PhD Project Portfolio

Case Study No 1. A-Part from the Earth
Case Study No 2.Distortions and Disembodiments
Case Study No 3.Female Form

This Assemblage section explores the intersection between art and trauma by considering how bodily experience of trauma can distort, deform, and re-shape self-perception. These works reflect my commitment to advancing critical arts research by fostering insightful dialogues and innovative approaches to understanding complex human conditions through exploratory creative art practice processes.

Case Study No 1.Turning Insides Out
Case Study No 2.Embodiments, Enactments & Re-Enactments
Case Study No 3.Performing the Self and Others

This Assemblage section of my project entitled 'Insides/Outsides: Performing the Self/Selves' explores the hidden or hiding, disguised, anonymous or partially obscured self through my arts research, moving-image and photographic practice. It reflects my interest in contemporary artistic practice and how it can be used in critical dialogues around adverse childhood or later adult traumatic experiences. I use immersive performances, audio and imagery that engage different perspectives on self-representation.

Case Study No 1.Damaged Family Photographs
Case Study No 2.Damaged Family – Surface Damage Only
Case Study No 3.Damaged Family - Ghosts

The source material for the images in this Assemblage are taken from my family's archive of photographs and photograph albums. Having laid abandoned in the corner of an old farm outbuilding they have been marked by time and deterioration; with the original analogue picture surface being damaged or almost completely obliterated, save for the abstract patterns and distressed surfaces that flow in displaced pigments and the marks left by natural processes. The damaged surfaces extend these studies into a visual landscape that traces time past, and time present, to create a new image for time future.

Case Study No 1.Transformation/s
Case Study No 2.Skin and Bones
Case Study No 3.Re-turning/Re-membering

This Assemblage is a visual exploration of the way objects, people, places and images embed themselves in the psyche and speak to the processes of transformation as the sense of self shape-shifts through time. The work considers how place informs who we are and how we are formed - how we time-hop and return to the past to bring back new rememberances with every return. Through this work I consider the inevitable process of aging - examining the abstracts textues and tones of our own human skin and how time, memory and place reshape the self, as our innate search for sanctuary within nurturing ‘safe places’ like nests continues.

Case Study No 1.Bear-Witness
Case Study No 2.Material Inscriptions - Temporal Traces
Case Study No 3.Becoming-Bear
Case Study No 4.Bear Adventures
Case Study No 5.Becoming-Otherwise

This Assemblage section contains several phases of work that connect to my childhood teddy-bear. I begin to experiment with the soft yellow knitted fur-skin or surface of 'Bear' imprinting its texture onto my own skin. As a childhood symbol of stability and comfort, the journey of 'Bear' is traced from inception when created by my Grandma Flora, to being inscribed, replicated, and re-made onto my own skin. This performative work turns my teddy-bear into a patchwork knitted costume, which I then 'inhabit'. This new 'fur-skin' becomes a soft, wearable, sculptural form. The photographic images move between portraiture and object study, giving these handmade forms a playful while surreal presence.