Victoria’s practice-led PhD research enquiry explores what might constitute ‘female subjectivity’ through an entanglement of site-based histories and auto-ethnographic material, reprocessed through image-making technologies. The practice-based methods she uses in combination constitute a conceptual and material model as a Reclamation Ground. This is a literal, psychological and metaphorical artistic site that enables a testing ground for reclaiming ‘female subjectivity’ from reductive, systemic patriarchal categorisations prevalent in the Global North.[1]

The Reclamation Ground, as an experimental method, will be developed and expanded upon throughout the course of her PhD study, in response to a variety of sites and experiences. It is also important to say that she holds the term ‘subjectivity’ in this enquiry with an awareness of its contentious positioning within contemporary feminist discourse, and she seeks to reveal and investigate the tensions that arise through the practice developed in a posthuman context.[2]

Un-challenged, subjectivity is a singular construct that binds one’s gender to reductive dualisms as a “form of power that subjugates and makes subject to”.[3] This investigation seeks to break open and complicate this association using Reclamation Ground as an artistic research strategy, renegotiating what subjectivity is in a posthuman context in which psychological and systemic borders between all genders and indeed species are being de-constructed and readdressed in the context of an environmental crisis. Victoria seeks to reclaim the term subjectivity from patriarchal legacies in the context of her artistic practice and the broader socio-political and ecological landscapes of the 21st Century.

This research works to ‘agitate’ and decentre notions of the female subject through a deconstruction and reconstitution of on-site matter using image making technology. Sites are physically encountered, experiences are documented, and digitised material is extracted before the generation of site-responsive artworks translate Victoria’s physical and embodied experiences developed through an engagement with site-based histories, matter, cultures and ecologies. Site-responsive art practice is a term that defines the Land Art genre, describing a dialectical relationship between artist and site.[4]

In this research enquiry, an agitation of physical, visual and conceptual material proposes a radical reshaping in which engrained, subjugating power dynamics are conceptually destabilised as a feminist Reclamation Ground. Thus, this research enquiry is about becoming and transforming notions of the subject through artistic practice, examining the unexplored potential that ‘female subjectivity’ might hold in a posthuman, contemporary context through specific methods of material engagements across different methodologies.