Night watch: reconceptualising memory through poetry and visual images

In this research I shall speculate upon reconceptualising memory traces emerging from familial/personal trauma and loss. The exegesis explores the progress of my research from the manifestation of visual images to poetry. The structure of the research highlights my experimental approach of braiding the symbolic and metaphorical interconnections of various creative media. In addition to navigating between media ranging from drawing, book-arts, collages, sculptural objects, digital media, print-media, photo-media and poetry, there is also an element of performance art represented as photographic images that manifested in my final work (that appears in my doctoral examination exhibition). Departing from trauma and loss led me to rather a restorative and even a celebrative notion of self-construction, desire, longing and a sense of homecoming. The metaphorical nature of each work is part of an ontological chain, undoing memories and recreating them in a liberating sense of realisation. My outcomes express a contribution to the existing field with new nexus of meanings where imagery circulates between creative visual and written forms and components. My aims focus on exploring such open-ended meanings that emanate from poetic depth, bringing forth the existentiality of self-representation that suggests potential new models of reconceptualising memory.