yvonne jones  - Artist Statement / Exhibitions / Catalogues / Education 
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Using appropriate materials and process my artwork explores the meaning of being human with the corporeal bodies we still are. In the work I use the corporeal body that I am.  My born-female-body draws in issues of feminism. My PhD Peeling the Body http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/165501/, brought focus to the ongoing issues of gender in the modern day, with the possibility of the posthuman subject being able to side step or rise beyond them.

By exposing questions of the relationship between the human and posthuman the works engage with socio transformative issues, the first time I heard that we ‘may already be posthuman’ (in a conference in FACT, Liverpool UK) I wondered how I had not heard this previously. The term was etched in my mind.  I needed to examine the notion. As part of this journey I became resident artist in the Centre for research for Cancer Immunology, UoS and currently with Foreign Object.

By human I mean the acknowledging, owning and exercising of the characteristics commonly associated with human existence. Experiences through the senses, emotions, compassion, empathy, disease and mortality. I acknowledge the area of difficulty using the term human with regards social issues and degradation of women. By posthuman I mean both the literal posthuman and the posthuman subject. The literal posthuman, imagined by Hans Moravec, believing we will be able to transfer the ‘I’ of ‘me’ or ‘you’, into a new machine leaving the worn out corporeal flesh and blood body behind and defunct, thus making immortality possible. The posthuman subject a more abstract idea, spoken of by Katherine Hayles, where we accept some of the notions of the posthuman, but continue to accept our mortality. My PhD thesis says more about this in detail, http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/165501/.
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                                                                 Posthuman issues are central to my work