Dr Shirley Chubb, Reader in Interdisciplinary Art and MA Fine Art Coordinator at the University of Chichester (UoC), has received a small arts award from the Wellcome Trust of £29,000 for a collaborative project titled Significant Walks: personal visualizations of the chronic lower back pain experience.
The research team developing the project includes Professor Ann Moore, Director of the Clinical Research Centre for Health Professions (CRC) and Dr Kambiz Saber-Sheikh, Coordinator of the Human Movement Laboratory, CRC at the University of Brighton, and Neil Bryant, Video Artist and Digital Media Specialist at the University of Chichester.
Significant Walks explores the reality of walking for individuals with chronic lower back pain and will involve working with a group of participants from East Sussex who will be invited to identify a short walk, within the home or elsewhere within their local area, which is of particular significance to them. The research team will work with participants to synthesize video documentation of their personal walks with simultaneously gathered biomechanical data and will explore how the resulting hybrid footage can be further manipulated in order to identify the most effective way to express the nature and challenge of their personal movement.
The research team will then compile the range of footage into an immersive video artwork to be exhibited at visual arts and science venues including learning and public environments, where the life size scale of the work will engage viewers in micro journeys that both interpret clinically accurate data and express individual experiences.
Dr Chubb said: "The research team is delighted to secure such prestigious funding and will be developing a website to monitor the progression of the project overall and to provide a discussion forum on the interpretive potential of digital technologies in the visual arts and health management."
The Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving extraordinary improvements in human and animal health. It supports the brightest minds in biomedical research and the medical humanities. The Trust's breadth of support includes public engagement, education and the application of research to improve health. It is independent of both political and commercial interests.
Find out more at www.wellcome.ac.uk
