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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The research considers how spatial productions so often result in compact places that make unwelcome contradictory bodies; this is because most places are furnished by those who exercise the “primary” gaze.

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The project reviews the writing of Hélène Cixous, specifically regarding the bed, which Cixous observes to be a place of repression for women (linking them with passivity) but suggests that it can be reclaimed as a site for an exploration of the self (through accessing the creative unconscious) (1976).

 

The issue of the bed is highly relevant today, in an era marked by a bedroom-culture of image making. The production and reception of the selfie often persists the essentialisation of femininity as passive, and conceals the labour of women and their desire inherent within their roles as producers, directors and editors.​​ The artist's practice of photographic self-portraiture aims to explore the discomfort of this flattening gaze through attempting to perform the roles of artist and subject.

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Employing a methodology of Haunting, Heaviside explores temporary appropriations of character and place. The project locates itself around the bed: specifically, in hotel rooms and Airbnb's. It notes that hotels are holding places for the dispossessed; for those excluded from proper place. The Airbnb is a product of the advancement of surveillance capitalism. It is the hotel par excellence in that it offers greater seclusion and further embodies a home away from home.

 

Joanna Walsh writes that “hotels are for those who understand performance: ghosts, actors, women” (2015: 17). The research continues: this is because the act of making and remaking is a feminine practice. It traces the practice of Cixous who textually remakes the bed into a more desirable place, to the practice of the Maid who haunts the hotel room. It considers how the linguistic turn from the designation ‘Maid’ to ‘Housekeeper’ shelters within itself a long history of cleaning being a gendered profession – a profession which today is still predominantly female. The change in language is an attempt to repress the gendered term and make the working conditions in hotels appear equal.

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The work also reflects upon the labour of the Guest. The practice of producing work within the setting of hotel/Airbnb, marks a failure to use the site “correctly” and begins to explore ways in which the hotel invites failure. Failure is important because it recognises that not all desire is the same and allows for systematic corrections, which the hotel imitates on a smaller scale through processes of cleaning and resetting. Hotels erase what once was; and precisely because they are transitory places, they make room for desire.​

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Using themes of hospitality (and therefore hostility) to reflect on upon the online space and discuss how bodies are hosted, Heaviside explores ways to move and curate in/with landscapes to consider how the internet may be used as a material to create architecture roomy enough for othered bodies.