Supervisor: Professor Harriet Hawkins

Institution email: Flora.Parrott.2016@live.rhul.ac.uk

Subterranean spaces conjure up powerful imaginaries; the unknown lurks in their dark unfathomable depths; their damp volumes unsettle, disarming with their challenge to visually dominated sensory regimes and discomforting with experiences of confinement and containment. They are spaces of capitalist exploitation and scientific fascination and significance, where bones and material culture are dug up and dated, where sediments enable the recreation of past environments and the prediction of future ones, and where nature and technology come together to exploit resources and to create powerful ideas of the environment.  The designation of the Anthropocene as a geologic epoch brings recognition of the force of human induced environmental change that together with environmental uncertainties demands new ways of imagining and intervening in the environment. Developing an innovative combination of geography and visual art practices this creative practice based project will emphasize the value of subterranean imaginations for engaging questions of nature, technology and the environment, Drawing together human and physical geography, printmaking and workshop development with arts and humanities research methods (including archival work and participant observation) to examine scientific engagements with underground spaces.