Artist - Photographer, writer, lecturer, psychological therapist and workshop leader.
I work both as an artist using self-portraiture, still life photography, digital imaging and video, and as a photographer/therapist to extend the range of potential meanings that lie within notions of domestic photography and to explore the relationships between photography, memory, identities and unconscious processes.
Starting in 1983, working with the late Jo Spence, I evolved and developed a new photographic practice - phototherapy - based upon re-enactment. Through embodiment, I explore the psychic and social construction of identities within the drama of the everyday. My work makes explicit the multiplicity of identities that an individual inhabits, using the 'self' as a text to be deconstructed, reviewed, challenged and reconsidered. This work bridges private and public discourses, theory and practice. Themes which I have explored in exhibitions and articles include: gender, sexuality, ageing, class, desire, memory, location, urbanism, shame, family dynamics, power/powerlessness, health and disease, bereavement, grief, loss and reparation. The work has been exhibited widely, nationally and internationally, since 1985.
I have run intensive phototherapy workshops and given lectures in universities and galleries throughout Britain, the USA, Canada, Eire and Finland. I have also run workshops in community settings, including a women's prison, projects with survivors of sexual abuse and schools based projects on digital identities.