Shirley Chubb

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 work focusing on how visual art might become an effective means to manifest the significance of walking through particular environments and landscapes.

Her work has been shown nationally and internationally and is held in public and private collections.

Her work within the Health Sciences has involved interactive arts and health projects developed in collaboration with physiotherapists and academics. Recent research has contributed to the fields of art & science, health & wellbeing, narrative research, photography and archive research and museum studies.

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 holds the 2021 Creative Physiotherapy Scholarship at Auckland University of Technology where she is working with Professor David Nicholls in the Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences - Te Ara Hauora A Pūtaiao.

   

News

Shirley's collaborative research as part of the Significant Walks project has recently 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

Three new 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 

Shirley and Dr Clair Hebron are leading 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, physiotherapy and anthropology researchers and partner-walkers linked across five universities in Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines and the UK.