About

The aim of my artistic research is to identify how technology has changed feminism over the last one hundred years, in particular the impact it has had on women’s relationships to one another and the formsin which knowledge is shared. The spine of this enquiry - in which I situate my practice-based research - is Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’, a book published nearly one hundred years ago in 1929. The text,written by Woolf from the notes of a series of lectures entitled ‘Women and Fiction’, proposes a fictional narrative. However, as it was first published in The Forum (an American magazine which first began in 1885 and invited a number of guest authors to discuss current politics and social issues) it has often been considered as a work of non-fiction. My project is interested in this blurring of fictional and factual narratives, and examines the idea of autobiography as fiction, a mode that creates a method to explore the intersection of women’s voice with contemporary modes of broadcast and dissemination. My title: Cool Sex (sexe cool) is derived from Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Le Deuxième Sexe’ (The Second Sex)(1947), written eighteen years after Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’. By considering the changes of language and technology, most particularly to the concepts of time and knowledge and how they are accessed, over the last one hundred years, I am able to explore how women’s ‘voice’ has altered during that period. The project will reflect upon the implications of these shifts in human relationships, with aparticular concern for the female and the maternal. I will explore this through incorporating a range of entangled research methodologies, most specifically practice based research, through my own established art practice which is embedded in the everyday and the relationship between art and life.