student spotlight

Street with tall building and a car parked outside

Architectural Appropriations in Contemporary Sculpture: The Uncanny Effect of Cross-Medium Migrations

Kirstie Gregory

  • Student: Kirstie Gregory
  • Director of Studies: Dr. Doreen Bernath
  • Second Supervisor: Dr. Lisa Stansbie

Project description

This project looks at the way contemporary sculptors repurpose the forms and attendant associations of architecture, why and how they do this and to what effect.  It focuses on sculptors who have returned to this way of working repeatedly in their practice, adopting and adapting the medium-specificities of architecture for their own purposes. The research will focus on Mike Kelley, Mark Manders, Gregor Schneider and Rachel Whiteread among others. Using a psychoanalytical methodological approach, and examples of gothic or ‘uncanny’ literature, I examine the echoes of narratives which reinforce the viewer’s psychic and sensory experience.

student Biography

Kirstie Gregory, BA (H) History of Art (The Courtauld Institute of Art), Dip Museum Studies (University of Queensland), MRes History of Art (University of Huddersfield), is Research Programme Assistant at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. Kirstie recently completed a Masters by Research on the work of Romanian/British sculptor Paul Neagu and worked as a curatorial assistant on the exhibition ‘Paul Neagu: Palpable Sculpture’ (2015) at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. She is an interviewer for the British Museum’s National Life Stories oral history project for which she is currently interviewing sculptor Phyllida Barlow. She is Assistant Editor of the series of publications. Her writing has been published in Paul Neagu: Palpable Sculpture, Sculptors Papers from the Henry Moore Institute Archive, Artists Lives, Sculpture Journal, Careers in Art History, Glamourie, and in An Introduction to the Principles of Symmetrical Intimacy Volume 1.