Resilience and Embodied Recovery in Printmaking and Photography:

My work is explicit, raw, and direct, conveying the urgency of my rage and my abiding need for freedom. Through a feminist lens, I explore issues of bodily autonomy, social justice, intimacy, trauma, mental illness, and sexual violence. Using photography, printmaking, bookmaking, and installation, I explore the relationships between images and objects, and the associations made with women’s roles and values and our bodies. Drawing on my personal experiences of trauma and resilience through art-making I argue that embodied practices like photography, specifically self-portraiture, and printmaking are powerful tools in the arsenal for healing by connecting my works to psychological theories on trauma and recovery, feminist studies, affect theory, and queer theory.

The thrust of my thesis work is a continuation of the work I began in my undergraduate studies at Smith College. I touch on themes I have been exploring in my artwork since I’ve started making art: identity and body, resilience and trauma, intimacy, touch, gaze, feminism and resistance, and the exposure of the private to the public. My thesis follows the arc of my personal journey of recovery and healing, as this process is reflected in my processes and subject matter. The first section explores the importance of printmaking as an embodied practice, while the second section discusses how self-portraiture has become a critical subject for understanding myself. I will also explore how women artists use self-portraiture as a means to reclaim and exert control over their image; their representation. The third section examines the history of the study of psychological trauma and theories regarding trauma and recovery, as well as the embodiment of trauma. In the fourth section, I will consider how affect theory intersects with my thesis work and recovery process, with an emphasis on anger, sororal solidarity and queer identity. The fifth section will focus on resilience and the usage of creativity in the face of adversity.

My research into psychological and sociological theories regarding sexual violence, abuse, trauma, feminism, and resistance has shaped the conceptual focus of my artworks. I will examine and compare the works of Francesca Woodman, Dorothy Nissen, Cecily Brown, Nagashima Yurie, Catherine Opie, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Tracey Emin. These artists and artworks have been foundational to forming the concepts, aesthetics, and technical approaches I have utilized in my thesis artworks. Folded into these sections, will be theoretical examinations looking at the writing of Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, Audre Lorde, Ann Cvetkovich, Marsha Meskimmon, Sarah Ahmed, and Margaret Iversen. Since my studies at Smith College, I’ve always had an interdisciplinary approach to my artwork, including a strong research practice.

My art-making process is an embodied activity and an expression of my creative urges and desires. Printmaking is a strenuous practice that requires the entirety of mind and body. Self-portraiture also requires contorting my body to extremes to achieve the right angle or refraction of light. To photograph oneself is a radical act that demonstrates self-reclamation. When I click the shutter, I rewrite every dialogue I have had.

As I am processing my sexuality, trauma, and identity, I am simultaneously gathering archival photographs, creating my own archive of female identity, companionship, interaction, romantic friendship, and sororal solidarity. I piece together my process of recovery from sexual violence and discover how integral these female relationships were and continue to be part of my processing of trauma.