Investigating disorientation through the adoption of role-play in contemporary fine art practice

Through my programme of practice-led research I have used role-play as a vehicle for the exploration of identity and politics in a series of art works encompassing video, drawing and photography. This research discusses the highly spatialised ways of describing cultural identity, covering aspects of: film, mapping, spatial practices and theory, performativity and translation, as well as a body of art works by the artist- researcher and other contemporary artists. I move through overlapping terrains of female geographers, cultural and visual theorists, filmmakers, architectural historians and theorists, sociologists, psychoanalysts, art writers and artists.My primary focus is role-play and identity with relation to the experience of place and displacement - role-play for me is a strategy for the physical navigation and negotiation, translation and reconciliation within a given site. In my practice I make use of the characters of the Navigator and the Ambassadress to explore physical and linguistic aspects of the description and translation of space. I will discuss these roles, through the art works generated, firstly to explore the legacy of female explorers and the rise of spatial language and metaphor to examine the female experience of space, and secondly to interrogate the notion of disorientation and dislocation; of being out of place.The written thesis is constructed around two main sections - mirroring the two roles in my practice: that of the Navigator and the Ambassadress. The submission consists of art works made during the doctoral research programme, employing these roles to produce separate bodies of drawing, photography and multi-screen video works that reflect my primary themes