The elusive encounter: an exploration of memory and trauma through expanded spatial practice

Making art and writing at the intersection of creative practice and psychoanalytical enquiry, I explore how memory can be activated through art practice in a sensory, embodied encounter that reveals and transforms trauma. The expanded spatial practice of this doctoral research encompasses installation, textiles, text, video, photography, sound, sculptural objects, performance and artist books. Using sculpture, video and sound, I consider how material investigations and experimentation with the sensory aspects of memory can, through affect, embodied perception, intuition and felt knowledge, be a means to transform past trauma, which I approach as an ongoing lived experience in the present. For my primary research field of contemporary art, I approach trauma through the frame of trauma studies and related studies on the archive and situate this research within the intersecting methodologies of feminist art history and queer autoethnography. This challenges traditional conceptualisations of the impact of trauma on memory by focusing on identity, relationships and artmaking practices to bring about personal and sociocultural change. The research starts with the proposition that the encounter with material forms can engage memory to generate meaning through the embodied associations of materials used. I employ the principles of body-oriented psychotherapy, such as somatic experiencing, to explore how embodied sensations in artmaking can release the truncated energy of trauma to focus on a ‘felt sense’ of self. Once that energy is released, the narrative is reclaimed and made anew. The embodied processes involved in artmaking, including the use of sensory materials, tactile construction, assemblage (hand-formed, gestural), repetition and performance lead to release of the unconscious energy embedded in trauma. I reflect on emotions and my own lived experience to reimagine and rematerialise them, uncovering trauma as an element of a fractured then re-forming identity. This research argues that creative practice is a form of somatic experiencing in which trauma is revealed and transformed, moving from silence to testimony in a trajectory from personal to collective acts of memory. My aim, through personal and sensory exploration, is to challenge and transform the understanding of trauma-informed contemporary art in society.