Shona Illingworth - The Watch Man. Balnakiel

This richly illustrated book profiles two significant bodies of artwork: The Watch Man and Balnakiel, by Shona Illingworth through images of her work, specially written art/text works by the artist, extracts from her ongoing dialogue with Professor Martin A. Conway and a series of diagrammatic drawings that emerge from their interdisciplinary research process. The Watch Man and Balnakiel are studies of memory, history and place that examine the damage that is done to the psyche by the experience of war and the equally pervasive and insidious marks that have been left on the physical landscape by the presence of the military. Informed by an ongoing dialogue between Illingworth and Conway, these artworks extend an exploration of the relevance of scientific insight into spatial understandings of memory to current thinking about geopolitics, contemporary fears, how collective memory forms across cultural and social difference, and how our sense of physical and temporal location is formed. This is further elaborated by three specially commissioned essays on Illingworth’s work by leading academics and art writers in the field, which develop new thinking about memory and its articulation in moving image and sound through a close examination of these artworks. Additional artworks represented in the book have been developed by the artist through interdisciplinary discussion with specialists such as Dr Anson Mackay, Reader in Environmental Change, University College London and Dr Jason Franks, Research Fellow, Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of St Andrews. Funded by the Arts Council England and an Arts Award from the Wellcome Trust.