Collating Research

Arts & Humanities Department of Art & Performance

Aligning with the Asia Triennial Manchester 2025 (ATM25), the Research Jam highlights the breadth and depth of practice-based research.

HOME, Manchester

Asia Triennial Manchester 2025 Research Jam

Clamshell is a collaborative project by Alana Lake and Nicola Lewis-Dixon that brings together research, practice, and artistic experimentation in the form of an A3 portfolio box. Conceived as both an archive and an artwork, the clamshell functions as a container for diverse contributions from researchers, artists, and practitioners, each offering a fragment of their process - texts, images, scores, drawings, or other ephemera. The project is motivated by a desire to explore how research can live beyond the studio or library and circulate in portable ways, foregrounding openness, process, and exchange. The project seeks to expand the possibilities of how research is disseminated and encountered, insisting on the value of collective making, the physical presence of materials, and the potential of research as an ongoing conversation. This will take the format of a pop-up exhibition and an open invitation to bring works to add to clamshell. Alana will speak for up to 15 mins presenting the project and its aims. She will also introduce With Force a recent sculptural commission archived within the box, speaking for a further 15 mins. With Force is a sculptural intervention that responds to the UK’s authoritarian policing of protest. Bringing together a marble baseball bat and cast-glass police truncheons, the work interrogates the limits of freedom and the right to protest in the present moment, while also calling into question the role of the artist in times of crisis. With Force has been supported and funded by ARTCRY.