jhayden /210 /artiststatement

In my artistic practice, I seek to incorporate work that involves the use of a variety of mediums (video, audio, collage techniques, and composite imaging) with scholarly discourses from philosophy, the social sciences, and performative studies in order to consider issues of stereotype and mythology as they relate to the body, illness, age, memory preservation and disability. As a unifying element, my work relies on socio-anthropological metaphors surrounding memory, cognition, sensory perception and the conception of the body as a literal embodied territory to be explored, mapped and conquered by medical science. My work is both participatory and performative in nature, and takes into consideration personal and cultural narratives of pain, dysfunction, and desire. My greater aim in creating this work is to examine points of contrast and similarity between experiences of the public and private, of ability and disability, of stereotype and individuality, and of the corporeal and metaphorical.

My current work is centered primarily around the conception of a collaborative and performative oral history project that aims to empower senior citizens by creating works that combine the organic capture of personal narratives and autobiographical memoirs with the artistic techniques of assemblage and collage. Through oral history interview techniques, I will work to preserve and archive personal stories, which I believe are a vital form of personal and social communications that can and should serve as an augmentation to official social and statistical narratives. My work in the area of creative oral history creation is based on my basic belief that life processing through narrative history telling and retelling can be both a valuable technique for individuals who wish to preserve and present their personal experiences and for communities that might benefit from the preservation and presentation of generational materials.

In addition to generating projects that aim to be of representational value to both individuals and communities, I seek to create work that will generate a safe space for personal creative expression in a way that is collaborative, accessible, fun and empowering. To this effect, I intend to combine collage artmaking techniques with oral history practices in a workshop environment. The result will be the co-creation of an installation that will give both the contributor whose narrative is featured in the piece and the participant who interacts with the piece a sense of agency. I allow my work in the field of oral history to emerge organically whenever possible, and ideally in concert with the intentions of the person whose story I seek to preserve. I endeavor to involve the individuals and communities I seek to represent as intimately as possible during each phase of my creation process. Although I ultimately provide the scale and the content of the installation pieces, it is my intent to consciously create a space for collaborative context where participants share in the overall artistic agency of the piece and help to shape the direction of the final presentation.