Reclamation Ground:
A Material Reckoning with Female Subjectivity through Site-Responsive Art Practice
This research enquiry investigates how a site responsive feminist art practice, constituted as a series of Reclamation Grounds, enables a critical examination of female subjectivity in a post-humanist context. Through an acknowledgment that subjective female experience has been jettisoned from preceding artworks, this critical auto-ethnographic enquiry establishes methods of deconstruction and reconstitution to investigate female agency in a time of ecological instability. Through different site-responsive methods across three key geographical locations, artworks investigate what other ways there might be of understanding subjectivity through materially embedded, earthly encounters that contribute to contemporary debates around Land Art, Feminism and technology.
The Reclamation Ground of this enquiry works on several levels of deconstruction and reconstruction, as both a sequence of artistic research methods and as a transformative materialisation of new artworks. This transformation spans site, studio and gallery through embodied encounters, creative extraction, material reckoning, and terraforming. These methods establish feminist readings of subjectivity through material thinking, exhibitionary practice, and auto-ethnographic methodologies. Through these approaches, metaphor is made manifest through an exploratory material practice as a Reclamation Ground, incorporating digital, sculptural and aural. Resulting artworks are each a site of reclamation - a literal and metaphorical Reclamation Ground - responding to three distinct landscapes that challenge the nature-culture binary through their postnatural conditions.
This active questioning of female subjectivity through site responsive artworks, as Reclamation Grounds, contributes to an examination of gendered subjectivity in response to geopolitics, landscape, technology and embodied, auto-ethnographic experience. Working with the materiality of ground, via the site, becomes a metaphorical container for working within the political space of reclamation and what that might mean in a posthuman/material/cyber/ecofeminist context. Thus, this research enquiry interrogates the significance of Reclamation Ground for feminist debates on what might or might not be reclaimed from predetermined notions of female subjectivity. The enquiry generates new grounds through a transformative body of work using exhibitionary methodologies that cumulatively, lead to an entangled reconceptualization of the subject as symject through site responsive, critically complex manifestations of female subjectivity.
The reclaimed symject of this enquiry is caught in an affirmative, psychological process of breaking away from individualism, towards the posthuman entanglements established in Reclamation Ground, while maintaining a sense of self through situated, embodied experience with more-than-human environs of which we are a part. These insights suggest ways in which technology can be worked with as a co-conspirator to develop meaningful symjective experiences in place, specifically within the context of ecological breakdown. It contributes to knowledge within contemporary art debates on how artistic practice can envision new ways of representing the complex species we have become.