Ronnie Angel Pope
Thesis title: Blank Space: A Site of Process, Interaction, and Possibility
Supervisor: Kate McLoughlin
My doctoral research pushes back against the class-exclusionary Modernist logic of reduction that equates ‘blankness’ with ‘emptiness’. I counter that blank space is the antithesis of a reductive ‘pure’ form, an a-political void of inactivity, or a ‘white cube’ of a space by reframing blank space as a site of process, interaction, and possibility. In doing so, I will reimagine and reassemble the blank space as a generative commons - as belonging to everybody. Interdisciplinary in nature, my doctoral thesis employs a dialectic method of thinking across materials, disciplines, and theoretical frameworks, drawing upon both textual and aesthetic examples from literature and contemporary art.
Research Interests:
- modern & contemporary literature
- aesthetics & visual cultures
- avant-gardes
- speed
- absences
- modernism
- post-modernism
- post-structuralism
- performativity
- affect
- art-writing
- the more-than-human
Ronnie is a Frieze New Writer (2021) and a recipient of The Film and Video Umbrella & Art Monthly Michael O'Pray Prize (2021). She is the author of iPhone Notes 2021 (If A Leaf Falls Press), which was flagged by the Times Literary Supplement as constituting a 'challenge to the ingrained snobbery' of the literary world. Her work has been published by Yoko Ono, Penguin Random House, The BBC, Frieze, Art Monthly, (The Man) Repeller, The Oxford Review of Books, Porridge Magazine, LUMIN Journal, The Quietus, and others.
