For over four decades Tate has built its conservation science labs and materials research around key parts of the UK's national collection of British and International art ranging from 1500 to the present day. The generation of knowledge pertaining to historic British paintings and modern and contemporary art (M&CA) in particular, has grown into a resource of national and international significance. Tate's modern and contemporary art research strengths now encompass 20th century paints, innovative cleaning science, plastics and polymer analysis. This forms the core expertise, knowledge and opportunities offered to others nationally and internationally, including through funded projects, post-graduate fellowships, doctoral studentships, collaborative funded research, informal partnerships and within the Conservation Department itself. Excluding the Turner Bequest, 60% of Tate's collection (or 23,455 items) consists of works dating from c.1945 onwards. Over the past decade, the acquisition of modern and contemporary art into the UK's national collection has accelerated to the point where M&CA works now constitute 90% of all new acquisitions and gifts to Tate. The preservation of the UK's cultural heritage must be centred around the appropriate characterisation of materials, as determining optimal, sustainable storage and display conditions becomes increasingly urgent and requires addressing through collaborative heritage science. This is particularly relevant for artworks containing new, lesser-known, degradable, and other novel materials within sculpture and installation art, paintings, and works on paper collections. Tate's capacity to offer access to in-house scientific expertise, mobile and fixed equipment and laboratories would immediately increase by more than 40% through the RICHeS access conservation scientist role. Our expanded access model will be developed and evaluated through a new partnership with the National Trust for their recently developed Modern Art in the Historic House research initiative, and additionally finessed through access case study opportunities with The Courtauld Institute of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, and others, to help ensure that our expanded access offer is ready, discoverable, and user-friendly by 2026. In addition to the enhanced access afforded by the essential RICHeS scientist role, the expansion of Tate's AHRC Capability for Collections (CapCo) funded equipment will underpin the deepening and broadening of Tate's M&CA materials research and offer. This will quickly lead to enhanced research and engagement through developing new knowledge of these materials and artworks. The bench equipment requested will expand our existing polymer analysis capability and the portable equipment requested will facilitate investigations at other Tate sites, with our Plus Tate partners and beyond; enabling us to better support collections nationally. When combined, the award will facilitate new questions, new research, new collaborations, and contribute to a range of key impacts in the preservation of M&CA across the heritage sector. This investment is vital to the future of the UK's M&CA art collections, where we collectively work to understand and provide solutions for the evolving challenges represented by modern and contemporary art; particularly within the context of the ongoing climate emergency. The existing expertise and achievements of the Tate team and collaborators, the transformative investments already made through CapCo, and the investments to be made through RICHeS will result in a sea-change in the way heritage science is inspired at Tate and accessed by others, which will undoubtedly underpin and strengthen Tate's vision to establish a national modern and contemporary art research hub within the next decade.

'Project code-named Humpty' [P c-n H] is a narrative art process, conceived by artist Kate Johnson in response to the wider goals of the 'Fragmented Heritage' [FH] project, awarded to archaeological sciences at the University of Bradford, under the umbrella of the theme: Digital Transformations. It is a project, delivered in 'chapters' bringing artist and archaeologists into a shared creative and scientific arena. A 10' high figurative sculpture has been created by the artist in clay. It will be cast in a uniquely developed material suitable for deliberate fragmentation over a precipice, with the purpose of yielding fragments which have not been influenced by an internal metal armature. Archaeologists will retrieve the fragments as if from an archaeological site and manually reconstruct the fragments, informed by innovative reconstruction and digital visualisation technologies they have developed on the FH project. When taken at face value, creating a monumental sculpture only to break it into pieces with the goal of putting the pieces back together again might seem a frivolous venture. Although the project involves some degree of risk, a frivolous undertaking it is not. P c-n H functions formally and conceptually and in its entirety, it is designed to allow for multiple layers of interpretation. It promotes reflection on our relationship with the objects we make, the nature of manual skill in a technological age as well as the nature of value and of beauty in relation to the art object. It concerns the paradoxes of human behaviour today and throughout the archaeological record. It will serve to strengthen the wider legacy of the Digital Transformations theme to the wider public as well as to heritage practitioners, curators, object handlers and excavators. P c-n H touches the core of the AHRC's ethos in supporting projects serving to enhance 'understanding of our times, our capacities and our inheritance'. In collaboration with Project Partner Bradford UNESCO City of Film, short films will be made documenting the process of the piece at each stage. The making of these films will give the artist and archaeologists opportunities for collaboration outside of academia. Engagement with the wider public will occur through the screening of the films in an open city space reaching an expected footfall of a minimum of 30,000. A live fragmentation/fragment retrieval event at Swinden Quarry accommodating a crowd of between 500 and 2000 people will incorporate crowd participation through music and the event will be filmed. P c-n H extends themes in contemporary art and importantly contributes to the growing genre of art and archaeology collaborative ventures whilst embracing wider interdisciplinary and non-academic communication.

The national collection is distributed throughout communities, localities, and national organisations. In the past two decades communities have adopted digital technologies to gather and record their collections in a form of 'citizen history' that has created a truly democratic and vast reservoir of new knowledge about the past. This reservoir could immeasurably enrich our national and global understanding but remains largely untapped, hard to find, and at risk of disappearing altogether. The intellectual and economic investment in community-generated digital content (CGDC) is immense and its rich and diverse content is one of the UK's prime cultural assets, but it is 'critically endangered' due to technological and organisational barriers. CGDC has proved extraordinarily resistant to traditional methods of linking and integration, meaning that resources often funded and produced by the public stand alone or are inaccessible. Diverse community-focused voices, sustaining the fragile histories of communities in transition, have effectively been silenced within our shared national collection. Existing solutions to this problem involving bespoke interventionist activities are expensive, time-consuming and unsustainable at scale, whilst any unsophisticated computational integration of this data would result in a lowest-common-denominator solution which would erase the meaning and purpose of both CGDC and its creators. The Our Heritage, Our Stories project responds to this urgent challenge by bringing together a powerful partnership, including researchers in digital humanities, archives, history, linguistics, and computer science at our HEI partners, the Universities of Glasgow and Manchester, with world-leading archive and digital infrastructure development at The National Archives (TNA), the project's lead IRO. This team will bring cutting-edge approaches from cultural heritage, humanities and computer science to dissolve existing barriers and develop scalable linking and discoverability across CGDC and the collections of TNA. We will collaborate in this process with leading UK heritage organisations, including Tate, the British Museum, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, and a network of smaller regional and local heritage organisations holding digital content created by and relating to communities. Our geographic range is essential for a truly national approach which engages with every part of the UK. Our project will use multidisciplinary methods to make previously unfindable and unlinkable CGDC discoverable within the national collection, while respecting and embracing its complexity and diversity by co-designing and building sophisticated automated tools to make it searchable and connected. We will showcase its new accessibility to the world through a major new public-facing Observatory at TNA where people can access, reuse, and remix this newly integrated content. As we dissolve barriers and add meaningful links across these collections, we will make them accessible to new and diverse audiences and open them up for research - demonstrated via multidisciplinary case studies - and embed new strategies for future management of CGDC into heritage practice and training. Public engagement is a driving theme in our project, which will be developed on principles of co-production and participatory design. The lasting legacies of this project will be the wealth of previously siloed, hidden, and fragmented CGDC it will situate and render discoverable. By so doing, we will revolutionise our understanding of the past, and the methods and means to achieve this, by developing cutting-edge tools, AI methods, historical and linguistic research, and new frameworks for sustainable archival practice. By enabling CGDC to be re-used and reimagined, we will help it survive and be nourished, for the future and for our shared national collection.

With the growth of digital technology, there is a new expectation among potential users of artist books and those that collect and care for them that the activities of making, cataloguing, storing, displaying, handling and looking at artist books can and should be enhanced by the digital. This proposal begins from recognition that important national collections of artist books are, sadly, largely inaccessible to the majority of their potential users and that this situation can be transformed through digital technology. Rather than viewing the computer screen and electronic text and image as a challenge or threat to the physical printed page, the proposed research network will explore the potential of the digital to transform our understanding, appreciation and care of artist books. The workshops will each address a different theme pertinent to the study of artist books and digital transformations. Workshop One will address two different but related questions. First, it will work with technology specialists to examine the relationship of the physical book with its digital representation and how that might be rendered. Drawing on the expertise of technology specialists at Tate, the British Library and elsewhere, this first session will think through just how those transformations might be achieved. Secondly, it will work with book artists and librarians to interrogate how that transformation might affect users' experience of the book. Touch, scale and the intimate relationship of the book to its reader are important issues to be explored in this session, which will ask what might be lost, gained or elided in creating digital representations of the artist book. In exploring both of these questions, this session will also reference the findings of related projects such as 'Touch and the Value of Object Handling' (2006-7) and 'Creative Digital Media Research Practice: Production through Exhibition' (2008-10), both funded by the AHRC. Workshop Two will work with artists to better understand recent developments in the creation of artist books in digital form. By extending our understanding of the concepts and formats of artist books from the printed page to iPOD publications, free downloadable e-books, hypertext works and phone-based works, for instance, this workshop will ask how we might nurture those practices and facilitate their growth. By engaging directly with contemporary practice in this way, the network will engage with understanding significant shifts in the nature of the artist book. This session will reference the findings of related projects such as 'What Will be the Canon for the Artist Book in the 21st Century?' (AHRC funded 2008-10). It will extend those debates by asking how we might engage with these new modes of production in the art school, the museum and the library. Workshop Three will ask how artist books of all forms can be catalogued to make them more accessible and so transform the way in which people can engage with them. Should they be catalogued as both books and art objects? Should they be more fully catalogued to enable thematic searching? How we might collect new formats of artist books? Should an image be provided to allow visual browsing? And how might questions of copyright be addressed in the context of making collections more accessible?

The sublime is, by its very nature, a complex and difficult concept, which eludes simple definition and takes on different meanings in different times, cultures and geographical locations. Yet, for many people, who have never considered the question in theoretical or historical terms, recognition of the existence of the Sublime is confirmed by their experience of the natural world, and the way it is interpreted by artists and writers.\n\nThe project will be set in the wider context of Tate's commitment to research its Collection, to display it in new and innovative ways, and to explore its range and potential through varied collaborations with the scholarly community and the public at large. From the early 18th century to the present day, images of landscape occupy a prominent position in Tate's Collection. Over the years Tate has promoted landscape through a range of themed and monographic exhibitions and displays, a number of which have given a prominent place to the sublime. They include Tate's ongoing displays of the great Romantic artist, JMW Turner, and the recent Tate Britain exhibitions, 'American Nature' (2004). In 2000 Tate Modern's vast new Turbine Hall was greeted as an architectural embodiment of the sublime - a proposal which has been acknowledged since through a series of ambitious art installations, including Olafur Eliasson's 'Weather Project' of 2003, and Rachel Whiteread's installation 'Embankment' (2005-6) - inspired by her experiences as an artist in the arctic wilderness with 'Cape Farewell'.\n\nOne aim of this project is to draw together a wide range of individuals under the umbrella of Tate's Collection to discuss, debate and collaborate on a series of interrelated events and research activities focused upon the role of the sublime in our perception of the natural world. These individuals will include established scholars from a broad range of disciplines, curators, artists, post-graduate students, and young museum professionals - at least one of whom will be selected and employed by Tate specifically to work on this project. Another principal aim is to engage Tate's audience closely in our exploration of the Sublime. We will do this through our dedicated displays, our proposed 'Tate Sublime' website, and a diverse range of educational activities, directed towards school children, students and the adult community.\n\nThrough our investigation, we wish to achieve a greater understanding of the ways in which perception of the sublime in the external landscape - rural and urban, historic and contemporary, real and imagined - are shaped by cultural experiences: the art that we look at, the books that we read, and the ideas that are communicated to us through the medium of history, philosophy, poetry, politics, and religion. It is not an objective of the project to impose the concept of the sublime upon our audience. Rather, one of our objectives is to discover, through collaboration with them, whether the Sublime remains a legitimate and potent concept in the contemporary world.\n\nAmong the potential benefits of this research project will be achieving new and innovative ways of engaging with Tate's Collection across a wide range of material, and bringing it, at the same time, before a diverse audience. One important potential application is to determine the most effective ways in which visual images - in this case principally landscape based art works - can be used as the focus for an investigation of a fundamentally abstract concept, and how best such a concept can be discussed and disseminated, not only to those with a vested academic or museological interest, but to a broader public.\n