The house was like her: rebuilding the post-traumatic home through art practice

Abstract

This practice-led research investigates the relationship between survivor and home in the aftermath of domestic abuse, focusing on how this trauma-fractured relationship might be reconfigured towards repair through art practice. It develops earlier insights into the traumatic event and victim-perpetrator relationships in artistic research, by examining the post-traumatic relationship between survivor and home environment, which remains underexplored. As the primary site of female victimisation, the domestic environment undergoes a kind of monsterisation in trauma’s aftermath. Rather than offering refuge from the monster (Cohen, 1997), the domestic comes to embody it: the sanctuary-body splinters into vicious fragments, encoded with trauma, irreconcilable.

I first approach repairing these fragments through repetitious artistic processes including drawing, painting and ceramic sculpture, exploring a key mechanism for this splintering: traumatic repetition. Exploring repair through repetition creates space to explore, transform, and reconcile traces of trauma, repurposing repetition as a tool of repair. I go on to transform the spaces around these artefacts using installation alongside large scale visual narratives. Through these, traumatic personal-domestic bonds are transformed into nodes for social, environmental and temporal reconnection. Finally, I forge dialogues between the interior of this part-imagined post-traumatic home and the world beyond its door. Through the interplay of ceramics, installation and moving image, I explore the tension between comfort in confinement and wonder in wandering.

In this way, this study examines how splintered vestiges of the domestic can be rebuilt into ‘something like a whole – though […] not necessarily like any pre-existing whole’ (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 128). It investigates the rebuilding of the post-traumatic home by repeating, translating and reconfiguring the echoes of the domestic environment. It explores the role of reparative art practices –processes and outcomes – in understanding the fractured afterlives of female trauma, and in reimagining the idea of ‘home’ as a safe place.

Date of Award	2023
Original language	English