Nicola writes:
“Most of my visual work is life-writing. It’s an expression of feelings, thoughts, reactions, and stories from my life, and it’s evolved organically out of post-traumatic impulses to express and interrogate the social, historical and political meanings of these experiences. I have thoughts, feelings, a sense of longing, and a wish to be plunged into colour, especially blue and the colours that jump with blue. I want the colours and shapes to draw the feelings and thoughts from me, to relieve me of their tensions and contradictions.
“Often I am dissociated in the process, and the work displays characteristics of post-traumatic narratives, as identified by the scholar Meg Jensen, such as prolixity/verbosity (or in my case word-explosion), repetition, disjointedness and nonlinearity. Unnameable feelings and thoughts find their way out of the body, through the body. There is frequently no memory of creating the work, except perhaps in seeing where colours ran or smudged, and remembering the anxiety as it went out of control, or relief in seeing the painting take control of itself. Most of the work is made on A2 size paper. A plan is to move into large-scale through experiments with print enlargements and projection. I want to share the sense of immersion in colour. “
“One way of working through blocks, boredom, depression or dissociation is what I call ‘Radio Drawings’. Then I write and draw while listening to podcasts, radio drama, political talks and focussed discussions. This can help me stay focussed in presentations and conferences, although it is a very intense, time-specific practice which I cannot sustain for longer than about 30 minutes. Also, once I have filled a page, I call it finished. One development could be to sustain a session over several pages, although there may be time breaks, continuity could be brought into play. I tend to avoid conscious continuity, and I believe this is another element in my post-traumatic narrative tendency.
“The following slideshow of Radio Drawings includes work during a conference on Pedagogy co-ordinated by Jess Edwards of the National Education Union. It also includes responses to to a decolonisation/reparation song by Exuma and a talk by Ken Olende on the work of Africanist socialist Cedric Robinson.”
“A subsection of Radio Drawings are responses to works of literature, usually radio dramatisations on the BBC. They range from adaptations of Agatha Christie mysteries, through world ‘classics’ to contemporary and modern drama – including episodes of The Archers! This is where my creative visual practice meets the sphere of literature studies, which is my first and discipline and love. Somehow this process drags what is in me to meet with what is out there, in books and plays. None of us is alone. We are united in our alienation and sense of being isolated. I also use this practice to respond to documentaries and news programmes. “
“As I begin my PhD research I am consciously reflecting on the qualities of this life-writing and how I use text in visual art (or how my writing collapses or finds new ways to survive in visual practice) to express ideas that seem hard to articulate in a linear way.
“My research is focussed on representations of the family and developmental trauma, using a Marxist historical materialist framework. Alongside colleagues, I am participating in knowledge creation through creative practice, challenging traditional knowledge production through praxis, decolonisation, queering, neurodiversification and gender inclusion.
“The expressive work is attempting to ‘find out’ the systemic role of the institution of the family in capitalist society through exploring representation and a reflexive practice of life-writing. The family has undergone many upheavals and changes in my 60-year lifetime, and yet its social function in reproducing labour and sexual oppression – and developmental trauma – persists.
” A conversation with my good colleague Katie Margaret Hall identified dimensions and qualities she found in the work which reflect my research aims, and I have taken and developed this list to incorporate my methods, aims and critical frameworks. These are (not in order of importance):
- Immersivity
- Portraiture
- Self-portraiture
- Memoir
- Journaling
- Biography
- Political poster
- Historical materialism
- Autoethnography
- Life-writing
- Trauma theory and traumatogenic writing
“The gallery below shows more examples of processes and techniques, and directions. I will report on developments through further projects and posts on this website.”
