Calum Eccleston: DIE TO SELF

A 12-hour durational performance concluding a practice-led PhD exploring the unseen in Alastair MacLennan’s archive.

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Archives appear to us through the lens of perception. As in life, we navigate our understanding of them through a subjective, thus unstable view. We may strive to uncover what lies beyond their surface, yet often foreground that which we have seen, said, heard, and felt, revealing only ourselves in turn. In this sense, an archive is at once beyond us, and of us as a physical and psychological site, both real and imagined.
Presented in The Alastair MacLennan Archive, this 12-hour performance marks the culmination of Calum Eccleston’s practice-led PhD at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee. Supported by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, the research explores the unseen in Alastair MacLennan’s archive using his “die to self” principle; the transcendence of the self through dissolving one’s ego.

 

About the Artist:
Calum Eccleston is a performance artist whose work explores the body, the self, and archival space. Following his MA in Fine Art, he was awarded a Graduate Resident Award at the University of Cumbria in 2019. As an active member of The Pharmacy, an artist-run space in Carlisle, England, he organised exhibitions and events to support experimental art practice. In 2022, he moved to Dundee to start a PhD at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee supported by a Doctoral Award from the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities. His work has been presented across the UK and internationally including at the 10th International Festival of Ephemeral Art (Sokolowsko, Poland), Hexxyduxxybox (Delhi, India), Out of Site (Chicago, Illinois, USA), the 22nd, 23rd, 24th and 25th International Multimedial Art Festival (Odžaci, Serbia), BBeyond (Belfast, Northern Ireland), and Le Lieu, centre en art actuel (Québec City, Canada).