Dayna Heaviside is an artist based in the North of England and is a PhD student at Leeds Beckett University. Her research explores issues of agency surrounding the body that are accelerated by the internet and its productions of space. The work is driven by a close engagement with critical theory, and particularly draws upon discourses surrounding sexual difference, desire, deconstruction and surveillance capitalism.

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Returns to the Bed: Practices of Écriture Féminine in Visual Economies.

 

Using photography, performance and autofiction (feminine writing), I explore a contemporary feminine experience of the bed within visual and networked economies. My practice situates itself within the Airbnb, which has allowed for a practice my own bedroom wasn’t spacious enough for, illustrating Legacy Russell’s idea that the internet can provide the space to reimagine reality (2020: 23). Russell doesn’t write this with the view that the digital world is a utopia (a space, as opposed to the prohibiting nature of place), but rather means that the internet is a creative material with endless possibilities.

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By situating myself in the Airbnb, I explore the connection between selfie culture, practices of aestheticization and the home (particularly the bedroom) and consider how the symbol of the bed remains relevant to issues of women’s agency. Through a practice of self-portraiture, and the presence of my camera, the work considers a new, digital gaze, which I situate in relation to discourses surrounding the surveillance economy in Zuboff (2019), Srnicek (2016), and Dabiri (2023).

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The work engages with a Cixousian dialogue surrounding the bed through a rereading of three key works by Helene Cixous: The Laugh of the Medusa (1975), Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays (1975), and Coming to Writing (1992). These writings, as suggested by Cecily Davey, trace the transition of the bed from a site of women’s repression, where the historically female bed-ridden positions in art and literature equate femininity with passivity, to a site for the exploration and liberation of the self through dreaming. The bed is a site of non-event since sleeping is considered nonperformative, “narrative resistant” (Greaney). Yet, for Cixous, the bed is instrumental in bringing desire into language, which is key to the development of women’s writing.

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Like dreaming, art is often haunted by the unconscious. In the research, I discuss the work of Sharon Kivland, Joanna Walsh, Sophie Calle, Cindy Sherman, and Sonya Dade; five practitioners who use a combination of photography and autofiction in their occupation of non-places (Augé, 1992) – in hotel rooms, domestic settings, and houses which are in fact museums. Like them, and as with the practices of so many other women, my own work exists in non-places. I explore how these settings allow for failure and I celebrate this failure in my own work – for instance, the failure to use a hotel room correctly – temporarily remakes spaces.

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Returns to the Bed initiates a discussion of visual economies through the lens of hospitality. Through a practice of self-portraiture, I consider how women are presented online through selfie culture in a way which does not simply reduce her to a passive or narcissistic tool of surveillance capitalism, but as a creative agent. It asks what it means to be hosted in the digital age and undertakes a practice of écriture féminine to return to the self “which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display.” (Cixous, 1975: 880)