- Title
- How to raise a ghost : the haunted house as a metaphor for the haunted self
- Creator
- Proposch, Melissa
- Date
- 2023
- Type
- Text; Thesis; Masters
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/190605
- Identifier
- vital:17681
- Abstract
- This investigation takes an artistic autoethnographic journey in search of the haunted self. As an entangled form of research, it weaves the narrative and analytical into reciprocal relationships. Its methodology and conclusions tell a ghost story. An investigation of one’s haunted self is by nature an examination of personal ghosts and family shadows. This research documents a process of discovery, of looking for and finding my interior haunted house and the psychic home of family trauma and secrets. An examination of this tender and volatile site calls for intuitive and caring exploration and reading. Confinement during Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns further brought into focus my actual home as a site of exhumed memories. There, I developed strategies for attunement to the signs and stories of family ghosts. This process led to newly imagined narrative approaches for artmaking. The story of the haunted house is dark and curious, offering a metaphor for the negative psychological space of the family home, and embracing dystopian aesthetics. Metaphors play with meaning and draw symbolic likenesses to make their language expansive. This research explores how a visual language made for ghost story telling can draw upon the symbolic and metaphorical to express the nebulous and unsettling. It also examines the inherent spectrality of some arts technologies and their capacity to cultivate space and give voice to our phantasmagoric other. This investigation has also been informed by the practice of two artists for whom invocations of the ghostly are conceptually fundamental. Through engagement with their haunted selves, Tracey Moffatt and Louise Bourgeois provide raw access to the personal, familial, and societal shadows which haunt us all. Autoethnographers prefer to reveal meaning through process rather than declarative statements. The journey into my imaginary shadowlands culminates in the retrieval of a haunted object as artwork. Invoking the smoke and mirrors of nineteenth century spiritualism, this work embodies the notion of the artist as medium, calling upon tacit experience to bring forth image, then dialogue, and therein, the communion to be found in shared meaning. Partial fulfilment of requirements for Master of Arts; Thesis
- Publisher
- Federation University Australia
- Rights
- All metadata describing materials held in, or linked to, the repository is freely available under a CC0 licence
- Rights
- Copyright Melissa Proposch
- Rights
- Open Access
- Subject
- Melissa Proposch; Art; Autoethnography; Metaphor; Photography; Printmaking; Haunting; Haunted house; Haunted self; Ghost; Shadow; Ghost story; Shadow self; Secrets; Family curse; Tracey Moffatt; Louise Bourgeois
- Full Text
- Thesis Supervisor
- Wilson, Carole
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