Thursday 8 April 19:00 via Zoom
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The extensive range of Rosy Martin’s work shows a focus upon and a poignant investigation into the relationships between photography, memory, identities and unconscious processes.
Starting in 1983, working with the late Jo Spence, she evolved and developed a new photographic practice- phototherapy – based upon re-enactments. Through embodiment, they explored the psychic and social construction of identities within the drama of the everyday.
Re-enactment phototherapy moves beyond the impossible notion of finding any “ideal,” “real” or “positive” image. This is an idea that ignores how meanings are constructed or subjectivities are produced. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialist past, identities are subject to the continuous interactions of history, culture and power. The subject as the site of the articulation of representations, inscriptions and meanings can be explored in the freedom of the potential offered by re-enacting, playing with and subverting identities, rather than seemingly being fixed, defined and contained by them.
She has continued to develop ways of using re-enactment phototherapy, in work with collaborators and in running experiential workshops. One key aspect is the use of the ‘therapeutic gaze’ – a very different approach from the traditional portrait, in which authorship is challenged and both the subject and the photographer actively work together to create, and credit is given to both.
She has also used still life and video to explore the experiences of pre-bereavement, loss and grief by focusing upon her childhood home as a metaphor/ metonym for her relationships to both her father and mother, and an exploration of a working class suburban home, almost unchanged since the 1930s.
Since 1985, her exhibitions and publications have explored gender, sexuality, ageing, class, desire, memory, location, urbanism, shame, family dynamics, power, powerlessness, health, disease, bereavement, grief, loss and reparation.
Martin has run intensive experiential phototherapy workshops and given lectures in Universities and Galleries throughout Britain, the USA, Canada, Eire and Finland. She also ran workshops in community settings, including a women’s prison, projects with survivors of sexual abuse and school-based projects on digital identities. Hopefully once Covid restrictions are lifted, these can happen again. Rosy Martin was a lecturer in photographic theory, art history and visual culture at Universities in the UK and a psychological therapist in private practice.
Her most recent exhibition was in the highly acclaimed Photo 50 show at London Art Fair in January 2020, Occupy the Void, curated by Laura Noble.
www.rosymartin.info
www.rosymartin.co.uk
www.outrageousagers.co.uk/pdf/Artists_Statement.pdf
http://lookatme.group.shef.ac.uk/rosymartin.php
www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/gallery/video/investigating-female-ageing-through-creative-practice-in-conversation