Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Impact of the Narrative (encoded meanings and creative interventions)

The social research project Hidden in Plain Sight centres its examination on trauma-related mental health, and body autonomy issues connected to individuals who identify as female within New Zealand society. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s nineteenth century short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” functions as the project’s conceptual framework and the anchorpoint between social-histories, intellectualism, and the political landscape. This socio-political composition is also positioned as a cultural marker with narrative functioning as a mechanism for memory recall. Wallpaper operates within the context of this project as a sophisticated skin embedded with meaning, linked to language as a plurality of signs. It is also viewed as an overarching signifier of patriarchal oppression, by taking the private “public” ornamental decoration becomes a metamorphic emblem of contemporary activism. Hidden in Plain Sight is a practice-led inquiry which employs research-creation as a methodology specifically, in association to the artist-pedagogy. Research-creation in this context is viewed as a multidimensional framing that investigates engagement as a radical form of enrichment. The international art collective Fluxus has been instrumental in unpacking the social-hybrid within contemporary practice including the digital territories as an extension of the relational network. Fluxus’s events have been redefined for the purpose of this research as performance installation-sites. French philosopher Jaques Rancière’s frameworks of intellectual emancipation and dissensus have also been engaged, wherein art is positioned as a specific sphere of experience that is reconfigured as a rupture to histories by redrawing boundaries.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Fine Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Grantor

Otago Polytechnic

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Covell, Marguerite

• artist-pedagogy
• mental health
• reciprocity
• research-creation
• relational-network

Statement dc:rights

• CC BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10652/7128

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:null:10652/7128