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2:00pm Welcome to Spineless Wonders: Clare Lees and Sharon Morris


Clare A. Lees is Professor of Medieval Literature, Director of the Institute of English Studies, and Vice Dean of the School of Advanced Study (SAS) at the University of London.
Clare’s research interests include the early medieval literatures, languages, and cultures of Britain and Ireland, gender and sexuality studies, histories of place and belief and how modern and contemporary poets, writers, and artists engage with early medieval cultures. Her public work includes the BBC2 documentary series, Art that Made Us (April 2022) and recent publications include Literature to 1200, co-edited with Joshua Davies, Yearbook of English Studies 52 (2022) and The Contemporary Medieval in Practice, with Gillian R. Overing (London: UCL Press, 2019).
Clare is a founding member of the Spineless Wonders research network.

Sharon Morris, artist and poet, is a professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL where she teaches across the School. Her research centres on the relation between words and images, and her publications include two collections of poetry and an artist’s book published with Enitharmon Editions and essays on semiotics. Her previous artworks include installations, film-poems, and live performances; currently she is making handmade artists’ books using Mokuhanga, Japanese woodcut, and Letterpress. Located in west Wales the work follows her interest in how geology, climate, myth, history and language, entail the present.Sharon is a founding member of the Spineless Wonders network.


2:05–2:45pm Tour of Exhibition: welcome to SOA with Catrin Webster and Louise Chennel

Professor Catrin Webster is Head of Department at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University and was previously at Camberwell, University of the Arts London. Webster studied painting at the Slade School of Art, University College London, and attained a PhD from University of Wales, Aberystwyth. She has taken part in international residencies, such as at the British School in Rome and URRA, Buenos Aires.
She is a painter interested in how landscape can be defined in the twenty first century and to what extent history and contemporary art practice inform this understanding. She also specialises in the inter-relationship between painting and other two-dimensional media such as video, photography and print, and how painting can dialogue with alternative media to continually reinvent itself.
Her paintings are held in national collections such as the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff and the Arts Council of Great Britain Collection, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London.

Louise Chennell is curator of Fine and Decorative Arts, and lecturer in curating at the Department at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University.


Introduction to items from the National Library of Wales, Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru, with Timothy Cutts and Miidong P. Daleong.

Timothy Cutts joined the staff of the National Library of Wales/Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru in 1995, following a degree in French and German and a diploma in Librarianship. As Rare Books Librarian he is responsible for the acquisition, cataloguing and promotion of printed materials in Welsh, English and other European languages from the invention of printing with movable type in the 15th century to the end of the hand-press period in about 1830, as well as modern private-press publications.

Miidong P. Daloeng is the Archive Decolonisation Project Officer at the NLW/LlGC. See NLW Governance Annual Review 2022–2023.

2:45-3:15pm Discussion panel: making and curating: chair Tim Brennan

Flora McLachlan, printmaker SOA
Paul Croft, printmaker, SOA

Tim Brennan is a Northern artist based in the UK. His concerns lie in various intersections of fields, surfacing as enquiry into mobilities, poetry in the expanded field, the artwork as museum, and feral publishing. He is perhaps best known for his reinvention of the guided walk form which he terms the manoeuvre and which he began in the early 1990s. Brennan founded the W.A.L.K. research centre at the University of Sunderland and is a co-founder of the Spineless Wonders network.
He has exhibited internationally since 1986 and recently at New Art Space, Nicosia (2018), Museums Quartier, Vienna (2018 & 2019), Athens Digital Art Festival and Primarola Festival (GR, 2022) and his small press publications were represented at The Berlin Book Art Fair (2024).


Paul Croft RE RCA TMP: Paul Croft qualified as a Master Printer at the Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque in 1996 and currently is Senior Lecturer in Printmaking at the School of Art, Aberystwyth. He has written two books on Stone Lithography (2001) and Plate Lithography (2003). He was elected as a Fellow of The Royal Society Painter Printmakers in 2008 and the Royal Cambrian Academy in 2022.
Welsh Time
Published in 2009 by Gregynog Press, Welsh Time comprises of eight lithographs by Croft, celebrating the work of Welsh author Emyr Humphreys. Printed from stone, the drawings depict a series of changing scenes set against a constant and timeless landscape, based upon the beach and headland at Tan y Bwlch, Aberystwyth. Suggesting the passage of time, each drawing contains references to details from some of the stories, which themselves recount the life and times of characters living and working in Wales over the course of the twentieth century.


Flora McLachlan is an artist working through the medium of print, with occasional forays into painting, film and sculpture. She is a Lecturer in Printmaking at Aberystwyth School of Art, specialising in etching and stone lithography. She was elected a member of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers in 2008, and the Royal Cambrian Academy in 2021. In 2024 she She is the 2025 winner of the Eirian Llwyd Memorial Print Award.
Flora inhabits a wild place on the edge of a moor under the Mynydd Preseli in North Pembrokeshire. Working with chance marks and the flow of watery materials to dream her images into being, her quest is to pass through the material/spiritual alchemical portals of printmaking into magical worlds of the beyond.


3:15–3:25pm break


3:25–4:25pm Decolonising the collection: chairs Ludi Price and Farzana Qureshi

Ludi Price is a librarian and visiting lecturer at City St. George's, University of London. She was co-chair of the Decolonisation Operational Group at SOAS Library, co-host of SOAS Library's Hidden Histories seminar series, and is co-founder of the #FanLIS project. Her research focuses on the intersection between fandom and library and information science. She has published chapters in Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries and Liberatory Librarianship: Stories of Community, Connection, and Justice.


Farzana Qureshi is an Arts and Humanities Librarian and a PhD researcher in Comparative Literature, focussing on migration and ecological memory studies with oceanic and spatial wilderness in Tanzania and Pakistan. She was previously co-investigator for the Two Centuries of Indian Print, a digital collaboration with the British Library. She was also an outreach co-ordinator with Project Dastaan, a peacebuilding Partition initiative. Farzana has co-published a chapter in Liberatory Librarianship: Stories of Community, Connection, and Justice. She serves as the co-chair of SOAS Library's Decolonisation Operational Group. Farzana currently sits on a Librarians advisory board (LAB) for the digital Publishing platform AM.

Presentations by:

Jasmine Violet Shackleford, SOA PhD researcher: Black artists’ visibility in the Archive, the National Slate museum. See article in The Guardian How Clive of India's 1767 sofa ended up in a British South Asian Living Room.

Miidong P. Daloeng is the Archive Decolonisation Project Officer at the NLW/LlGC.
Miidong Daloeng is currently working with the National library of Wales on its Archives Decolonisation project. She has a postgraduate degree in Digital Information and Media Management (Archives) from Aberystwyth University and a bachelor’s in library and information science from the university of Jos. Her interest includes ease and free access to information, diversity and inclusion, long term preservation of digital resources and sustainable archiving/librarianship. Miidong has had over five years’ experience working in institute of learning, research, and finance.


4:25–4:30pm Catrin, Sharon and Clare: Closing remarks and introduction to the Evening event 2

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