Public and Private

February 2016 

In Public and Private, Michele Allen presented a series of photographs, texts and a video work produced as a result of a four-month residency at Durham Castle.  

The works responded to the Castle’s history as a site of government and latterly as home to Durham University’s ‘University College’, known as the founding college, as in 1832 it marked the inception of the first university in the North of England.  

The exhibition featured three different, but related, bodies of work, drawing on photographic and archival research related to the Castle and was installed within its existing collections and architecture. The work was deliberately open-ended, allowing it to form a dialogue with the castle as a context and to frame broader questions about the relationship of the heritage site to the region it once governed.

Photograph by Michelle Allen, exploring the day-to-day life of Durham Castle showing the voting box in the SCR.