Research Statement

Embodied Objects, Incorporated Images: Art, Materiality and Sociality

Using knowledge derived from practice-based research whether in the form of creative activities like art, craft and design or a social scientific methodology, I explore whether and how the innovation and use of materials and images can influence and/or be analogous to human relationships. Through my current studies at University College London (UCL) I investigate the relational and (inter)subjective nature of action within a community's embodied ways of knowing, making and being.

My previous artwork (2007-2010) touches upon some of these themes as well as a more subjective and personal narrative by examining the relationship between mobility, transience and identity. In the installation Moving Home and the object series Baggage I transformed and recontextualized everyday items like packing peanuts, cardboard boxes, moving blankets and adhesive bandages to conduct material 'dialogs', and played with the analytical processes that we use to assign identity and value.

In my masters thesis series Skin Deep I used materials like clay and fiber and techniques ranging from handbuilding to embroidery to express my personal condition as well as larger social constructs of gender, ethnicity and race. Using the metaphor of "skin as surface" and vice-versa I rendered images of my body or created objects as 'materializations' of selfhood. Through self-representations in different media, I explored ideas of difference and the relation between depth and surface, the corporeal and spiritual, and the transcendent and the immanent.