Alumni Update: Dr Lizzie Swarbrick

This piece is part of our 2020 Alumni Magazine. The magazine pieces for this year’s edition will be published online, as well as included in a combined 2020/21 printed volume next summer.

Blog written by Dr Lizzie Swarbrick. Dr Swarbrick completed her PhD at St Andrews in 2017 and is now a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh.

Well, suffice to say that 2020 has been Not Good. We’ve each had to sit with the headlines every morning, working out on our own personal scales how traumatic the news is today, and what we might subsequently expect from our levels of concentration and hope. The majority of my colleagues in academia have been at full tilt, working out how to manage teaching during a global pandemic. All the normal rituals of summer – research visits, conferences, perhaps even a holiday – were cancelled. Of course, the people this hits hardest are those on precarious contracts, staff who are carers, and individuals vulnerable to Covid19. It’s as if we are all just a little out of our depth whilst swimming on East Sands; our tiptoes grazing the sea floor, our noses just above the water. For some the sea is rougher than others.

 I have to admit that, for me, whilst the sea is painfully cold, it’s also largely calm. My postdoctoral research position as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow means I’m protected from a great deal of the tumult. It has been profoundly odd to research in this environment though. My particular work is focussed on the complicated ways Scottish medieval church architecture – and all the multi-media art forms it once contained – moved audiences, both physically and spiritually. It’s near-impossible to get a sense of the kinetic experience of space somewhere, when you can’t actually inhabit it. For months I’ve been an architectural historian with no buildings.

Orphir, taken on one of Dr Swarbrick’s recent research trips. Credit: Lizzie Swarbrick

It’s the end of September and I’ve just come back back from finally experiencing some art ‘in the flesh’ once more. Lugging my research kit (camera, zoom lens, binoculars, head torch, os maps, pencils, paper, mask, anti-bac) to Bristol, London, Aberdeen, and Orkney. I’m used to sombre atmospheres in medieval churches, but this is definitely heightened by being masked-up in near-deserted interiors. That said, I did get that rush of wonder I’d been hoping for on Orkney. Clambering over medieval vaults never gets old, and being able to roam around St Magnus cathedral was spectacular. Perhaps most moving was the c.1100 round church at Orphir, built under the patronage of Earl Haakon Paulsson (killer of St Magnus) after a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. I’d been in the (much flashier) Temple church in London just a week earlier, but walking solo along a country lane to the bay where Orphir church stands felt free. I picked up a homemade chocolate cookie from a socially-distanced ‘honesty bun box’ and, after, dipped my hands in the waters of Scapa Flow. It was a remote spot for me. Remote from my university in Edinburgh, my family in Oxford, and even more so from the Holy Sepulchre which inspired this church’s architecture. And yet, the building here shows that this place was connected in the Middle Ages, and it’s certainly still connected now. I just hope that I can manage to feel similarly connected, however much I have to work remotely.