Sian Gouldstone is a visual artist and a lecturer on BA Photography at Bournemouth University. She previously taught for three years on the BA Photography at Leeds Arts University and for five years on the BA Commercial Photography at Arts University Bournemouth. She has an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmiths College, London (Distinction), and is a PhD researcher at University of Plymouth. Sian’s research explores affective and material manifestations of whiteness, in post-colonialising spaces. She has an interest in photographic materialities, suburban spaces and non-representational theories. She researches photographic methods for visualising whiteness, as an affective form of imperial duress and a legacy of British imperialism in suburban contexts. Using experimental photographic practices that draw on archival resources alongside her own images, Sian utilises shifting virtual and material forms of photography to produce and explore affective atmospheres. Her aim is to understand the continual forms of imperial duress and social forces of whiteness that manifest in contemporary suburban space. In her most recent work, she adopts various strategies for folding photographs, with reference, and in direct response, to ideas in phenomenology, philosophy, new materialism and affect theory. This approach allows her to experiment with means for problematising the domesticated, colonised, fixed, still, permanent, flat and representational; all of these are concerns that overlap in the study of photography and empire. Sian’s broader artist practices have explored experiences of domesticated and controlled space for over a decade.

Sian has collaborated with a number of other artist practitioners as part of the collectives RE/EMERGE, A Family Of and Artists for Affect (AFA). With RE/EMERGE she exhibited at Vacancy Atlas in Plymouth (2023). With AFO, Sian exhibited at Madlab, Manchester (2009), participated in creative interventions at Liverpool Look13 (2013) and Les Rencontres d’Arles (2013) and, with AFO, she exhibited at Bournemouth Emerging Arts Festival (BEAF) in 2021. She participated in Redeye’s Lightbox course, with Open Eye Gallery, in Liverpool (2011) and exhibited work and exhibited in East London Photo Month (2011) in the same year. Sian has spoken about her research nationally and internationally, including at the conference Visualising the Home at University of Cumbria (2017), where she also showed work in the accompanying exhibition of the same name.