Margaux Welch

My practice investigates the intersection of making, researching and lived experiences. It is centred on the idea of research as a form of practice. I seek to manifest making as a means of processing trauma and offering insight into hidden and extensive closed-door experiences of psychiatric hospitals. I see my practice as a means of self-care but also heavily investigate social care often through the lens of social prescription as a means of reducing over medication. I commit my practice to a care-focused approach which extends beyond the physical work and studio into the community. This allows a continuous consideration of individual and collective wellbeing which feeds into my visual practice. Through both community work, practice and research I am to facilitate a deeper understanding of illness and the ways in which art can serve as a therapeutic tool for individuals and communities alike. 

Through making I seek to create a visual language of illness whilst maintaing a point of departure of lived experiences. Documentation of experience is a fundamental element, serving both as a receipt of experience and a means of sharing trauma through visual means. I intend not only to recreate experiences and clinical settings but re-imagine them in a manner which offers insight into the feeling’s hospital settings provoke. My strategies to do so consist of playing to all the senses of the viewers through smell, sound and uncomfortable materiality. Control of materials, colour and composition allow a regaining of control of traumatic spaces. I ground my design within the aesthetic of clinical commissions with a focus on wipe-down surfaces, cleanability and clinical furnishing. I look to artists such as Lyndsey Mendick, academics of hospital environments and commissioned works for clinical settings to form a practice which is playful, clinical in aesthetic and thought provoking.