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Stanley Kirkby: In the Woodshed.Edison Bell 8″ Radio Shellac Disc (c.1928-31)

Tracking Time: Art, Technology and Modernism in the Thames Valley 1850-1950
This proposed book is the likely outcome of a PhD which I will commence in the next few years – timing depends on how much support I get from my own or other institutions.

The subject is one very close to my heart as I grew up in the small railway town of Didcot Oxfordshire (originally Berkshire).

I hope to trace the myriad threads which informed artistic activity post-railway and how this brought phonographic, kinematic and wireless sounds and images to the Thames Valley area.

mapdidcot1

I will be drawing on the subject matter explored in my poetry ( Last Farmer : salt Publications 2010) and this in turn will feed back into the artistic research. The area was host to small artistic communities which used the railway as a means of ‘escaping’ from London. The Blewbury Artists and Long Wittenham’s connections to the Cockerel Press and Reading University will be explored.

I will also be looking at amateur examples of early photography and the military dissemination of technology. I also hope to link the spread of early phonograph equipment and recordings based on actual examples of early 19th Century artefacts that I collected from my country step-grandfather.