Research Abstract

MAKING GOOD MIRRORS: CREATING SITES OF RESISTANCE & CONNECTION IN A SOCIALLY DISCONNECTED WORLD

This practice-led research considers ways of creating sites of resistance and connection in a socially disconnected world through art. It is produced from my perspective as an intersectional feminist artist. As a woman of palawa tommeginne heritage, I exist within the margins of Australia’s colonial patriarchal narrative, a narrative that all Australians are part of, yet a narrative that creates ongoing and unequal sites of representation for many. I understand resistance as both action and opposition, active process against a dominant power, and necessary tools for the marginalised facing ongoing and imposed social and political structures. Most importantly, resistance is also a site of radical possibility (hooks, year) created and supported through developing connections, shared experiences, and dreamed futures. My research questions in the current Australian context are: how can we make these sites of resistance and connection when forced into social disconnection, isolation, and distance from one another? And how do artists maintain the active process of resistance and connection and dream of radical possibilities in a COVID normal reality?

While drinking tea and dreaming new possibilities for intersectional creative practices, my research projects explore decolonial practices and public space interventions (both permanent and temporary) made with photography, video, conversation, and accompanied by autoethnographic text. These creative practice works incorporate imagined futures (Blue Echo series, various, 2021), collaborative portraits (Eye to Eye, various, 2019–2021; Untitled, tbc, tbc), video and self-portraits (Yet my mouth is silenced with carbon and cloth, online/various, 2020; Blak Fem’ism, Gertrude Street Projection festival, 2022; and Untitled, tbc, tbc) and six podcasts (Radical possibilities and what ifs? 2021–2022). Methods include yarning, relationality, standpoint and situated knowledge. Combined with a written dissertation, my research seeks to find the moments that help us see new possibilities, what those possibilities are, all depend on where you are willing to stand.

Bio

Jody Haines is a photo-media artist based in Melbourne, Victoria.

By approaching photography as a social practice, Jody collaboratively focuses on identity, representation, and the female gaze, from a decolonial feminist perspective.

Applying her social practice approach to photography and film, Jody has been commissioned to collaborate with local communities across Australia, producing work for festivals and programs, including the Women Dreaming Project (Women of the World 2018, Festival 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games), Our people Our place (HorizonsFestival 2019), and #IAMWOMAN an ongoing relational photographic series (including Arts House 2019, Immerse Public Art Festival 2018, and One Night in Footscray 2018).

Exhibitions include Photo 2021 International Festival of Photography at Footscray Community Arts Centre, Tell: Contemporary Indigenous Photography Sydney Festival 2018 Ballarat International FotoBiennale 2017, Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2017 (AthertonTowers with Susan Maco Forrester), Channels Festival 2019 and West Projections 2020. Most recently shown in the group show Here I Am: Art by Great Women in conjunction with Know My Name (National Gallery of Australia).

Jody is a PhD candidate at RMIT School of Art and lives and works on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung peoples, she is a descendant of the Tommeginner people (Northwest Tasmania).

jodyhainesphotography.com
jody@jodyhainesphotography.com
@heidi_hole (instagram)
jodyhaines (vimeo)