Harriet Bennett

About

In my academic research and artistic practice I am interested in how magical experience and ritual contributes towards material culture and historical knowledge. I particularly enjoy exploring the stark visual and conceptual contrast between the tactility of ‘oldness’ and the severity of the digital realm.

My master’s dissertation, marking the end of a seminal time on the RCA/ V&A History of Design course, explores contemporary folk engagement with a site in the Cornish landscape called Sancreed Holy Well. I synthesised primary sources consisting of visual and object analysis of my own photographs of objects left at the site, digital ethnography, and newspapers with secondary research of local histories and academic theories from design historians and anthropologists.

I found it to be a fascinatingly contradictory site: It is peaceful yet highly contested, tangibly ancient yet a magnet for hypermodern technologies. The site’s features, notably a tree and well chamber, function as a publicly curated folk assemblage which is designed and curated through the deposition and subsequent displacement of objects. Despite how these objects are valuable votive offerings to the depositors, to others they are perceived as pejorative ‘ritual litter,’ hence the clearing of the objects in organised public events.