Belinda Mitchell

I am a Senior Lecturer in interior design at the Portsmouth School of Architecture. I am also a practising artist. 

Whilst gender has been critical to the analysis and understanding of the consumption of lived, often domestic, interiors – the analysis of a gendered practice, of production, has been much less considered.  My research rethinks the production of interiors through an expanded drawing practice.

I worked as a practising designer in retail practices such as Din Associates and in public practice at Hampshire County Architects before moving into teaching at London Metropolitan University.  In 2005 I joined the University of Portsmouth, School of Architecture.

I studied interior design at Kingston Polytechnic and Visual Art at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. I am a founder member of Mitchell Bould, 2000-2008, a collective arts practice that investigated drawing and collaborative processes through inter-disciplinary and interactive projects. Drawing is foundational to my visual arts and teaching practice.  

I am the course leader for the MA Interior Architecture and Design Course and the MA Architecture programme with pathways in: Spatial Design and Practice, Landscape & Urban Design and Building and Heritage Conservation. Over the past 14 years I have led these interdisciplinary programmes and their recent development into the new MA Architecture course.I am currently the module leader on the MA Interior Architecture course for Interior Theories and Interior Practices: Design Project.  I contribute to research methods and thesis projects. 

Situated in post-human feminist phenomenology, my research engages with alternative modes of knowing through drawing, moving, caring, connecting, and relatively new technologies such as LiDAR scans.

I am currently a member of the organising committee for the forth coming AHRA 23 conference at UoP, Situated Ecologies of Care.  I am leading an interdisciplinary workshop and a paper session, Patience in Placemaking, with Victoria Hunter and Virginia Farman, University of Chichester.  Through an expanded drawing practice, the session engages with interdisciplinary modes of representation through repertoires of inhabitation that incorporate movement rhythms, routes and repetitions. The session asks, how might language, actions, gestures and materials perform to create everyday sites of affect – spaces of care?

I have led a collaboration funded by Supernatural Cities Research Group to develop a digital scan with CCiXR of Wymering Manor, a sixteenth century house in Cosham. This work has resulted in the presentation of a conference paper, Matter of the Manor: Found Magic, with Maggie Bowers, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at UoP, at the recent Architecture, Media, Politics, Society Conference, (In)tangible Heritage(s) (2022) and to presentations at the Magical Realism Symposiums held at UoP (2021) (2022).  This project has also facilitated a creative writing workshop at Wymering Manor (2022). Forthcoming is a joint journal paper on ‘found magic’ a new definition of Magical Realism. 

I engage with community groups across Portsmouth. I regularly liaise between Portsea Action Group and the University of Portsmouth. I have recently been invited to be a trustee of Wymering Manor where I am supporting the Manor to develop an understanding of the house’s significance locally and internationally.

I peer review for journals and publishers.  I have acted an external examiner for various institutions over the last 15 years.