From the South West to Shanghai: Molly Erin McCarthy’s funded research trip and what it brought back to Plymouth

<p dir="ltr">“My experience in Shanghai was crazy. I’ve never been outside Europe, and I’ve never travelled alone. This was going halfway around the world, to a completely different culture, being on my own, slightly terrified.”</p> <p dir="ltr">Molly, a Plymouth-based artist whose work spans digital and physical worlds, travelled to <strong>Shanghai and Hong Kong in late August through to early September</strong> after receiving Arts University Plymouth’s <strong>Wilhelmina Barns-Graham travel grant</strong>, which supports postgraduate students to fulfil their potential in the visual arts through education, residencies and travel.</p> <p dir="ltr">“I used the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham travel grant to spend one week in Shanghai and one week in Hong Kong.”</p> <p dir="ltr">For Molly, it wasn’t a sightseeing tour. It was practice-led research: a chance to test her ideas against a context far beyond her usual reference points.</p> <p dir="ltr">“The reason I applied to go to China specifically is that I have quite a broad research interest that covers concepts across interactive storytelling and immersion. I like working across digital and physical media, and I draw heavily on references to Cornwall and to British folklore.</p> <p dir="ltr">“I wanted to go somewhere where technology is a major topic, where people are pushing the boundaries of digital and physical processes. It also felt important that I go somewhere with a completely different cultural lexicon compared to what I’ve been drawing from.”<br /></p>

<p dir="ltr">Shanghai gave Molly volume and pace. She moved between galleries and museums, but also spent time practising the kind of observation that can’t be repeated online: sitting in public spaces, walking without a destination, and noticing how culture is staged in everyday life.</p> <p dir="ltr">“I started in Shanghai, and I saw so many exhibitions. One day I visited 10, which was intense but amazing… I also visited museums, met with the team at Chronus Art Centre, and spent a lot of time just sitting in cafes or walking around.”</p> <p dir="ltr">One of her most surprising research sites wasn’t an institution, it was a retail space: the shopping mall as a designed environment, engineered for attention.</p> <p dir="ltr">“I spent a lot of my time in shopping malls, which was unexpected, but actually an amazing, rich research position. In some cases, you could literally walk through one shopping mall and directly into another.”<br /><br />At Shanghai’s K11 Art Mall, Molly was interested in what happens when art is threaded directly into commerce, and what that does to the viewer’s experience.</p> <p dir="ltr">“I went there because I was interested in how they present themselves as this merger of artistic practice and commercialism. When I first walked into the mall, I was met with a sign stating “IN ART WE LIVE”. There are art galleries inside and artworks installed throughout the mall.”</p>

<p dir="ltr">“I went with quite a utopian view of what that might look like, but ultimately found a very high-end shopping mall with artworks littered between boutiques. That experience knocked me back down to the reality of a globalised capitalist economy.”</p> <p dir="ltr">The trip also brought her face-to-face with the infrastructures behind digital structures, in a way she hadn’t expected.</p> <p dir="ltr">“I went to an electronics market, which was unlike anything I’ve seen in the UK. There were spools of microchips reminiscent of film reels, and people were working in their shops making electronic components.”</p> <p dir="ltr">Across the exhibitions, she saw a central theme emerging, that of the tension between tradition and technological acceleration.</p> <p dir="ltr">“At Aario Gallery in Suhe Haus, I was blown away by rich oil paintings depicting the moment of metamorphosis. At Power Station of Art, the complex installations of Martin Goya Business collective transported me to an immersive, theme-park-esqe world that merged grasslands, megacities, networked culture and ancient artefacts. The film installation <em>Too Rich City</em> at Fotografiska evoked visceral emotion, as I was guided by the Old White Swan time machine, which can only travel backwards in time. I also had the pleasure of experiencing the work of Lawrence Lek here, whom I have admired for some time.”<br /></p>

<p dir="ltr">Hong Kong brought a different rhythm. A typhoon disrupted part of Molly’s plans, but the city also offered something she was actively seeking: a better understanding of what digital work needs in order to be experienced as it was intended. At M+, she found a format that resonated with her. </p> <p dir="ltr">“M+ had a whole media art dedication area with private booths and a catalogue of around 250 pieces of media art that you could sit and watch at your own leisure.”</p> <p dir="ltr">“It felt like there was an understanding of how digital media works might need to be experienced, that you have to create the right conditions in a museum for people to engage. In the back was a space dedicated to interactive work, where I was able to play Cassie McQuater’s Black Room browser game, awash in warm, pink light.”</p> <p dir="ltr">She also noticed how local specificity shapes culture, describing a talk at Hong Kong University’s Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre on influencer culture that unexpectedly prompted her to reflect on Cornwall’s own identity within a larger nation.</p> <p dir="ltr">Then came a moment that, for Molly, landed in the territory she’s increasingly drawn to: the strange, the unsettling, the bodily.</p> <p dir="ltr">“At the Sigg Art Prize, I saw work from six contemporary Chinese-born or based artists, including Heide Lau, who had produced an incredible ceramic installation inspired by Chinese folklore. At one point, I was startled when I realised the central sculpture was a robotic crab with a ceramic carapace that began jerking around unexpectedly. It was, in a way, grotesque but captivating. That simple disruption really made me reflect on what it means to be immersed in an artwork.”<br /></p>

<p dir="ltr">Molly talks about her international research trip as widening the frame of her own creative practice. Seeing contemporary art and culture in Shanghai and Hong Kong helped her place her own ideas within a larger conversation, returning to the South West with a fresh perspective.</p> <p dir="ltr">“It provided a lot of clarity to see the kind of work I want to make being produced elsewhere and dealing with similar topics. It was invigorating.”</p> <p dir="ltr">It also brought her, in an unexpected way, back home, to consider Cornwall as more than a backdrop, and to the gap between how places are marketed and how people live in them.</p> <p dir="ltr">Based on her experiences as an outsider in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and her knowledge of how local landscapes can be perceived by visitors, Molly intends through her own artwork to deconstruct the notion of Cornwall that is commonly depicted on postcards. Molly is asking questions about what jagged edges are smoothed over by the demands of the tourism industry and resource extraction, and what contemporary forces are doing to place, community and story.</p> <p dir="ltr">“I have become driven by this idea of creating new mythologies that move beyond just regurgitating established narratives, into something disarming, labyrinthine and more-than-human.”</p> <p dir="ltr">Alongside the creative charge of the trip, Molly describes a more human recalibration that resulted from her travels, the concept of the human connection that persists even when language is a barrier to understanding.</p> <p dir="ltr">“At the end of the day, I went to China and couldn’t even speak to a lot of the people I met because of the language barrier, but I still felt a deep connection. Some of the best conversations I had were through Google Translate. It was very humbling.”<br /></p>

<p dir="ltr">Molly didn’t come straight from undergraduate study into a Master’s. She returned after building experience, making work, and recognising what she wanted to strengthen.</p> <p dir="ltr">“I had a four-year gap before returning. My professional experiences during this time made me realise I needed to dig deeper in terms of the core of my practice.”</p> <p dir="ltr">She chose MA Fine Art because it gives her the interdisciplinary space to let research lead, alongside opportunities to share work publicly and develop her thinking with others.</p> <p dir="ltr">“I chose Fine Art specifically because it’s a very interdisciplinary subject area and I wanted to allow the research to take me where it needed to take me.”</p> <p dir="ltr">For Arts University Plymouth, Molly’s funded trip offers an example of what postgraduate study can unlock: ambitious practice-led research that reaches beyond the studio, supported by opportunities that help students test ideas in the world, bring that learning back, and push their work forward with confidence.<br /></p>