Supervised by Jeremy Millar, Senior Tutor in Critical Practice at the Royal College of Art, and Dr Andrew Wilson
October 2016 –
Front cover of Film Art magazine, no.9, 1936
This thesis catalogues and analyses instances when film form, theory, technology, architecture, discourse and ephemera influenced artists working in the first half of the twentieth century in Britain, focusing on activity in London. It makes detailed case-studies of particular works executed in the traditional media of painting, sculpture and print that result from this interest, alongside examples of artists’ work in film. In parallel, it traces the evolution of an idea of film as art in texts written by artists, critics and theorists during the period in question.
The thesis analyses films, artworks and monographic and institutional archive papers held at Tate, the British Film Institute and the Harry Ransom Center, as well as in smaller public and private collections. It attempts to resist the linearity of art history in order to make visible artists’ concern with film, and the resultant focus is on artworks, films, publications and exhibitions as ‘containers’ for cyclically shifting conceptions of film as/and art that could inform the present rubric of ‘artists’ moving image’.
How did you come to be researching this subject?
My present doctoral project is important to me because it connects the somewhat sprawling research and curatorial interests I have pursued over the previous ten years professionally. Although interdisciplinary in nature, the backbone of my topic is the development of modern art in the UK, so Tate is the instinctive home for this research.
About Inga Fraser
Inga Fraser is a curator and writer with over ten years’ experience working in museums and galleries in London including curatorial posts at Tate and the National Portrait Gallery. Her research focuses on the impact of the emerging disciplines of film and photography on art in the twentieth century, and the convergences between art, fashion and design in the modern period. Her present doctoral project explores artists’ engagement with film in Britain in the twentieth century.
Selected publications include:
‘Encounters: Derek Boshier and Film’ in Helen Little (ed.), Derek Boshier, 2023; ‘Alia Syed’s Wallpaper: “the agreement of deviations”’ in Maria Palacios Cruz (ed.), Alia Syed, 2023); ‘Barry, Iris (1895–1969)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2022; ‘Colour and Kinesis’, Tate Etc., no. 48, Spring 2020; ‘From a sheet of paper to the sky’, British Art Studies, no.7, Autumn 2017; ‘Visual Culture‘, The Year‘s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, vol.25, no.1, 2017; ‘Kinomuseum? Film and Video at the Tate Gallery: the Rushes of a Relationship’, LUX Online, November 2017; ‘From a Sheet of Paper to the Sky: Pattern in the Work of Paul Nash’, in Paul Nash, ed. Emma Chambers, Tate, 2016; ‘“New Relations, Unsuspected Harmonies”: Modern British Art in Finland, 1906–1964‘, FNG Research, no.4, 2016; ‘Visual Culture’, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, vol.24, 2016, pp.246–68; ‘Media and Movement: Barbara Hepworth Beyond the Lens’, in Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World, eds. Penelope Curtis and Chris Stephens, Tate, 2015; ‘The “English Independents”: Some Twentieth-Century Women Carvers’, Sculpture Journal, vol.23, no.3, 2014; ‘Born Fully Clothed: the Significance of Costume for the Silent Cinema Vamp’, in Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle, ed. Marketa Uhlirova, 2014; ‘Tree, Iris (1897–1968)’, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2014; ‘Body, Room, Photograph: Negotiating Identity in the Self-Portraits of Lady Ottoline Morrell’, in Biography, Identity and the Modern Interior, eds. Penny Sparke and Anne Massey, 2013.
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