THE JOURNEY 

​ABOUT  Approaching the Posthuman through Art .

The first artist to have significant influence on me was Francis Bacon. Aged 13, accompanying a close friend on her school trip, I stood rooted in front of his work, awash with emotions. With Van Gogh, I love the vitality and colours in his work. In the work of Giacometti it is how he presents the sense of a person and how from a specific view point his work jumps into 3D. Antony Gormley’s work and his phrase ‘the experiencer on the other-side of appearance’ never ceases to fire me up. The term Posthuman fired my curiosity. As my work developed, from expressionist figurative painting to an increased mix of video and installation, I began to identify with and appreciate the works and theoretical positions of Orlan, Jo Spence and Marina Abramovic. Moving back into painting and building canvases, I came to understand the influence of Rauschenberg on my work. I have work in the Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, part of the University of Cambridge; Gwynedd Museum, Bangor; Private Collections UK and US. ​

​Through studio practice the works uncover the experiences of existence of this once younger now ageing, female-flesh-and-blood 'unit'. Using biological gender and cultural effects to explore, and make visible, an ongoing life; the phenomena of being human today, (a ' now-human'). The form and content is sourced from observing my corporeal structure, the 'unit' with its medical events and interventions, memories,  senses, emotions, dreams and imagination, embedding them in visual language. The multi-helical journey steers through different focuses of the 'unit'  with evolving art processes; using drawing, painting, expressionistic figurative and abstraction, video, installation, built canvases and texts. This 'now-human'  considers herself to be an emerging posthuman,  seeking out relationships of living-today with notions of the posthuman. ​
At the first encounter with the term posthuman, my thoughts were "I am human, so what is this posthuman ?" The term fired my curiosity. Realising that with my internal replacement lenses, my body was (for me) already significantly altered by technology,  It opened many questions. We as a society had already taken on board and accepted the received video image of a person, as if it were the person, whereas in reality the image was a construction of dots.   The path to the posthuman was already begun.  I discovered two directions of travel, the literal and the philosophical. Both expanding at speed, philosophically, where the subject becoming separate and free from the corporeal becomes a possibility, and technologically, where we (the me and the you) are removed from our worn out body and transferred into a new, constructed artificial unit. We already see today how  Deep Fake can construct an image of a human that can convincingly appear to be someone who it is not. 
Wanting to know more took me on a journey.  The corporeal, my corporeality, became central to my curiosity within my art practice.  It was finely sharpened following my breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. There were several medical events where medics helped me to collect material during the processes, enabling the art works. My thanks to them.
The work developed into a practice led PhD Peeling the Body https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/165501/

It seems relevant to acknowledge here, that although I remain breast-cancer-free thus far,  cancer cells have been found  in my oesophagus. They were removed, leaving me with ongoing treatment. It was with the first cancer that  my interest in self-observing and the recording of sensations became more finely tuned, experiencing from inside while , through video, photography, audio, also 'seeing' from the outside.
I came to accept that the corporeal, of us, could well hold much more knowledge of our 'unit' than we hold in our conscious mind. The work Mind Knowing Body 2015 6 Mind knowing (body)  shows my breast cancer before it was diagnosed.         

I cannot agree with Stelarc's claim 'the body is obsolete', we still have choices once aware of them. Moravec's statement that 'The Senses have no Future' causes me concern, without senses there is no experience. Through my art practice I observe my own existence, exploring, exposing experiences. The experiences gained from the corporeal flesh and blood body, the senses, that Stelarc and Moravec dismiss. Experience is significant for living units. Experiences through the senses, emotions, compassion, empathy, disease and mortality. My position at this time is that experience makes our now-human life rich and varied; do we want a non experiencing existence? 

By exposing questions of the relationship between human and posthuman the works engage with socio transformative issues.  My born-female-corporeal-body draws in issues of feminism.  Peeling the Body brought focus to the ongoing issues of gender in the modern day, with the possibility of a posthuman-subject  side stepping / rising above them.

Human is a complex noun, with its associated gender inequality, 

Posthuman can encompass both the literal and the subject. The literal imagined by Hans Moravec, where we transfer the ‘I’ of ‘me’ or ‘you’, into a new machine, leaving the worn out corporeal body behind, defunct, making immortality possible. The subject written of by Katherine Hayles, accepts some of the notions of the posthuman, but continues to accept our mortality.