Linda Stupart is an artist, writer, and educator from Cape Town, South Africa, currently based in Birmingham, UK. Their work explores climate change, embodiment, abjection, and the transgression of borders, often through radical site-specific performance, film, writing, and sculpture. Recent projects have included performing on icebergs in the Arctic Circle (2019), immersing in the River Cole, Birmingham (2021–2023), balancing on a precarious log in the Danube (2024), and floating on a homemade raft on the Grand Union Canal, Birmingham (2024). Stupart’s practice is deeply attuned to the ecologies, histories, and fictions of the sites they inhabit, challenging conventional narratives of place, bodies, and communities.

For the Creative Fellowship, Linda collaborated with the Sexuality and Gender Studies Collective, a new initiative reimagining research and teaching in sexuality and gender at the University. The Collective brings together staff, students, and external partners across disciplines, aiming to build connections, increase visibility, and foster new approaches to research and education across HASS and STEM fields.

The fellowship explored key questions, including:

• How can UK universities remain spaces for critical study and discussion of sexuality, sex, and gender in a changing legal and political landscape?

• How can creative practice support academic freedom and research in the face of growing hostility toward LGBTQI+ rights?

• What connects the study of gendered bodies, identities, practices, and discourses across STEM and HASS disciplines, and how can differences be bridged?

• How can research on gender and sexuality inform our understanding of pressing social justice challenges, including climate change and conflict?

Stupart met with a range of academics conducting open, exploratory conversations to support network-building and furthering their current lines of creative enquiry.

In June, Stupart led a participatory session Getting your hands dirty: Queer making as knowledge production in universities to conclude their creative fellowship commitments. The workshop was attended by delegates from Activating Creativity and saw Stupart using natural clay available around Redd Hall Pond on the Unviersity's Streatham campus to explore creativity in teachign through Queer making. Under Stupart's lead, participants created small artworks from the clay whilst listeing to and discussing texts by author Ursula K Le Guin amongst others.

About the Creative Fellowships

Arts and Culture Creative Fellowships offer creative practitioners the opportunity to engage with innovative academics and professional services staff across the University of Exeter’s colleges and campuses. The Creative Fellowships are designed to benefit both the Creative Fellow and the host, providing inspiration for new approaches to creative practice and generating fledgling ideas that could be the springboard for future initiatives.