OUR STORY
The womb and the room give birth to thought and image. The Enclosure Group is a collective of artists and scholars interested in the history of medieval women’s religious communities and their afterlives in art, literature, and intellectual history.
Stacie Vos is the founder and director of Enclosure Group, which first formed in the spring of 2020 when Vos called together a group of visual artists, writers, and scholars who were exploring various definitions and images of enclosure—from the anchoress’s cell and the enclosed rural lands of England—to the camera, the projection booth, and the confessional—in their work. Vos’s own work on enclosure began with her dissertation, completed in 2021. The research group became a vital community during the writing of this project, which was all done during the lockdown period caused by the global pandemic that began in the late months of 2019.
Today, Enclosure Group has expanded to include Enclosure Academy and holds courses in art history and literature. We hope you will join us in this online, and sometimes joyously in–person, community for learning, teaching, and sharing artistic creations.
ENCLOSURE ACADEMY
The Enclosure Academy offers more than academic content; it offers a community. Not only do our students and instructors collaboratively produce a singular, live conversation that emulates in-person learning, but they also become recurring familiar faces across our Academy’s courses, book clubs, workshops, and events–each a new forum to learn together and from each other.
We believe in participatory learning, meaning that our courses are made alongside students who are active contributors in a dialogic mode of material encounter–a unique and ongoing community of readers and interpreters of text & image. We encourage this interactive mode of learning across all of our offered courses, disciplines, and creative practices, including our free programming. Here, we invite our students and members to present in workshops and lectures where both works-in-progress and complete projects can be discussed, heard, and celebrated.
The Enclosure Academy embraces amateurs* and experts at once, believing that we are always discovering something new together, and that we are in this for the love of the game and the love of our neighbors.
*French amateur someone who loves (a person) (early 15th cent. in Middle French), someone who loves (an abstract concept) (late 15th cent.), someone with a strong interest (in a thing or an activity), non-practising enthusiast of the fine arts (1680), non-professional practitioner of an art or a science (1762) < classical Latin amātor lover, devoted friend, enthusiastic admirer < amāt-, past participial stem of amāre to love (see amant n.) + ‑or ‑or suffix.
Photo credits.
Above photo source: Black and white negative of a unknown person and place, . Vanessa Bell 1879–1961. Presented to the Tate Archive by Angelica Garnett, the loose negatives in 1981 and the albums in 1988 and 1992.