Meeting Place is a regular series of informal exchanges and conversations, held at BALTIC 39. These intimate Salon-style discussions are interdisciplinary and designed to explore the ways in which artists collaborate with experts in the fields of science, the environment, health and medicine to generate new research and artwork. Developed by BALTIC Professor of Contemporary Art, Christine Borland and BALTIC Curator of Exhibitions & Research, Alessandro Vincentelli.

Artist and Professor of Fine Art, Rona Lee and Geographer, Dr Kathryn Yusoff discuss Lee’s exhibition That Oceanic Feeling, John Hansard Gallery, 2012, a body of work developed in dialogue with researchers at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, whose work involves mapping the most remote and unknown areas of the planet’s surface – the deep sea bed.

Lee’s work explores our complex relationship to this ‘invisible’ and simultaneously (as a result of increasing environmental, economic and political pressures) emergent space, reflecting on geo-physical methods of ‘world making’ in parallel with the imaginative pull of the contemporary ‘depths’.

Kathryn Yusoff is a Geographer Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London whose current research addresses questions of ‘Geologic Life’ within the proposed geologic epoch of the Anthropocene and the opportunity this offers to re-think human-earth relations and the place of materiality within the politics of life.

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