Janice is currently researching how running could be used as a speculative tool within art practice to investigate time, memory and the ineffable. Conversely, she has been constructing fragmented narratives and engaging with other processes of editing to think about psychological displacement and to explore place as an extension of the body/memory.
Janice's research interests include:
- Feminist phenomenology and time
- Autoethnography
- Embodiment, the senses and film and video
- Screen/ space and the projected image in contemporary art
- Repetition, duration and the diagnostic gaze
- 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
Her most recent work ‘A Well Trodden Path ( the distance between two places)' is an experimental video installation originating from a walk with the artsist’s mother whose life has changed since the onset of Parkinson’s disease. Along with associated research into the ways in which running could be used as a speculative tool within art practice to investigate memory, time and the ineffable, the video is an attempt to explore changing relationships through shifts in time and perception. The video encounters themes of displacement and loss through a poetic narrative along with a fascination with what the film critic Laura Marks terms as ‘haptic visuality’. Fragmented narratives and processes of editing are used to explore the idea of the screen as a psychological barriers as well as a site to project into, to imagine that which is not seen.
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’ 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:
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’.