Sharna Barker Vestiges of Self: Self-Portraiture in the age of the Embodied, Decentred Subject

Can you describe your research project?

My practice-based doctoral research examined the boundaries and definitions of contemporary self-portraiture, arguing for an expansion of the genre. With recourse to my practice, I considered how self can be registered in fragmented presentations of the human form and how these devices point to self-construction as a bodily process that continually breaks down and transforms.

My works, as somatic (re)constructions of self, foreground disintegration, unpredictability, and failure, as ‘self’ appears and disappears interchangeably. Using predominately paper and latex, the paintings and sculptures underscore material and formal precarity to propose alternative representational methods. Here a continual collapse of form and structure is key. In emphasising material volatility alongside markers of the artist self, the works offer some stability and accessibility to read them as self-portraits, while simultaneously ungrounding the steadiness and security of ‘self’.

Why have you chosen this topic?

I am concerned with how ‘material matters’. In other words, I am interested in understanding how materials and forms can be representational tools that speak to an intertwinement of corporeality, embodied experiences, and conceptual meaning. Embodiment and change are now proving central to understanding how we exist and relate to the world and things. Therefore, questions of how to visualise the embodied, fractured self and how to define contemporary self-portraiture were interrogated.

I am interested how artists employ revised or new strategies for articulating and visualising embodied experiences where bodies are represented by unconventional means. Evident in this kind of art is an attempt to register a body in the capacity of material and form, stressing movement and action. Here I am influenced by material practices in Surrealism and post-minimalism as well as contemporary practices such as those that appeared in the 2022 Venice Biennale The Milk of Dreams.

What research methods do you use?

The research was practice-based and practice-led. My inquiry was led by theorisations of desire, particularly of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, that offer an embodied model for the relationship of art object and human subject and frame the kinds of strategies employed in my work. I explored material practices of Dorothea Tanning, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Lynda Benglis, seeking to understand how their works – by underscoring desire and embodied experience – enable ‘self’ to be understood as dynamic and changing.

Adopting these artist’s strategies, my works reconceive signifiers of ‘self’ in a fragmented presentation of my body, incorporating aspects such as my skin tone, bodily parts, and bodily scale, as well as the work’s material unpredictability and precariousness. Further strategies include omitting facial features, which the genre has long been associated with, instead emphasising pliable materials and forms. Being attentive to movement and gravity, applying methods of repetition, and navigating three-dimensional space and the horizontal are all key to my works’ operation.

In what way did your research affect your artistic practice?

The project assisted me in understanding what I was trying to do in my work for some time, but didn’t have the vocabulary or depth to describe or realise it. It really anchored and gave currency to what I am interested in and my approach to making. In this way, the project has fostered and become the groundwork for my practice and imparted skills that I can continue to apply in the future.

What are you hoping your research will result in, both personally and publicly?

The project provides a complex and significant framework for new understandings of the genre. My exegesis offers ways to critically articulate the kinds of representational strategies employed in contemporary practices, placing the contemporary interest in bodily aesthetics in a historical context by linking it to the visual language and strategies in Surrealism and post-minimalism. This has certainly enabled me to contextualise my own practice and simultaneously I hope that my research also proves valuable for others working in this space.