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Paper short abstract

Focusing on studio image-work developed through ecological research, this paper examines how images shape ways of sensing, attending to, and knowing environments. Moving across digital and material forms, it reflects on image-making as a site of multimodal inquiry

Paper long abstract

This paper engages debates on studio anthropology by examining studio-based image-work as a transdisciplinary practice through which different fields think together, without assuming a hierarchy. Rather than treating the studio as a site for the production of field devices, the paper approaches it as a space where concepts, relations, and modes of attention are reworked through aesthetic practice.

Drawing on my work as an anthropologist and artistic researcher within ecological research contexts, the paper focuses on image-work developed through and from fieldwork, archives, and collaborative practice. The material comes from the UKRI Treescapes project and includes photographic, moving-image, digital, and materially mediated works produced across studio, exhibition, and museum settings. These images do not function as documentation or translation of field encounters, but as sites where mediation itself becomes perceptible: where the conditions through which environments are sensed, imaged, and known are brought into view.

Engaging the panel’s interest in ethnography as a practice of the artificial, the paper argues that studio image-work reshapes what counts as ethnographic knowledge by foregrounding aesthetics as method. Working transdisciplinarily, I treat image-making and anthropological inquiry as forms of reasoning that emerge across practices, rather than as instrumental means: the artificial is not defined by technical intervention, but by the deliberate composition of mediated relations between bodies, images, instruments, and environments.

The paper offers a situated contribution that reflects on the promises and limits of studio practice for multimodal anthropology, showing how image-work operates as a site of methodological, epistemological, and ethico-political transformation.