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Stephen Felmingham delves into Cold War Bunkers for doctorate talk
Academics often use the summer as a chance to re-charge their batteries, rest, and maybe even squeeze in a holiday before teaching for the forthcoming year ahead. Stephen Felmingham had slightly busier plans...
Stephen, Programme Leader for our Painting, Drawing and Printmaking BA (Hons) degree, instead used the time to gave a paper at the The Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference on his recently-completed doctoral research – as supported by Plymouth College of Art Research.
Hosted at Imperial College, London, Stephen's talk 'Peripheral artefacts: drawing [out] the Cold War' was attended by an international cross-disciplinary group of writers, academics and artists.
Attendees were those who had all previously explored the histories, meanings, materialities and fates of Cold War Bunkers across a range of scales – from individual human encounters to their role as semi-secret nodes and exceptional spaces in global geo-political systems.
His paper is then due to be published in a forthcoming book next year 'Approaching the Ruins: Atmospheres, Bodies and Materiality in Cold War Bunkers' as part of the Geopolitical Bodies, Material Worlds series co-edited by Dr Ian Klinke, University of Oxford and Luke Bennett from Sheffield Hallam University.
Stephen's interest in Cold War Bunkers is no secret to the college and our students, with the artist also creating an exhibition solely focussed on them.
'The Violet Club' was exhibited in the Gallery at the college earlier this year and investigated the trauma of the generation that lived through this most dangerous period in history.
