Dayna Heaviside is an artist based in the North of England and is a PhD candidate 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 image economies.

​​​

​

​

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

 

Returns to the Bed initiates a discussion of the role of women in visual economies through the lens of hospitality. Through a situated art-practice I use the Airbnb – a site hovering between the digital and the IRL – as a theatre for the reimagining of the self. My practice of self-portraiture, in which I perform as imagined women, redresses dominant discourses of selfie-taking as narcissistic and in its dissemination, which remains “offline”, the work considers how intimate viewings allow for the correction of female visibility. (Jansen, 2019) The work asks what it means to be hosted in the digital age and employs a practice of écriture féminine to return to the self “which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display.” (Cixous, 1976: p.880)

 

Using photography, performance and autofiction (feminine writing), I explore a contemporary feminine experience of the bed within visual and networked economies. The work engages with a Cixousian dialogue surrounding the bed through a rereading of three key works by Hélène Cixous: The Laugh of the Medusa (1975), Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays (1975) and Coming to Writing (1977). These writings, as suggested by Cecily Davey (2013), trace the transition of the bed from a site of women’s repression to a site for the exploration and liberation of the self. My practice posits that today that the bed remains relevant to issues of women’s agency and is a site from which a new, networked body is emerging.

 

Like dreaming, art is often haunted by the unconscious. In the research, I discuss the work of Joanna Walsh, Sophie Calle, Sharon Kivland, Sonya Dade and Lynn Hershman Leeson; five practitioners who strategically haunt hotel rooms; and explore the idea that “hotels are for those who understand performance: ghosts, actors, women.” (Walsh, 2015: p.17)