Mig Dann
gone
310gsm Canson paper
digital images, text
3.5 x 10 x 1.5 cm
Just Breathe
video (still)
9 min 18 sec
The past comes back to haunt
tulle fabric, thread
dimensions variable
Research Abstract
The Elusive Encounter: An exploration of memory and trauma through an expanded spatial practice
This research examines the intersection of creative practice and psychoanalytical enquiry to explore memory as embodied or sensory remembering. It asks how the encounter with material forms can engage with memory to generate meaning through the embodied associations of the materials used. Processing emotions and lived experiences through reflection, and then re-imagining and re-materialising them in a contemporary context, reveals trauma as an element of a fractured then re-forming identity. I explore memory through my art practice as a sensory, embodied encounter to reveal trauma. Through an analysis of my multidisciplinary practice, which references my traumatic memories, I propose that creative practice is a form of somatic experiencing. The embodied gestures involved in artmaking, together with reflection that is an intrinsic part of the process, leads to release of the unconscious pent energy embedded in trauma. I consider whether a material investigation and experimentation with the sensory aspects of memory, including affect, embodied perception, intuition and felt knowledge, is a means to transform past trauma. I argue that trauma is exposed, moving from silence to testimony, tracing a trajectory from personal to collective acts of memory. By underpinning my creative practice with trauma studies and situating it within the intersecting research methodologies of queer autoethnography and feminist art history, I question dominant discourses of identity, relationships, and practices and aim to bring about change, simultaneously personally and socio-culturally.
Bio
Mig Dann is a Melbourne-based artist who is undertaking a practice-led PhD in the School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne. Her art practice is multi-disciplinary and autobiographical, exploring and expressing issues of childhood trauma. Her work is informed by memory and forgetting, absence and presence, feminism, queer culture and decades of lived experience. She is particularly interested in how public art can create new and innovative relationships to existing sites. The way the past is remembered is through the present, and because those past memories are always shifting she is exploring how the concepts of memory, time and identity can be identified through the present encounter with materials and the sculptural object. Making memory visual and working with it as a set of possibilities is a strategy that she is investigating through installations that combine objects, sound and moving images, in order to explore the poetics as well as the politics of memory and personal cultural history. Her creative practice is underpinned by trauma studies, specifically scholarship concerning body-oriented psychotherapy, and situated within the intersecting research methodologies of feminist art history and queer autoethnography. Mig has exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2016 she was commissioned to make a site-responsive work for the Sculpture Walk at Wesenberg Sculpture Park, Mecklenburg, Germany, followed by a six-week residency, where her research on memory and trauma originated.