Supervisor: Professor Adrian Heathfield

Institution email:   helpsa1@roehampton.ac.uk

In the intersecting fields of live art, performance, and visual art practices, the exchange between scenography and the body is gaining significance, professionally and academically. These arts increasingly attend to the multisensory perception of the subject by developing environments intended to intensify affective and meaningful impact on their audiences.  Building from my established practice of sculptural installation as an investigative platform, I will draw on interdisciplinary resources combining research from enteric neuroscience, medical humanities, phenomenology, and discourse on embodied cognition in movement practices, to critically and practically explore somatic processes of perception and experience. My practice as research will consider the embodied experience of scenography by both the artistic practitioner and the participant- roles that have become progressively blurred in the field of live arts.  I will examine how scenography is experienced within the viscera and the gut, a highly sophisticated site for affective response, but significantly under-represented in scholarly enquiry. Further, I will explore the affective impact of haptic visuality; a predominant perceptual mode I identify to suggest the embodied experience of the visual, incorporating kinaesthetic, tactile and proprioceptive perception. Established in the field of art history and video art, I will develop this concept through its refocus and application to scenography, advancing scholarship within performance studies.  I will develop practical research methodologies building to a series of public exhibitions and interventions that intersect theory and practice. The combined written and visual documentary forms of my research output will provide a new resource for scholars and practitioners, making a valuable contribution to practice as research discourse. The research will contribute to interdisciplinary aesthetics between performance studies and visual culture, with insight from neuroscience and medical humanities, offering new scholarship within art-science discourse, and providing a vital conversation between these remote specialisms.