Roshana Rubin Mayhew (RCA) - 2024-25 Students
roshana.rubinmayhew@network.rca.ac.uk

Feeling the Blues: Leaning into Dissonance and Wrestling-with the Imprint of Trauma

This practice-led research investigates an emergent queer methodology presenting within interdisciplinary art practice – one that reconsiders unknowing as a ‘leaning into dissonance’ – a sideways move designed, in part, to address trauma in queer and racially ‘othered’ environments. This aims to creatively navigate the impact of traumatic events on corporeal agency, exploring the artistic capacity to give form to and shape the embodied experience of trauma. Necessitating a corporeal investigation, this research foregrounds bodily sensation through tangible interactions with clay within the palpable space of performance. This is bolstered with excavation of early Blues, in which the dissonance of living within the manifold conditions of abuse – queer, women, of colour – was leant into through the artistic expression of personal and collective trauma. This unique synthesis contributes an innovative and rigorous consideration of what is needed to creatively materialise and lift the weight of trauma. Simultaneously building upon and reconfiguring current approaches within critical race studies and queer theory (Rogers and Coutts:2023; Macharia:2019; Ahmed:2017; Sharpe:2016), philosophies of emergence (Nail:2022; Golding:2022; Lyotard:1993), and somatic approaches to trauma (Menakem:2017; van der Kolk:2014). The surge in abusive, oppressive practices has intensified amidst the rapid circulation of the digital age and ascent of alt-right populism. This exacerbates ongoing resonances of queer and racial trauma, further compounded by the erosion of essential sectors of care and critical thinking – health, education, arts, and artistic research – leaving us ill-equipped to mount effective response. In confronting these escalating challenges, this research underscores the urgency of leveraging the power of experimental art practice to creatively address and move-with the imprint of traumatic event. This aims to formulate an embodied, emergent path to address the profound impact of trauma on corporeal agency within the intricate weave of contemporary society and provide not only means for survival amidst struggle but creation of aliveness – pleasure, joy, togetherness.

This research aims to: Creatively address and navigate the imprint of traumatic events, with focus on queer and racial contexts, exploring the artistic capacity to materialise and lift the embodied experience of trauma; Investigate the affective ecology of live performance and foster collective alliance to wrestling-with the trauma imprint; Articulate and develop the emerging queer methodology, readdressing ‘unknowing’ through engagements with dissonance.

Principal Supervisor: Professor Johnny Golding