ABOUT

Red, Amber, Green Britain is an online exhibition of work produced by Helen Snell during her tenure as artist in residence at the University of Exeter from September 2020 - March 2022, as part of the project ‘Inequality, Identity and the Media in Brexit-Covid 19 Britain’. This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of UK Research and Innovation’s rapid response initiative to COVID-19. This website, which also hosts an interactive app, features Helen’s responses to our research findings and methodologies. This online presentation enables our research findings to become accessible to audiences beyond the academic community. 

We are an interdisciplinary team of ethnographers (Katharine Tyler, Principal Investigator, Joshua Blamire, Research Fellow) and political scientists with expertise in media analysis and surveys (Co-Investigators Susan Banducci, Daniel Stevens, and Research Fellows Laszlo Horvath and Andrew Jones) at the University of Exeter and an ethnographer (Co-Investigator Cathrine Degnen) at Newcastle University. We are interested in the ways in which Brexit and covid-19 – and the intersecting inequalities that these processes produce – have been framed by the media and experienced within the everyday. Examining these inequalities, and their potential effects on social and political polarisation, is crucial to understanding how British society will emerge from these dual processes. 

We have conducted  research https://brexit-studies.org/covid-19/ on experiences of the pandemic that builds on our existing project https://brexit-studies.org/belonging/ that explores identity, belonging and the role  of the media in Brexit Britain. Our research on the pandemic includes a three-wave panel survey and online fieldwork interviews with participants across England, many of whom we had previously interviewed as part of our Brexit project. In these conversational interviews, we explored with participants their experiences of the pandemic, their views on the government handling of the pandemic and Brexit, their media practices, and their hopes for the future. Katharine Tyler conducted the interviews in the South West, Joshua Blamire in the East Midlands and Degnen in the North East of England. Helen Snell also conducted interviews in the South West and participated in some of Katharine Tyler’s interviews. We have included extracts from these interviews in this exhibition website. All direct interview quotations reported on this website draw on informal conversational-style interviews held online between October 2020 and July 2021. This time period included a nation-wide lockdown across the UK.

The resulting drawings and GIF animations reference the circularity of news headlines, government statements, information and disinformation. The looping, pulsing animations invoke the prevailing climate of confusion, a culture of distrust, denial, mixed messaging and political U turns. Traffic light colours run throughout the visuals and articulate this ‘stop start’ culture. Amber becomes the colour of confusion, the unknown and non-binary space. The need for anonymity in the fieldwork has given rise to questions around the visualisation of anonymity. These questions reveal powerful associations suggested by blanks, cut aways and pixelations. Many of the animations feature blanks, black outs /white outs or shadows and absences in flickering colours. The anonymous space, the amber/yellow space becomes a rich metaphor, a kick back against stereotypes, and binaries. 

Helen’s use of pencil drawing as a recording tool, as opposed to photography, has enabled a distancing process that retains a human, analogue touch. The subjective process of making drawings from supposedly objective, but often highly edited press images is in stark contrast to the presentation of these images and animations on a variety of digital platforms and apps. 

Some of our interviewees’ responses to Brexit and COVID-19 were developed into animations for an interactive app that Helen designed in collaboration with Laszlo Horvath, political scientist and team member. The app was featured at the Science Gallery in Detroit in their recent exhibition ‘Tracked and Traced’ in 2020. The team have also been working with Freddy Wordingham and James Allen, software engineers at the Institute for Data Science and AI at the University of Exeter in designing the interactive app.

The animations were also used in ethnographic fieldwork interviews to prompt discussion with participants and were sometimes fed back to the same participants who contributed the original source material. The use of these visual stimuli has allowed for new methodologies to emerge, both in the collection of survey data via the app and also in some of the fieldwork interviews.

Brexit and COVID-19 are extraordinary social and political processes that are occurring simultaneously. These events are exposing the major inequalities that underpin British society across class, ethnic, racial, national, migrant, generational and geographical identities. They are also both high profile public events and processes that generate media and government information. Our projects include: “Identity, Belonging and the Role of the Media in Brexit Britain” that is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and “Identity, Inequality and the Media in Brexit-COVID-19-Britain” that is funded by the ESRC as part of UK Research and Innovation’s rapid response initiative to COVID-19.