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Additional and alongside her independent practice Danica often works within collaborative frameworks in which she is interested in the balance between giving equivalent priority to both the personal and shared interests. Examples of dialogical collaborative projects in which her individual practice research occurs are:

Bummock: New Artistic Responses to Unseen parts of Archives (since 2015, with Andrew Bracey, University of Lincoln)

Like the bummock – the largest part of the iceberg hidden under water – archives traditionally contain far more than is accessed. This project seeks to investigate, research and use unseen parts of archives as catalysts for artistic research. The project is examining issues around how artists approach the access to archives differently to standard practice. Using artistic research methods, the ‘controlled rummage’ has been developed by Danica and Andrew to enable access to the ‘unknown, unknown’ within archives and collection – material inaccessible to usual methods.

The larger Bummock project is set up to allow individual artist research and exploration to occur.  Within The Lace Archive, Nottingham (2017-2019), Danica’s research developed a series of artistic responses to historical lace ‘drafts’– schematic diagrams of machine-made lace – which focus on the drawn lines found within the diagrams. Through redrawing, she examined the method of creating the lace through the imperfections in the drawn line, providing new readings of these historical diagrams. Most recently, within the Tennyson Research Centre (2017-2022) her independent research focuses on the archive collection of Lord Alfred Tennyson’s great niece Fryn Tennyson Jesse. Danica’s research here highlights histories and narratives that cross between biography and autobiography; exploring Jesse’s legacy and past while intermingled within crossovers with her own family narratives. Through various and specific mediums - biographies, memories, and narratives were examined through iterative processes.  www.bummock.org

Score: Mechanical Asynchronicity (2018-2022, with Martin Scheuregger, University of Lincoln)

A collaborative research project between visual artist (Danica) and composer (Martin), exploring historical lace patterns as the starting point for new live and installation-based visual-musical graphic scores and performances/live events. Danica developed drawings as graphic scores which in turn generated renditions that worked as both drawing, and score. In its totality, the work involved multi-components (vinyl records and live musicians), where multiple versions can be experimented with and reassembled to create many variations of the same material.  This lack of fixedness is crucial to the work’s identity as an iterative process more than a final product.

Returns (ongoing - since 2013 – with Andrew Brown, Joanne Lee and Christine Stevens)

Working under the title Returns, the group initially came together during a 2012 residency at the former Spode ceramics factory hosed by Bergen Academy of Art. Since then, it has repeatedly returned to investigate Stoke-on-Trent, its urban landscapes, diverse communities, manufacturing and craft skills, and the material history that has made it so distinctive.  Across the last year the artists have developed new ideas through idiosyncratic fieldwork, walking, looking and listening, each following the threads emerging from their previous research. Danica used found and sourced Spode materials – ceramic components, decorative motifs – in works that engage with a number of conceptual and material oppositions. Some of these, such as the modulation of value in found art objects, and art vis a vis craft practices, activate in the work relevant themes in critical discourse. Others, such as the relationship between drawing and ceramics, have specific resonance with the materials she worked with. Danica’s work within these oppositions combines embodied, performative, and formal exploration through constructions that trouble conventional hierarchies of practice­ – a drawing becomes the table for a tea set and pattern spills from the milk creamer onto the wall; highly ornate elements contradict the purpose of their functional design.

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