mapping and embodied entanglements. Denise studied at the Royal College of Art and her practice encompasses moving image, photography, printmaking, site-based interventions, installation, critical and performance writing. She uses various strategies of production including image and text, autobiography, polyphony, the intimate and fact and fiction, a continually recurring relation is the tension between public and private realms. During this process a historical figure, site, place, event, voice or voices are adopted to activate the work and produce a narrative arc. Place has long been a theoretical, philosophical and practical concern woven throughout her practice. Denise is particularly interested in the concept of place as a dynamic network of relations that is co-created and continually mapped which contributes to and affects how autobiographical identity is situated. Denise is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in the Place-based and site responsive practice research cluster at the University of Leeds. She is seeking to investigate a methodological tool and how it can be addressed as a form of mediating specific modes of cultural memory through the medium of place. This dialogue seeks to highlight the significance and complex character of visual, textual, artefactual and embodied experiences of place in constructing and mediating personal narratives of cultural identity and belonging in order to perform their retrieval, survival, communication and recreation. The site chosen to enact these relations and for its historical, national, symbolic or literary significance is Brontë country, West Yorkshire.