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My research is a sustained practice-led investigation into the visual culture of surfing and its relationship to place, identity, community and coastal heritage. Through graphic design, artist books, photography, moving image, exhibition and archival practice, I examine how surfing cultures construct, communicate and contest their own identities, with particular attention to British and North Sea contexts. The work uses surfing as a situated cultural lens through which broader questions of belonging, representation, cultural memory and the relationship between people and coastal environments can be explored.
The research is intentionally place-responsive but internationally orientated. Lincolnshire and the wider British coastline provide a distinctive context from which to investigate questions that have wider relevance to coastal communities and cultural practices. Through the development of Armchair Hero as a practice-led research platform and archive, alongside exhibitions, publications, partnerships, public engagement and interdisciplinary collaboration, the research seeks to create a sustained body of visual knowledge rather than a series of discrete creative outputs.
Over the coming years, my ambition is to establish a distinctive area of research expertise at the University of Lincoln around visual communication, surfing culture and coastal identity. This will contribute to the University's emerging emphasis on practice-led, place-responsive and globally engaged research, particularly across Rural and Coastal Health and Wellbeing and Heritage and Cultural Wellbeing. The intention is to build a reciprocal relationship between individual research profile and institutional reputation, using creative practice to make Lincolnshire's coastal cultures visible while positioning the University as a site for internationally relevant research into coastal culture, visual identity and creative practice.
