Andre Stitt, Civics

This body of research is a series of paintings and performance that consider how we engage with specific man-made environments, specifically the civic, institutional and architectural structures that have attempted to respond to or deal with the placement of art within Britain’s post-war new towns. Performance, painterly abstraction, hard edge construction, and graphic layering and transparency are combined to embody experiences of Britain’s new towns. Developed over a two-year period, the originality of this work lies in the novel effects that it achieves by exploring the relation between painting and performance with reference to a New Town environment. The published forms of the work are an exhibition of paintings at Edge Hill Arts Centre, with two book chapters that explain the methodology of the paintings, and a series of performance works at Skelmersdale, with an accompanying catalogue and journal article.

In this portfolio, the research narrative, including its 300-word statement;

ST101: the summary of the research narrative contained in this context document;

ST102: two chapters in the book Civics, pp. 19–42, 58–126, focusing on the exhibition of paintings at Edge Hill Arts Centre, 2019.

ST103: the catalogue accompanying the performance series New Town Reclamation in Skelmersdale, 2019.

ST104: an article in the journal The Modernist on the background and methodology of the performance series New Town Reclamation, 2019.

Also included as an appendix is a press release for the New Town Reclamation performances (STA101).

This body of work was commissioned in two parts. The exhibition was commissioned by Edge Hill University and the live on site-performances by the Illume project in Skelmersdale New Town, with funding for the performances provided by the Arts Council of England, Lancashire Council, National Lottery.