"Khyal: Music and Imagination" builds on fundamental research into the ways in which Indian musicians and audiences experience and imagine classical vocal performance, using its insights to generate new kinds of engagement and creativity. The project brings together, first of all, musicians, ethnomusicologists and visual artists to explore the khyal genre and stimulate the artists to produce original works of visual art inspired by the music and by existing interview material. This new artistic production in turn facilitates new forms of engagement accessible to a wide range of people: in schools, at concerts and festivals, and at museums and galleries. In the first instance we will bring together a diverse group of people into a project team: visual artists based in both the UK and India, ethnomusicologists, and performing musicians. We will discuss findings of our earlier research, particularly as it relates to the moods and emotions expressed in the music and the role of visual imagery in both performance and listening. Artists will be introduced to our extensive collection of audiovisual recordings and interview transcripts, from which relevant source material will be selected. They will be commissioned to produced original artwork in media of their choice (e.g. paintings, video installations) inspired by this material. While this work continues, we will run a series of school workshops with a local arts organisation with a strong track record in this area, Gem Arts, in the course of which school children too will be encouraged to engage with the idea of music and visual imagery and to produce their own art works. At the same time, we will develop a simple interactive app which allows users to engage with audiovisual recordings of Indian music. All of these elements - original research materials, interactive app, professional and school children's artwork - will be combined in a public exhibition presented at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle. We will also give public presentations drawing on this material at other venues, including the Darbar Festival in London, the UK's largest festival of Indian music. The aim is to increase engagement with this genre of music and with the interface between music and visual arts more generally, to facilitate new forms of creative engagement amongst school children, and to foster dialogue between academics and creative artists.

This ambitious industry-facing project seeks to shape a key area of the engagement portfolio of the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and The Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead. In recent years these public-sector art galleries have experienced staff restructures and funding cuts that have made it increasingly challenging to pursue their ambitions to extend their learning offer and maximise their potential for engagement with new audiences. The project builds on the momentum created by a successful pilot project led by the Fellow and Anne Fountain (Lead, Laing and Shipley Learning Team) between May-December 2018. The pilot explored the potential for developing a new learning offer for KS4 English Language and Literature pupils at the Laing. Previously, the gallery had never worked with this particular audience of teachers and pupils, and they represent a substantial audience to benefit from engagement with the gallery's collections. Funded by Arts Council England 'Museum-University Partnership Initiative' (MUPI) monies, the pilot was undertaken on a small scale but led to clearly measurable successes. Questionnaire feedback from 100 KS4 pupils and their teachers who attended pilot workshops in late 2017 indicates their educational benefits and popularity, and the footfall generated by these visits helped the Laing overachieve on its related annual KPI target for 2017-18. The Fellow and Anne Fountain (as lead project partner) are keen to build on the momentum generated by the pilot project to fully develop their collaborative venture and establish a self-sustaining learning offer for KS4 and KS5 English pupils both at the Laing and the Shipley. This will establish a new learning audience for these galleries, thereby increasing both their learning visitor footfall and augmenting the annual income of the Learning Team, helping them to meet KPI targets in a challenging economic environment. The Fellow will thereby serve as the academic lead in providing a model for engagement that could be adopted by galleries and museums across the UK, with project activities and publications highlighting the findings of our collaboration. The project's development of an innovative learning offer at the Laing and Shipley will be complemented and mutually informed by the Fellow's scholarly research on the relationship between Art and Literature at the turn of the eighteenth century. Exploring a transformative moment in the history of the relationship between Art and Literature in Britain, the Fellow's planned monograph derives from research first began when the Fellow was a postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded project "Court, Country, City: British Art, 1660-1730' (University of York/Tate Britain), since developed through a published article and essay. The monograph explores the decades (1660-1735) which oversaw the development of distinct theories, networks, institutions and markets for the textual and visual arts in Britain, arguing that they saw a marked transition from Renaissance concepts that celebrated the interconnectedness of the Arts to an increased demarcation of the differences, and parameters, that separated them.