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Research Fellow
Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies (CAWCS)
Tel: 01970 631007
Email: mcrampin@wales.ac.uk
Role in the University
Research Fellow
Background
Martin Crampin joined the Centre’s staff in 1999 to work with Peter Lord on the series of CD-ROMs for the ‘Visual Culture of Wales’ project. Building on the text of the three printed volumes, he was closely involved with recording, editing and illustrating interviews, as well as providing additional photography and design.
Martin was based at the Centre while working on a subsequent AHRC research project, ‘Imaging the Bible in Wales’. The project was based at the University of Wales, Lampeter, but was run in collaboration with the Centre and the National Library of Wales. As artist, researcher and designer, Martin managed the production of the online database and DVD-ROM, which was written with John Morgan-Guy. Together with designing the website and DVD-ROM, and recording and editing further interviews, he photographed hundreds of artworks for the project in churches and collections all around Wales.
Following the conclusion of this AHRC project, Martin worked as a cartographer and illustrator for the ‘Ancient Britain and the Atlantic Zone’ project. This work drew in part on one of his earlier research interests in prehistoric and medieval archaeology, developed during his MA in Celto-Roman Studies at the University of Wales College, Newport.
Developing the research undertaken during the ‘Imaging the Bible in Wales’ project, Martin conceived a new project focusing specifically on stained glass. During the ‘Stained Glass in Wales’ project (2009–11), he wrote hundreds of new window records for the database and added over 4,000 photographs to the resource. His online ‘Stained Glass in Wales’ catalogue was launched in June 2011 and continues to grow. After this project Martin focused his interests in stained glass on a volume outlining the history of the medium in Wales, and Stained Glass from Welsh Churches was published in 2014.
In November 2011 Martin became one of the first PhD students at the Centre, with the assistance of a University of Wales Scholarship. Bringing the experience of all of these previous research projects together with his work as a visual artist, his practice-based doctorate focused on medievalism in Welsh visual culture through the production of new artwork based on medieval patterns from the Cistercian abbey at Strata Florida and the churches at Llananno and Gresford.
In November 2014 he joined the ‘Cult of Saints in Wales’ project, co-ordinating a series of events around Wales to share the team’s research, accompanied by a small touring exhibition. This role was continued during the ‘Vitae Sanctorum Cambriae’ project (2017–19), and he also co-curated and designed materials for the project exhibition at the National Library in 2017. Funded by the AHRC, the texts published by these projects will be augmented by the ‘Visualizing the Saints of Wales’ follow-on project in 2021, which will publish supplementary information on the imagery of saints in the medieval and modern periods alongside geographical distributions of their cults in Wales.
In 2020 he published a study of the imagery of St David, and a book on the depiction of Welsh saints in places of worship is in preparation.
Martin has been involved in the Interreg ‘Ports, Past and Present’ project since its inception in 2019, and now works on the project part-time. He is part of the team at CAWCS supporting ten creative practitioners who are developing creative responses to the five functioning port towns in Ireland and Wales, drawing on his own experience working as a visual artist.
Academic Interests
- Ecclesiastical art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly stained glass
- Decorative arts of the medieval period in Britain
- Welsh medieval narrative tradition and the Lives of the saints, as well as related imagery
- Nineteenth-century medievalism, the visual culture of antiquarianism and the imaging the medieval past, and the revival of Celtic-Christian styles of ornament in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
- The role of creative arts within heritage interpretation.
Expertise
Martin works independently as a photographer and designer in a variety of media, and has deployed these skills in the series of research projects that he has been involved in at the Centre. He has designed publicity materials, books, exhibition catalogues and websites, working with most of the projects that have been active at the Centre over the last twenty years.
As a practising artist, he has exhibited across Wales and internationally. His art practice is primarily concerned with the recording and reinvention of medieval decorative arts, and this was explored in his practice-based PhD (2011–15).
Having worked with Peter Lord on the ‘Visual Culture of Wales’ project, Martin has been one of the small number of specialists familiar with the long history of visual art in Wales. Since then this expertise has focused mainly on the medieval period and on art in churches, as well as the field of medievalism in visual culture.
He has been recognized as the leading expert on stained glass in Wales and, following the publication of Stained Glass from Welsh Churches in 2014, has been developing an international reputation as one of the few specialists in nineteenth- and twentieth-century stained glass.
Martin has been preoccupied with the digital humanities since the 1990s, as an essential member of small teams creating innovative multimedia material on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM, and then in the management, production and creation of several key reference websites including the ‘Imaging the Bible in Wales’ database, the ‘Stained Glass in Wales’ catalogue and ‘Monastic Wales’.