Download the thesis - South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault

2 INTRODUCTION
Artists delve into shadowy places. We inhabit spaces and are fascinated by what can
be repulsive to others. Bones, death, corpses and other abject materials provide
artists with endless opportunities for metaphor. We gaze, and in our natural
introspection, we wonder.
This research is an immersion into one such place, of trauma, loss and grief and into
the particularly shadowy world of sexual abuse, and asks: what can art contribute to
wellbeing following this experience? It is an immersion into the creative spaces of
artists who look at what hurts, disturbs and stultifies in order to offer what reveals,
transforms and restores, and asks: what can artists contribute to wellbeing through
their practice and how might this feed a community arts practice? It is an immersion
into creating art with a group of women who inhabit this shadowy world of trauma and
carry the stigmata of their experience and asks: how can being part of a shared
creative practice contribute to these women’s wellbeing?
This research and document is the work of an artist. It emerges from my creative
space and practices and a desire to understand and articulate some of the complexity
of what I do and what art does. It examines the nexus between my studio practice
and engagement with the community. In Chapters 5 and 7 much of this examination
occurs through a dialogue with participants, their artworks and creative practice, and
in Chapter 6, as a reflexive dialogue with my own creative practice.
This thesis in an evolution in a long-term enquiry into grief and loss, explored through
the prisms of the landscape, death and ritual, and a sustained and passionate interest
in the First World War. My reflections about the First World War, which involved
several excursions into the environs of the conflict and resulted in a Master of Fine Arts
degree and touring exhibition, were a meditation on loss and the enduring pain and
consequences of that cataclysmic event. While observing the dysfunction of present-
day families and cultures as a result of this traumatic event, my focus opened out to
include trauma in my contemplations of grief. It prompted this enquiry into whether a
creative practice could tend the wounds of trauma and perhaps lessen the possibility
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