"I Was Wearing Golding Clamshell Earrings": Multimedia Exhibitions As Dynamic, Experiential Means to Present Visual Research
The exhibition is a multimodal body of work combining video, installation, sculpture, drawing, and archival materials. First exhibited in 2023, I am continuing to develop this doctoral research-creation into new, visual methods to communicate lived knowledge of sexual violence, working from my own experiences as a survivor.
This talk has three parts. First, I will introduce the exhibition via audiovisual documentation and storytelling, discussing key works: a series of drawings produced in court, one for every minute of my perpetrator’s testimony; a silent video shot underwater, 70-feet beneath the surface, that sees me wander an endless ocean bottom wearing winter boots and a clamshell-like parka; a sculpture of a sexual assault kit, embedded in resin and cross-sectioned into six parts. Second, I will explore connections between these works, tracing, in particular, the recurrence of clam imagery, from shells and growth rings to implications of dredges and dissections. Finally, I will consider the affordances of the multimedia exhibition as a dynamic, experiential approach to both analysis and presentation of visual research.
The exhibition itself responds to the limitations of dominant avenues for presenting lived knowledge of sexual violence and the need for alternatives. Whereas police statements and court testimonies can exclude embodied knowledge, visual/material languages can communicate on multiple registers, in ways that are not possible through spoken/written language alone. In the gallery space, individual works of varying forms are put in direct conversation with one another. As viewers move through the exhibition, they may make connections between pieces, generating meanings that exceed what an individual work on its own might elicit. What might thinking through these relationships offer visual approaches to social science research?