Jenny, your project forms as an examination of psychological and socio-scientific practices. In fact, it appears to establish questions relating to us as individuals and how we are treated, perceived and even objectified within socio-scientific paradigms or cultures and therefore there is an inherent critique of this at the nucleus of this research. Some of your aesthetics share something of the pseudo-scientific early understandings of women’s bodies – for instance the belief that the womb roamed the body – that had the effect of harming rather than healing its subjects. So too, your work considering the effects of maternal separation experiments on Rhesus monkeys – where medical theory has played out as psychological harm in the real world. These works seem to lie at the nexus between the sometimes indifferent and inhuman health industry and the reality of lived experience. They appear to re-invest this space with a humanity via your use of formats which are lo-fi (animated medical illustration), personal (snapshot slideshow, ‘blog’) and intimate (nursery rhyme like ditties). In contrast with the slick aesthetics we usually associate with ‘science’, this works to humanise the medical–industrial complex and also to challenge and undermine its methods. Your body of work manifests as a website that has a range of elements from historic reflections to personal experiences and thoughts. While there are many cogent aspects to this ongoing and developing work, the use of a website as ‘form’ was an insightful decision, because as a document it allows for an unfolding series of spaces and matrices, where we can potentially move through spaces intuitively (or associatively) similar to the way our minds operate. The strength of this research project is that it arrives from a place of lived experience, and this authenticity is apparent as we experience the various facets of this work. We, like you, tie together many strands that in turn open out to various discourses in our minds, and therefore the work is not overly determined – it remains an open space for the viewer to question, and investigate their thoughts. It is a significant aspect of document-artworks that they afford arrays of realisations. Donna Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble (2016) might assist in further understanding this type of fraught and discursive space, and the value of not determining
