PhD
My PhD explored the relation between the operation of photography and that of remembrance – drawing on ideas from Barthes, Proust and Lacan. Midway through my research I came across the linguistic theorist Ann Banfield, whose work proposes that sentence structure in the novel changed after the invention of photography. Banfield identifies sentences that are ‘unspeakable’, partly because they can occur only in novelistic writing, but also because they exclude the “I” (the first person). The italicised sections of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves are good examples of these kinds of sentences. As a result of this discovery, I added Woolf, Flaubert, Joyce and W. G. Sebald to my reading list, and shifted my attention from theory to the novels themselves. My practice also altered; I exchanged photography and video for a kind of automatic drawing – considered as a form of ‘displaced’ self-portraiture – generated by digital recording devices and output in various media, including tapestry and inkjet prints, alongside text-based works such as my Concordances (2005-2025) and my diaristic writing projects, for example de Umbris Idæarum [on the Shadow Cast by our Thoughts], 2021, and ’s/Wake, ongoing).
Supervised by Profs. Anne Tallentire and Michael Newman. Examined by Prof. Briony Fer and Dr Jo Melvin.
Download ‘On the Blank: Photography, Writing, Drawing’
Guardian Diptych (Tangled Trip), 2006, Framed Newspapers, 67 x 95cm