Shifting Ground is a four-year, SSHRC-funded research-creation project about energy, community and geography in the North — ten artists and researchers working across disciplines that don’t normally share a bibliography, let alone a website. A project like that has to publish like a journal and look like an exhibition, and those two instincts pull in opposite directions.
The site holds both. Each of the ten researchers gets their own page. Thirteen exhibitions and projects are documented with installation photography rather than summarised in a list. Five recorded conversations sit in their own section, and the resource library runs to twenty-seven items — video, reading, downloadable documents — which is the part another researcher or a graduate student actually arrives for. Events, press and conference appearances are assembled by hand instead of scraped from a feed, because in academic work the distinction between a talk and a publication and a show matters and a calendar plugin flattens all three.
It’s built entirely on pages, deliberately. A four-year project changes shape every year — a new strand, a new partner, a form of output nobody planned for — and pages bend where a rigid content model has to be rebuilt. Not every site needs a custom post type. This one needed room.
