I am in the guts of this house: Haunting as a site of artistic inquiry

This thesis project utilizes the metaphor of the haunted house to speak about illness, the tension between women and the domestic space, and the connection between our bodies and the spaces we inhabit. Through this project, I am investigating how to use affect, materiality, and metaphor to translate my experiences of illness into sculptural form. My project draws on the Gothic literature of female authors like Shirley Jackson and Charlotte Perkins Gillman, as well as phenomenology and Gaston Bachelard's concept of topoanalysis. The haunted house has a long history of serving as a medium to discuss the complex relationship between women and the restrictive elements of the home in a patriarchal society. I am also interested in how home can serve as a metaphor for the body, and the haunted house therefore as a representation of the ill body. My project questions the home as a site of safety and comfort, as a way of reflecting on distress, illness, and bodily disorientation. In my practice, I am using multiple textile practices, including embroidery, knitting, dyeing, and spinning, alongside found objects, to create immersive textile installations that suggest the rooms of a home. By using features such as suspension, movement, claustrophobia, and embroidered text, this project draws attention to the tenuousness of stability and health. I am in the guts of this house prioritizes a lived phenomenological understanding of illness, creating a space to consider the inescapable human experience of pain or illness.