Strange Places

For my Final Major Project at Schumacher College / Dartington School of Arts, I wrote a semi-autobiographical account exploring the multiple worlds or realms inhabited through a lifespan. This is ultimately a creative means of exploring fractured experience through separated parents, different life stages and later sexual trauma. When a person is traumatised, something both unsayable and intangible happens in their bodies, minds and souls. These experiences – however disturbing and painful, because they are utterly disturbing and totally painful – are also extensions, enrichments, alternate dimensions, and other worlds. They are places to travel to and from, within which we might find certain types of knowing to bring home.

This piece of writing is now in development to become my first novel.

My aim is to create a ‘transition document’ which troubles the hard boundaries of modern psychology and leaves tears in the fabric for a mulchier, metamorphosing, mythological way of seeing and moving in the aftermath of trauma. Along the way, I have remained interested in how the body moves through worlds, as well as how realms move through the body–exploring the permeability of a soft, female body in places full of sharp objects, linear philosophies of living, as well as strange patriarchal and capitalist expectations of consistent capacity and productivity. There is no final conclusion; the story asks us only to stay with the paradox of softening around hard-edged intrusion; of learning to accept that we will have unwanted images in our underworld which require loving attention; that repair is not about integrating these worlds but learning how to travel between them and knowing their topography; that our bodies are at the same time bounded and porous, and were always already infected.

A recurring motif of red thread holds this paradox; it is danger, spiderwebs in the dark, tautened energy–but also weaving, repair, navigation through labyrinths. Spiders trying to hold worlds together. 

The artwork shown here is a collection of weavings, oil paintings and sculptures, all images which had been metamorphosed in my body in the process of developing the work. The excerpts of written work were shared in audio, typed and handwritten formats. In the process of writing, I felt the need to ‘release’ certain images; they welled up in my body until they became almost overwhelmingly present, and so I was drawn to painting, weaving, making as a way to allow them space to transmogrify. It was alchemical, and I am now currently working on a lecture for the Auto/Biography Study Group on the process of working with such haunting images.