Denise Startin

Denise Startin is an artist, writer, and researcher whose interdisciplinary practice stages speculative feminist historiography through embodied fieldwork, dramatis personae, and the politics of memory. Working across moving image, photography, installation, site-specific interventions, and performance writing, she explores how archival fragments, textual, visual, and artefactual, can be reinterpreted through sensory gestures and narrative slippage. Her work reframes the archive not as a static repository but as a haunted, migratory space, one that moves across media, bodies, and temporalities. Through walking, (re)collecting, re-enacting, writing, re-citing, reciting and remembering, she activates the landscape as a mnemonic terrain and the archive as a site of negotiation, where memory is contested, reanimated, and re-authored.

Central to her methodology is the use of dramatis personae who act as narrative interlocutors, structuring devices and speculative tools that enable a slippage between researcher and archive, past and present, fact and fiction. These rhetorical figures operate as explorers, (mis)guides, and mnemonic surrogates, enabling a mode of fieldwork that is both materially grounded and imaginatively expansive. Thro...

2023-2026 PhD Candidate, University of Leeds, Place based and site responsive practice
2013 MA Royal College of Art (With Distinction in research)
2009 BA (Hons.1st Class) Fine Art, Coventry University

2025 Practice holds Discovery, PGR Group Exhibition, East Street Arts, St.Mary’s Lane, Leeds
2024 Hints for British Tourists, Solo Show, Rugby Art Gallery & Museum, Little Elborow Street, Rugby
2022/23 Rugby Open, Rugby Art Gallery & Museum, Little Elborow Street, Rugby
2022 Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, The Fireworks Factory, No.1 Street, Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, London
2022 RBSA Prize Exhibition, 4 Brook Street, St.Paul’s Square, Birmingham
2022 Hints for British Tourists, Solo Show, CT20 Gallery, 73 Tontine Street, Folkestone
2022 Fronteer Independent Art Fair, CASC Gallery, Northgate Street, Chester
2022 Hints for British Tourists, Solo Show, City Arcadia Gallery, Coventry
2022 Warwickshire Open Studios, Holyhead Studios, Coventry
2022 Royal Cambrian Academy, Open Competition, Conwy, Wales