Identity that refuses to identify,

has no voice,

and cannot be spoken,

My work addresses a conflict in identity. We identify ourselves by our name, in the face of ‘others’ and by our histories. A matter of being given a name and inheriting a legacy passed on from past generations is both passive and active. The first relates to language and the second to a place or a site. My research stems from the need to understand conflicting definitions in my own identity and contradicting legacies I inherited within a political and historical context that led me to ask of the methods in which we define, replace, name and see. In the absence of answers and the lingering presence of trauma, loss and forgetting I turn to the search itself through the use of photography, printmaking, video and drawing.

In my practice-led PhD, I ask of identity and landscape through actions of naming sites and siting names. By resisting the intention to fossilise what insists on remaining in constant movement, I search between cultures and landscapes for places where gaps appear in systems of remembrance and language. In my practice I confront personal memory and historical political events with the possibility to see and name (again). Influenced by states of crisis and ‘split-identities,’ I approach dualism as a method of witnessing, of storytelling and as reflections of mark making.

www.danaariel.com