Staff Profile
I am an artist working between art and architecture. I have a BA in Fine Art: Painting and Printmaking from the Glasgow School of Art, a Master of Fine Art from Newcastle University and a PhD in Human Geography from Durham University.
My work takes the form of large scale architectural installation, painting and film/audio. The potentials for deep participation in (re)creating the urban realm are at the centre of my practice and I often work in collaborative, slow ways with groups and communities. My work prompts questions about land and property ownership, housing precarity, urban planning and local democracy.
My commissions include the architectural installation Protohome for Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead in 2018, the public installation Traversing the Round for Maison de la Culture, Amiens, France in 2013, which formed part of the Art, Cities and Landscape Festival and You Can Take It With You, a sound and visual installation for Up the Wall Festival of Live Arts, Chester Castle in 2011, which then travelled to the Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool for the Everyword Festival and to The NewBridge Project, Newcastle. I have presented work in public space and in galleries, including: the installation One Hundred and Thirty Million Pounds of Earth at Shieldfield Art Works, Newcastle in 2019, the architectural installation Gathering (alongside Ed Wainwright) at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle in 2018, the self-build housing project Protohome in the Ouseburn, Newcastle in 2016, the video The Spider Web City at Art Kontakt Festival, Porto Palermo Castle, Albania in 2014, The 100 Gram Cycle – a plan for a wheatfield in Rome - at The Nordic Embassy, Berlin in 2014 and the audio piece No Map Only Memory at Lisbon Architecture Trienalle in 2013. My curatorial projects include Urban Organisms, an exhibition/events programme at The NewBridge Project, Newcastle in 2015, which examined urban food sustainability.
I have also worked on research projects including: ‘Brexit Futures’, with Prof. Ben Anderson and ‘Disposal: the housing crisis in Horden’s numbered streets’, with Prof. Rachel Pain.
I am a trustee of The NewBridge Project, an arts organisation in Newcastle, where I also have a studio, and I am on the steering committee of the Collective Studio, with The NewBridge Project and Newcastle Institute for Creative Arts Practice (NICAP) and of the North East Community Led Development Network.
Website: www.juliaheslop.com
Blog: www.unofficialculture.wordpress.com
Twitter: JuliaHHeslop
Presently I am working on the long term participatory action research and social arts project 'Dwellbeing', which has since become a Community Benefit Society and Co-operative. Based in the estate of Shieldfield, Newcastle, Dwellbeing examines student accommodation development in the area and actions community-led responses to this.
I am also collaborating with In Certain Places at the University of Central Lancashire on the project 'Expanded City' which examines the potential for participatory social space in the new North West Preston housing development.
Working within a context of austerity and rising homelessness, my PhD aimed to translate knowledge across borders, mobilising methods of participation in housing and planning from an informal neighbourhood in Albania to the UK to examine whether participation in the urban realm can trigger processes of collective learning, skills building and politicisation for low income groups. My PhD culminated in the participatory build project Protohome which I initiated. Protohome was a collaboration between Crisis, the national charity for single homelessness, xsite architecture and TILT Workshop. Working alongside an architect and a joiner, a group of individuals who have experienced homelessness developed a timber-frame self-build housing prototype. Once the building was constructed it was open to the public and hosted a programme of events and exhibitions examining the collaborative design-build process and wider issues to do with housing and homelessness in an austerity context and participatory housing alternatives.
This research involves a range of methods from ethnography, to studio practice and live build projects working with groups/communities. In so doing it uses the creation of the art/architectural object as a research tool, as well as a mode of dissemination.
I have taught on modules including:
MPlan: Planning Linked Research
Architecture: Design
Architecture and Urban Planning: Visual and Creative Practice Research Skills
Architecture and Urban Planning: Alternative Practice Histories and Theories
Human Geography: Urban Geography
Human Geography: People, Participation and Place
Planning: Urban Poverty
Engineering Experience
Human Geography: Geographies of Everyday Life
Painting Strand
- Heslop J. Learning Through Building: Participatory action research and the production of housing. Housing Studies 2021, 36(6), 906-934.
- Heslop J. Protohome: rethinking home through co-production. In: Benson,M;Hamiduddin,I, ed. Self-Build Homes: Social Discourse, Experiences and Directions. London: UCL Press, 2017, pp.96-114.
- Heslop J. Protohome. Architectural Research Quarterly 2016, 20(4), 387-389.
- Heslop J, McFarlane C, Ormerod E. Relational Housing Across the North-South Divide: Learning Between Albania, Uganda, and the UK. Housing Studies 2020, 35(9), 1607-1627.
- Heslop J, Tomaney J, Morgan K. Debating the Foundational Economy. Renewal 2019, 27(2), 5-12.
- Anderson B, Wilson H, Forman P, Heslop J, Ormerod E, Maestri G. Brexit: Modes of uncertainty and futures in an impasse. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2020, 45(2), 256-269.
- Heslop J, Jarvis H. Housing. In: Hopkins,P;Pain,R, ed. Social Geographies: An Introduction. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018. Submitted.
- Pain R, Heslop J, Ormerod E, Butler-Rees A, Crawshaw H, Davisson H, Dawson L, Fairhurst M, Galin M, Harman D, Holloway E, James T, Liu A, Chau C, Qing H, Read F, Smith M, Somerset C, Sporik E, Turner I. DISPOSAL: The Housing Crisis in Horden’s Numbered Streets. Durham University: Centre for Social Justice and Community Action, 2016.
- Heslop J, Wainwright E. Gathering: Material Ecologies. 2018. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Hatton Gallery, 1.
- Heslop J, Wainwright E. Gathering (part of Hatton Gallery Exploding Collage programme). 2018. Newcastle University: Hatton Gallery, 1 room sized installation.
- Heslop J. Protohome. 2018. Gateshead, UK: BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, 1.
- Heslop J. Protohome. 2016. Newcastle upon Tyne: Ouseburn, 1.
- Hopkins P, Newcastle Social Geographies Collective, Pain R, Shaw R, Gao Q, Bonnett A, Jones C, Richardson M, Rzedzian S, Benwell MC, Lin W, McAreavey R, Stenning A, Blazek M, Pande R, Najib K, Finlay R, Nayak A, Ridley G, Mearns G, Bonner-Thompson C, McLaughlin J, Boussalem A, Iqbal N, Heslop J, Jarvis H, Burrows R, Bambra C, Copeland A, Tate S, Campbell E, Thompson M, James A, Raynor R, Cunningham N, Powells G, Herbert J, Hocknell S, ed. Social Geographies: An Introduction. London, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021.
- Heslop J, Ormerod E. The Politics of Crisis: Deconstructing the Dominant Narratives of the Housing Crisis. Antipode 2020, 52(1), 145-163.