Workshop // 2B 

// Session 2B //
Using digital collage as an artistic research output ‘Ways of seeing the penal colony’

In this interactive workshop, I will share my process of creating digital collages, using visual materials gathered in the course of postdoctoral fieldwork on sites of the former French penal colonies in French Guyana and New Caledonia (known collectively as the bagne). I will show some of my process using Adobe InDesign and Photoshop, in the format of a ‘screenwalk’ using screen-sharing; in the second part of the workshop, you will create your own digital collage using Adobe Spark (free to access) and evaluate this method’s potential for your own research.

The purpose of using this creative method as a research output, for me, was to offer new ways of seeing and imagining the rich and varied places of the bagne, to reflect on the ending of the penal colony and its ambivalent legacies. They incorporate digital photographs, scans of fabrics, leaves and flowers, postcards, tourist trinkets, archival and tourist maps, and cyanotypes (a form of cameraless photography).

The collages are, perhaps, a quixotic attempt to simultaneously address and communicate something to English-speaking audiences about a history that I think we tend to hear little of, but also to resist offering a singular cartographic or photographic image that will stand for the full complexity of this history and these places.

I believe a similar method could be helpful for research projects engaging with multiple sites, and with questions of how we can understand and imagine ambivalent histories and futures. Please bring some digital images with you to the workshop.

This work comes out of postdoctoral research carried out as part of Postcards from the bagne: tourism in the shadow of France’s overseas penal history, a research project led by Dr Sophie Fuggle and funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Read more at https://cartespostalesdubagne.com

About the Convenor

Claire Reddleman is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester, and previously taught digital humanities at King’s College London, working on digital cultural heritage, visual methods, mapping and contemporary art. Prior to this she carried out postdoctoral research as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Postcards from the bagne’ led by Dr Sophie Fuggle, using visual research methods to engage with the history of France’s penal colonies. This research looks at collage as a critical artistic method, as does Claire's PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, and her thesis is now available as a research monograph from Routledge titled 'Cartographic Abstraction in Contemporary Art: Seeing with Maps'. Claire previously gained a MA in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, and a BA (Hons) in History of Art and Architecture from the University of Reading. She is also a photographic artist and can be found online at www.clairereddleman.com and tweets @reddlemap