Recipient of the 44 Frame Factory Graduate Award.
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IN/VISIBLE: FEMIN-INE/IST RESPONSES TO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
This project uses hand-made textiles and print-informed media to explore women’s responses to domestic violence. It is informed by my developing understanding of trauma theory and feminism. Responses to trauma wax and wane. My work reflects this diversity with the aim of expressing multifaceted and nuanced reactions to violence against women. I focus on the tension between private and public, fragile, and assertive responses. The hand is explored as a motif of identity and protest, while the intimate nature of hand-made work feeds into both content and process.
I am an emerging, print-informed, mixed-media artist living and working in Melbourne. My work is shaped by autobiographical traumatic memory. It relies on art’s ability to convey affect, offering opportunities for empathic reflection without the need for a specific narrative. I often deal with the challenging aspects of traumatic memory such as shame and fragmentation. This is balanced by work which reflects coping strategies and protest. My communication simultaneously reveals and conceals aspects of my experience. I thus engage with the overwhelming power of trauma’s paradoxical nature without attempting to resolve it. I work with traditional print techniques, photography, textiles, and artists’ books for their ability to embody emotion, intimacy and issues of disclosure and documentation relevant to my work.