Two New Creative Fellowships Announced Between South-West Artists and University of Exeter Academics

Food citizenship and the material culture of wills are two areas of research which are being creatively explored by artists and academics through two new fellowships.  

The Arts and Culture Creative Fellowships are exploratory placements offering creative practitioners the opportunity to engage with innovative academics and professional services staff across the University of Exeter’s campuses. 

The Fellowships are designed to benefit both the Creative Fellow and the host, providing inspiration for new approaches to creative practice and generating fledgling ideas that could be the springboard for future initiatives.  

Firstly, multidisciplinary artist Carmen Wong will be working with Dr Clemence Scalbert Yucel from The Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies on ‘Food Citizenship: Researching belonging(s) and homemaking through food’, a research project creatively exploring Kurdish migration, belonging, and food citizenship in Devon.  

Dr Scalbert Yucel said: “Conceptually, I am keen to look into the notion of food citizenship to analyse belonging and home-making practices. I am particularly keen to explore the issue in many directions and in a playful or inquisitive way, looking at a variety of food practices and foodways in the county and across spaces. Working with a creative practitioner is, for me, a very exciting way to dive into both these conceptual and methodological enquiries in an open, explorative, and collaborative fashion, and to develop my learning.” 

Plymouth based Carmen Wong is an artist from Singapore and the USA whose work often experiments with embodiment, deep listening and food for convivial collectivism. They are a co-animator of JarSquad, an on-going social art project in Plymouth, and co-run care-as-commons, a reading/doing group comprising artists, researchers, and carers. 

Carmen said: “The Creative Fellowship will be an opportunity to revisit and refresh some of what I applied in pedagogies in contemporary performance, and my practice-as-research PhD which looked at choreographies of belonging in migrant cooking. I’m keen to learn more about the gastropoetics of the Kurdish diaspora in Devon, and listen shared food stories, and how these narratives speak to their experiences of place, belonging and personhood.” 

The second Fellowship is Wills as Windows on to Past Lives, which will creatively explore the four-year Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘The Material Culture of Wills’a partnership between the University of Exeter and The National Archives..Devon based, musician, performer and lyricist Chris Hoban will be collaborating with Dr Laura Sangha from the University of Exeter’s Department for Archaeology and History to explore the stories of material culture encapsulated in thousands of historic wills in England between the 16th-18th century. 

Dr Sangha said “The multidimensional nature of wills means they present many entry points for collaboration with a creative fellow. I’m particularly interested to have conversations about how creative approaches can be used to grapple with the fragmentary nature of historical evidence and to ‘fill in the gaps’ in sources.” 

As well as being a musician, Chris Hoban is also an educator specialising in projects which have a strong historical or natural aspect to them to explore connections between other environments and times and our own. He has also written regularly and performed occasionally with the Devonian folk roots band ‘Show of Hands’, and most recently co-wrote the RNLI bicentennial 2024 Christmas single ‘Pull Away’ with James Studholme of ‘Police Dog Hogan’. 

Chris said “As a songwriter, I am increasingly drawn towards writing lyrics framed within a historical context of time, object or place. The journey of discovery involved by venturing into the past – in this case, within the intimate settings of will and the honesty that entails – is fascinating and richly rewarding.” 

The Creative Fellowships will be run across five weeks between January and July 2025. You can find out more and keep up to date with each of the Creative Fellowships on their respective project web pages: ‘Food Citizenship: Researching belonging(s) and homemaking through food’ and ‘Wills as Windows on to Past Lives’. 

Naome Glanville, Arts and Culture Co-ordinator said: “I’m really looking forward to seeing how this year’s Creative Fellowships progress.  The projects have the potential to provide rich material for discussion, learning and creativity.”