Dr Louise Purbrick

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Louise Purbrick

           

arts research University of Brighton

L.Purbrick@brighton.ac.uk

Dr Louise Purbrick is Principal Lecturer in the History of Art and Design, School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton. She is currently working with photographer Xavier Ribas on the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project, Traces of Nitrate: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/projects/traces-of-nitrate. The project, which examines the circuit of the nitrate trade from its mineral form extracted in the Atacama desert to its market value in the City of London, is in its first year. The documentation of sites of nitrate industry and nitrate wealth in Britain and Chile is underway. Purbrick’s contribution to the Traces of Nitrate project is a development of her research in material culture.

Purbrick completed her D.Phil in Art History at the University of Sussex in 1993 and has since published much of this study of the industrial and material culture of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in articles and book chapters. She is editor of The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, 2001.

Her work with material culture is not restricted to academic enquiry alone; she is involved in the documentation of historic sites and the curation of exhibitions. Purbrick has a longstanding interest in the Long Kesh/Maze prison site, Northern Ireland, and produced the architectural history that accompanied Donovan Wylie’s photographic works The Maze (2004 and 2008). She was curator of Rattling the Cage, a community archive of materials used in a local anti-Guantánamo campaign. Since 2005, Purbrick has worked with Belfast-based cross-community project, Healing Through Remembering, on the establishment of a museum of the conflict ‘in and about’ Northern Ireland. Her academic and activist roles are brought together in the co-editorship of multi-disciplinary collections of writings that which attempt to understand the material remains of violent pasts (Re-mapping the Field, 2006 and Contested Spaces, 2007).

Purbrick’s mongraph, The Wedding Present (2007) examines the objects given and received upon marriage, how they are used, preserved and valued. It is an analysis of practices of preserving everyday things and an account of how the past is embodied in material form. The book argues that consumption may not be the most appropriate framework through which to view the acts of possession; it seeks to contribute to academic debate about the interpretation of material culture and, as importantly, attempts represent the experience of everyday domestic life.