Patricia Townsend: The Creative Process - An Investigation Through Practice
I work with video, photography and installation and am interested in the interface between the external world and the internal world of the imagination. Much of my work explores our emotional relationship with landscape - the ways in which landscape can affect us and the stories we construct by projecting our own beliefs, expectations and desires onto our surroundings. My PhD project is to investigate the process of making visual art from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. I am interested in the ways in which new artworks come into being, the trajectory of their development, the states of mind the artist moves through along this trajectory and the physical spaces that help or hinder the process. I draw on the ideas of a range of psychoanalytic writers focusing, in particular, on the writings of DW Winnicott, Marion Milner, Christopher Bollas and Kenneth Wright.
