Janice's practice based resaerch draws on knowledge from feminist phenomenology, philosophy, anthropology, film studies, cultural studies and contemporary art and intersect with the concept of an 'in-between' through themes emerging from lived experience such as illness. Janice is currently undertaking a Phd by Publication.
Janice's research interests include:
- Feminist phenomenology
- Autoethnography
- Embodiment, the senses and film and video
- Screen/ space and the projected image in contemporary art
- Dialogic art practice and the space of performance
- The haptic as a visual strategy
- Memory, loss, marginalization
- Liminality, the body and rhythm
- Place, identity, gender
- Walking and running as a speculative tool in art practice
- Poetic ambiguity, intuition and imagination
Research group membership
Fine Art Research (FAR) group, School of Arts, Oxford Brookes University
Research projects
Janice's most recent research project 'Encounters with Illness' includes a number of experimental videos. The project navigates some of the physical and emotional dynamics of human experience as they are affected by illness and disease ( such as Parkinson's and cancer) and explores ways to locate oneself in relation to such a paradoxical space inbetween. The Project is auto-biographical, drawing on personal archives. Each video engages with a poetic visual language to evoke reflections of 'the fear of the other within' (Cristofovici 1999) as we age and encounter experiences of illness and disease. Editing is used to intervene in a natural sequence of events, to create a story that reveals a disrupted body, an 'other than me' (Toombs 1993) and to reflect upon a shift in the temporal dimension brought about by illness and the separation from a hitherto familiar place. The project attemps to articulate a personal complexity of loss that unravels with the slow deterioration of the body and comment on our deeply subjective and sometimes unfathomable experience of disease, often clouded by partial knowledge.
Previous projects include ‘Waterwall’ a large-scale site related projection onto a waterscreen located in the Regents Canal, London in collaboration with Fatima Salim, British Champion Figure Skater and a National Ice Skating Association Gold Medallist. This site-related video projection onto a waterscreen explored the integration of technology and performance based works into urban social spaces. This work continued research into the relationship between the body and site, the construction of images that embody ideas associated with memory and personal history.
'Tow' was produced as part of ‘Visual Busking’, an interventionist artwork along Camden Lock, London.This single monitor work stemmed from an interest in the phenomena of time, memory and light and explored the deliberate modification of time to remove it from its everyday context and allude to memory as it is embedded in place.
She has also been commissioned to produce artwork for ‘Luminaries’ (Oriel Mostyn) an exhibition exploring the use of ‘light’ in contemporary art. Through a synthesis of video, installation and performance 'Spin' explored paradoxical states of being and the use of video as an instrument for the articulation of mental space. The work examined the gap between what a looped sequence can show and what we infer about the actuality it derives from.
'Stumble' was produced for a group show at Ffotogallery in Cardiff alongside work from Mariele Neudecker and Gary Hill. This projection considered the nature of video in relation to its content, the way a tape is edited and looped for example to create a tension between the mechanism and the image (a dancer on Pointe in this case). Editing was used in this work to intervene in the ‘natural’ sequence of events to examine a state of being rather than a simple ‘act’.
Research impact
Janice's exhibiting experience includes:
Art Stands Still, Collarworks Gallery New York, Objectified, CICA Museum South Korea, Birth Rites, Whitworth Gallery Manchester and Kings College Medical School, Displaced, P21 Gallery London, Autothnography and Creative Collaboration, The Hepworth Gallery Wakefield, University of Buckingham Medical School, Wheres the Art and Mediations, Ovada Gallery Oxford, Luminaries, Oriel Mostyn and Aberystwyth Arts Centre, The Serpentine Gallery, Ffotogallery Cardiff, Chapter Arts Centre, Silent Health, Gallery of Photography Ireland, The Cambridge Darkroom and Stills Gallery, Edinburgh.
Her work was recently published as part of the Live Art Development Agency Study Room Guide Restock, Reflect, Rethink series, ‘The Displaced and Privilege: Live Art in the Age of Hostility’.