Up the garden path: telling the story of researchers’ career journeys through art

By Aaron Andrews

On 1 October 2026, Attenborough Arts Centre hosted the unveiling of Researcher Journeys, an artwork created by local artist Carol Pairaudeau in collaboration with students and staff at the University of Leicester, as part of an I-REACCH-funded Creative Engagement Fellowship.

This was the third round of a scheme pioneered by Attenborough Arts Centre to connect researchers with artists and creative practitioners. As artist-led Fellowships, they go beyond commissioning an artist to turn research data into a creative output, demonstrating the importance of arts and culture as research methodologies.

Throughout her Creative Engagement Fellowship, Carol held a series of Gelli printing workshops with staff and students from across the university. Participants were invited to create prints telling different aspects of their ‘researcher journeys’ – or the story of how they got to where they are now.

In Researcher Journeys,individual prints – which Carol compiled into a companion piece designed to look like an Ordnance Survey map – told individual stories: of childcare; of moving continents; and of ‘a career experienced, rather than driven’.

Carol took these prints and all the scraps created in the process to produce a collage which told a larger story. ‘The garden is a visual metaphor for a research environment, where new discoveries and greater understanding have the potential to lead to a brighter and more hopeful future’, Carol said of the artwork. ‘An old ladder symbolises the idealised traditional career path – a straight line from PhD to postdoc to academic post’, but this was not the route many people had taken.

At the unveiling, contributors and guests got a chance to see the artwork up close. One noted that the garden had ‘a lot of (bio)diversity at the bottom, but less as you go up the ladder’ reflecting the reduction in ethnic diversity we see throughout academic career progression. Researcher Journeys will be installed on campus in the coming weeks, where you’ll get a chance to see the final piece and pick out the individual stories amongst the foliage.