Practice-led PhD in Fine Art (The Glasgow School of Art)
Image as Data: Investigating The Monstrous and Pleasure as Feminist Interventions in Fine Art Practice
Engaging with Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory and Black feminist film criticism, this research delves into the visual pleasure inherent in both moving images and painting. It seeks to explore the interaction between gaze and touch, integrating pleasure as a feminist intervention in fine art practice. This project revisits the myths of Frankenstein and the tale “The Painted Skin” from Liaozhai zhiyi. By accessing the digital collection of the illustrated edition of “The Painted Skin” online and examining the physical object at the Austrian National Library, the archival research investigates the pleasures of looking and spectatorship through the lens of voyeurism. It focuses on the dynamics between monster/human and screen/body, as well as the materiality of physical archives and collections. Additionally, it interrogates how digital methods of examining images function within archival research against the backdrop of post-colonialism. Drawn to the setting of the kitchen in films such as The Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and Jeanne Dielman (1975), this project explores domestic work by examining the body’s relationship to acts of caregiving and pleasure-giving under observation, judgment, and surveillance within a constructed space. It aims to parody a “becoming” that reactivates sensory pleasure through touch and acts of making. The PhD project encompasses moving images, performance, painting, and ceramics, aiming to use images as data and live mediums of practice to respond to the myriad ways women and bodies are depicted in mass media and social media.
