Shirley Chubb

Posthuman Walking Project

Horizons - Paint

Horizons - Print

Significant Walks

Pen Rest

Whomade

Thinking Path

Liminal

Hold

Shirley Chubb’s practice focuses on broadening the reach, impact and communicative potential of the visual arts where she works across disciplines to find common territories of thinking and practice.

Within museums and archives her approach to site specific locations involves significant collaboration and negotiation with curators and conservators in order to push at the boundaries of representation within exhibition environments. 

Her exhibitions Thinking Path and Pen Rest considered Charles Darwin’s synchronic approach to knowledge and prompted an interest in the mechanics of motion, with her current research involving collaboration with physiotherapists interested in investigating how visual art might become an effective means to manifest the significance of walking through particular environments and landscapes.

Her work has been funded by The Landscape Research Group, The Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England, is shown nationally and internationally and is held in public and private collections.

Shirley is Emerita Reader in Interdisciplinary Art at the University of Chichester and an Honorary Fellow in the School of Health Sciences, University of Brighton. 

She held a Creative Physiotherapy Scholarship at Auckland University of Technology working with Professor David Nicholls in the Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences - Te Ara Hauora A Pūtaiao.

   

Her work within the Health Sciences has involved interactive arts and health projects developed in collaboration with physiotherapists and academics with recent research contributing to the fields of art & science, health & wellbeing.  

Shirley's collaborative research as part of the Significant Walks project has been published here in Mobilities of Wellbeing: Migration, the State, and Medical Knowledge (2021, Grønseth, A. & Skinner, J. eds. Ethnographic Studies in Medical Anthropology, Carolina Academic Press) and here in CURARE 42 (2019) 3+4: Aesthetics of Healing: Working with the Senses in Therapeutic Contexts.

Shirley and Dr Clair Hebron lead the Posthuman Walking Project (PWP) funded by the Landscape Research Group (LRG) 2023 Research Fund focused on the theme of Landscapes and Care. The project brings together arts and physiotherapy researchers and walker-partners linked across five universities in Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines and the UK.

 

News

Shirley & Clair Hebron recently published a chapter titled Art as a Deterritorialising Vehicle for a Nomadic Physiotherapy in Inviting Movements in Physiotherapy An Anthology of Critical Scholarship, University of Manitoba, 2025. The chapter discusses how transdisciplinary education and art can offer opportunities to explore movement within physiotherapy and draws on the development of the Posthuman Walking Project.

Shirley co-edited Encountering Environments Through the Arts: Interdisciplinary Embodiments, Politics and Imaginaries (Routledge, 2025) with Professor Vicky Hunter.

Three works titled Five Walks, Metatarsal Walks and Four Walks feature in the #WalkCreate Gallery as part of the AHRC funded Walking Publics/Walking Art research project exploring walking, wellbeing and community during the COVID-19 pandemic.