Swansea Metropolitan University

Faculty Member, Faculty of Art, Design and Media

Reader in Arts & Science Interactions

About

Ingham gained an MPhil with the University of Wales in 2001 and a Doctorate in 2006 with research into historical and contemporary arts and science collaborations in the anatomical theatre. She currently runs a number of research initiatives within Swansea Metropolitan University including the Centre for Lens-Arts and Science Interaction and The Science, Arts, Technology Network. In addition to her academic research she continues to be active as an arts practitioner, and her current project, Re:embodiments, is a collaboration with The RCS Hunterian Museum London, and is funded by The Wellcome Trust.
Ingham’s practice is interdisciplinary, incorporating theory and practice. Research questions are concerned predominantly with the body and the discourse between art and the biosciences, and the relationship between photography, memory and death. She has received support from The Wellcome Trust, The Arts & Humanities Research Council, The Arts Council of Wales and The Calouste Gulbekian Foundation, to explore, research, develop, exhibit, tour and publish a series of artists interventions. These interventions are staged in domains that are normally exclusive spaces such as the Dissecting Room, the Anatomical Museum, the Hospital Operating Theatre, and the Medical Research Laboratory. Using a range of photographic, video, and medical and diagnostic imaging technologies, her practice explores concepts of consciousness and the role of the anatomical museum and dissecting room to perceptions and representations of disease and mortality. Whilst grounded in a philosophical and theoretical discourse, public engagement with science is crucial to the communication of her practice, as demonstrated by her AHRC Sciart Fellowship, Seeds of Memory (2005/6) with the Cardiff Neuroscience Research Group, incorporating scientific research into brain function and cognitive disease with a photographic exploration of plant-based pharmaceuticals and the notion of ‘photographic memory’. She also writes on photography, melancholy and memory, and on contemporary revitalisations of the anatomical theatre and the body therein. Her most recent publication is ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Moxham’ in (Ed. Maaike Bleeker) Anatomy Live : Performance and The Operating Theatre, University of Amsterdam Press (2008). Her exhibitions and installations have been exhibited worldwide, and one of her more recent installations, Vanitas: Seed-Head, has been shown at The Waag, Amsterdam (2005) and ENTER 3 Festival, CIANT, Prague (2007). In 2009 Ingham was made a Reader in Arts and Science Interactions at SMU and was also awarded a Major Creative Wales Award to develop a programme of arts based research into ideas around identity, synthesis and transition.