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The interaction between the geological sciences and the arts is an area of art historical research that has gone largely unexplored. This thesis explores the role of visual materials during the formative year of the British geological sciences in the early nineteenth century. A diverse range of media including prints, books, newspaper publications, sculpture, academic painting and civic spaces provided a vehicle through which geological research could be conveyed to a variety of audiences. These audiences include academic, professional and amateur geologists, as well as artists, children, international audiences, and the greater public. This thesis will chart the development of the visual language which allowed geologists to capture their fieldwork observations and convey their theories to wider audiences. It will explore the manner in which geological art recorded the ever-changing landscape, as well as giving form to the extinct worlds of deep prehistoric time. This geological language began with timid, self-conscious attempts at geological art work which relied on long established aesthetic precedents including cartography, topography, and natural history specimen illustration. The geological visual language would evolve to project geological research to wider audiences and innovative forms of expression that were novel to the field. These innovations include geologically colored maps, subterranean projections of the earth, speculative projections of extinct animals and worlds long past, as well as three dimensional civic spaces designed to engage the public in geological educational pursuits. Not only did geologists require the aid of artists to promote their visual language, but artists, with the encouragement of John Ruskin, would look to geological research as a way of training the eye to capture scientifically accurate landscape depictions that adhere to the maxim of truth to nature. The interaction between geology and art during the early nineteenth century produced a rich body of art worthy of exploration.

This thesis encompasses an art historical reassessment of artists and art works that have, with few exceptions, been consumed by discourses of cultural theory and sociology. Building on the foundations laid by Kobena Mercer in 'Iconography After Identity', it aims to contribute to a still emerging art history that maps the dialogues and developments produced by black British artists during and after the 1980s onto the broader stories of British and twentieth century art as a whole. l At its root is an attempt to trace an alternative iconography within a wide breadth of works by artists including Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Joy Gregory and Faisal Abdu' Allah, among others, through an exploration and interrogation of 'disruptive aesthetics' as a methodological tool for rethinking 'black British' art By isolating and examining a number of recurring themes and images across the 1980s and 1990s (the restaging of canonical images, hair and hairstyling, the 'ethnic' mask, space and place) grouped together as case studies, it offers a sustained engagement with art objects as documents of subjectivity rather than symptoms of diaspora.

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This thesis addresses British art of the late 1950s and 1960s, and specifically traces how formalist aesthetics and broader cultural factors influenced abstract art being made at this time. As such it is concerned with defining how particular artworks, while not depicting the environment in which they were produced, can still be demonstrated to embody it through other means. Opposing a binary separation of pop figuration and formalist abstraction prevalent in other scholarship dealing with the period, this text instead outlines a scenario where formalist strategies of art-making were themselves ideologically predicated on a number of other societal factors. These factors include the semantic economy underpinning the field of branded advertisement, the increasingly afunctional appearance of industrially styled commodities, and an image of ‘classless’ professionalism cultivated to combat an existing political Establishment. Additionally, this study includes an examination of the influence exerted on British abstraction by American sources, and revisits the critic Norbert Lynton’s observation regarding the ‘Mid-Atlantic’ position many practitioners found themselves occupying stylistically. At the heart of such an enquiry is an attempt to account in concrete terms for characteristics differentiating British artwork from that being produced elsewhere. It is structured as three chapters, looking at the work of Richard Smith at a time during which he was resident in both London and New York, that of a number of sculptors who participated in the Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition New Generation 1965, and the development of Jeremy Moon’s painting practice. Brought together these three case studies combine to suggest an autonomous and vital sensibility, one quite distinct from developments being made either in Continental Europe or the United States.

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My interdisciplinary practice-­based research project utilises a theoretical framework of anthropology to explore concepts associated with economic and cultural appropriation in visual art. Through investigating the problematic history of artists appropriating ethnographic objects for use in their own work, the project considers how anthropology could be used to engage audiences in a more collaborative fashion. This thesis also outlines the processes for producing a body of work using the museum strategies of archiving, collecting and curating. This includes aspects of documentation, interpretation, and dissemination through online and offline channels such as blogging and participatory arts. The two main projects included in the thesis, The Imaginary Museum and Souvenirs from the British Isles, consider how audiences can be engaged through the artwork to produce their own interpretations. The Imaginary Museum achieved this through the physical interaction of audiences collecting postcards. Through ascribing a value to the work with the inclusion of a donation box and only having postcards available within the time frame of the exhibition, the audience began to consider the works as both limited edition artworks and souvenirs of the exhibition. Similarly, there was an element of ambiguity between the artwork and souvenir in the Souvenirs from the British Isles exhibition. Here the sculptures took the aesthetic of the souvenir but were presented in the style of museum artefacts which discouraged tactile engagement. This resulted in a more conceptual interaction, with audiences discussing potential interpretations of the work with each other. Both of these works demonstrate a method of engaging with the museum format, which suggests a model for other artists working in and with collections. Through considering the museum framework as a contact zone, I also aim to suggest the possibility of a collaborative form of anthropology, which can express multiple responses and interpretations of the work of art, whilst also addressing the more problematic aspects of cultural appropriation.

Building on the challenges set out at the Shades of Black conference in 2001, this thesis contributes to a recent resurgence of re-visitation and reframing of British B/black artists and the 1980s, and the emerging dialogues and discourses, with a particular focus on B/black British women artists. The research is grounded in a detailed case study of one such recent event, the Thin Black L|ne(s) exhibition of 2011 at Tate Britain devised by artist Prof. Lubaina Himid, seeking to plot out Himid’s discursive approach grounded in the visual, the performative, and the plural. I argue that Thin Black L|ne(s) is a practical, methodological and theoretical approach for inscribing B/black British artists into the visual arts canon and wider cultural memory of Britain. By taking on board the concepts and discussions of Lubaina Himid’s ‘conversations’ and Jenny Tennant Jackson’s ‘fold’, I propose a fundamental shift in approach to, and method of, British art history. Centering on the exhibition alongside interviews with four of the featured artists this research examines the strategies of the creative and curatorial practice of a selection of B/black British artists ranging from 1985 to 2011. I aim to open up new possibilities of engagement with Thin Black L|ne(s), and its artworks, as performative sites enacting discourse in a common and interconnected British art history, rather than signifiers of otherness in an alternative narrative of Britishness. The second part of this thesis offers an interdisciplinary ‘methodology of listening’ in order to better engage in dialogue with B/black British women artists. I examine the research method and purpose of the artist interview, and utilizing constructivist grounded theory methods offer new ways to move forward with an art history that responds to and respects Himid’s practice of generating conversations as presented in her exhibition Thin Black L|ne(s).