Performing & Visual Arts
In Conversation: Arts & Humanities Books Launch & Drinks Reception
How do recent books from the School of Arts and Humanities reimagine place—not just as a setting, but as something actively made through memory, material, and practice? From site-specific art to place-based writing, these publications invite us to think about how making is shaped by where we are, and how places themselves are shaped in and through arts and humanities research.
Find out more about the books that will be discussed below:
The Temporality of Building: European and Chinese Perspectives of Architecture and Heritage.
Authors: Dr Yun Gao, Professor Nicolas Temple & Jing Xiao
This book examines the role that time plays in the life of buildings, adopting a comparative study of this influence between European and Chinese traditions. Whilst issues of time in architecture have attracted increasing interest by academics in the West, challenging the dominant modernist precepts of space, there is little understanding of the subject in China and how these compare to historical and contemporary perspectives in Europe. A guiding premise of the investigation is that notions of building time require insight into how cultural habits commingle with natural rhythms, or what David Leatherbarrow calls “concurrency”.
Rather than examining specific buildings, the first three chapters apply three key themes (language, ritual and heritage) as cultural lenses to reveal differences and similarities between the two traditions. Through these lenses, buildings, interiors and their exterior spaces (churches/cathedrals, temples, palaces, gardens and courtyard houses) are explored to demonstrate how building time involves particular situations/settings and their correlating relationships to past traditions. In the final chapter we consider notions of time in the context of contemporary buildings in Europe and China, drawing on the earlier historical investigations and addressing globalising influences.
This book would be of interest to architects, architectural theorists, historians, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists.
Link to the book:
The Temporality of Building: European and Chinese Perspectives on Arch, 2025 (Routledge)
Image credit: O-office Architects, 3D drawings of Lianzhou Museum of Photography in China (2017)
Drawing As Placemaking: Environment, History and Identity
Author: Dr Simon Woolham, Co-Editor: Professour Jill Journeax
Using a combination of articles and interviews, the book introduces eighteen contemporary drawing projects that embrace an expansive definition of the discipline, and use their drawing practice to consider how place is understood and made. Drawing as Placemaking focuses on how drawings and drawing processes can examine and articulate our relationships to placemaking, to our concepts of home, to historical and memorial sites, to our personal histories, and to imagined and actual places.
The contributing artists (from the USA, Canada, Portugal, Germany, Turkey, Japan, New Zealand, Australia and the UK) use expanded drawing approaches to present different perspectives on how drawings are made, and how they can be used to describe, analyse, reimagine, transform and to make new actual, historical, and psychological places. The artist-authored chapters and the conversations with artists are interwoven to facilitate broader conversations about our human interactions with place, through all our senses; what we can see, touch, feel and hear, alongside what we know, theorise or imagine. The re-evaluation of placemaking from a range of cultural perspectives highlights new stories whilst reconsidering older ones.
The book reveals new and contemporary insights into the long historical connection between drawing and placemaking and contributes to new debates around placemaking. It offers a deeper understanding of how we use drawing to better define ourselves and our place in the world.
Links to the book:
With Love. From an Invader. – Rhododendrons, Empire, China and Me
Author: Dr Yan Wang Preston, Co-Editors: Emma Nicolson and Alan Elliott
Release date: July 2025
Publisher: The Eriskay Connection (NL)
Co-publisher: The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (UK)
Funder: The University of Huddersfield’s AHRC IAA grant.
ISBN: 9789493363212
Part love letter, part ecological field study, this multi-layered book by Chinese British artist Yan Wang Preston explores the life, symbolism, and politics of the Rhododendron ponticum in the UK. Set in the Lancashire landscape, the project combines daily photography, sound recordings, and natural collections across all seasons to challenge perceptions of “invasive” species and national identity.
Interweaving personal experience, ecological observation, and cultural critique, With Love. From an Invader reflects on belonging, resilience, and the often overlooked beauty of naturalised landscapes. Featuring essays, archival images from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and contributions from artists, scientists, and historians, this book offers a multidisciplinary perspective on migration: human and botanical alike.
A thoughtful and timely addition to contemporary environmental conversations.
Links to the book:
