Adrian Shaw
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Adrian Shaw's MPhil/PhD Art research project
On the Floor: The Museum Floor as an Active and Relational Site of Artistic Practice
My practice-led PhD examines the museum floor as an active and relational site of artistic practice, asking what becomes visible when the museum is approached from the level of the floor. Focusing on the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain, the research explores how the floor mediates relationships between bodily movement, institutional rhythms, artistic interventions, material traces, and public encounter.
Drawing on my experience of working at Tate Britain as both a gallery attendant and curator, I bring lived institutional and embodied knowledge into dialogue with artistic enquiry. Walking provides a methodological thread through repeated encounters with the Duveen Galleries, connecting observation, drawing, writing, photography, moving image, painting, and site-responsive intervention. Particular attention is given to the different movements that shape the museum: the everyday movement of visitors and staff; the operational activity of cleaning, maintenance, installation, and art handling; and movement generated through performances and events.
The research is situated in relation to floor-based artistic practices from the 1960s onwards, with particular attention to Bruce McLean鈥檚 King for a Day (1972) and Linder Sterling鈥檚 The Working Class Goes to Paradise (2006), both presented in the Duveen Galleries. Alongside these precedents, conversations with artists, performers, art handlers, curators, architects, and other museum practitioners extend the enquiry beyond my own experience.
Through artistic practice and its documentation, the research develops ways of attending to the museum through rhythm, duration, repetition, movement, and material trace, generating new understandings of the museum floor as a site where embodied, material, institutional, and artistic relations are continually produced and negotiated.
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