Sharon Young
Ms.B.
Summary
This image-text work is a transcreation of the masterpiece of realist fiction Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert published in 1856. My project holds a particular focus on the hysterical descriptions of the protagonist Emma Bovary and re-enacts these scenes through imagery and poems made from appropriated portions of the original text. This project aims to represent hysteria through non-stereotypical imagery; in contrast to those so associated with the medical representation of the illness. It seeks instead to adopt a language of interiority, with the author in self-identification with the experiences described by Flaubert over a hundred years ago which describe the position of the hysteric, later mirrored in Freud's Case Studies in Hysteria, 1895. As Flaubert himself wrote; “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!
Additional info
Sharon Young is an artist and lecturer based in London.
b. 1982, Belfast
Her work has been exhibited worldwide including Tate Exchange; Liverpool // Venice, Encontros das Imagem, Braga; Goa Photo Festival; Cosmos, Arles; The Centre of Photography, Clement-Ferrond, Tate Liverpool, and P3 Ambika Gallery, London and has been the recipient of awards such as Flash Forward Magenta Awards, Canada and The International Photography Awards, New York. Her work is held in public collections such as the V&A Library, The Yale Centre for British Art and PhotoIreland Foundation. She has recently presented her research at conferences such as She is Hysterical, UCLA, PSi 25, Calgary, Ithaca College, New York and University of Oxford.
Sharon is a lecturer in photography at Ithaca College, London Centre and University of Roehampton and Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art.
She is on the steering committee of Speaking of Her; a feminist research network for the production and dissemination of art practice and research and is currently a member of the London Creative Network.
Sharon is currently undertaking her PhD at the Royal College of Art where her research topic is:
Once More with Feeling: A reinvention of ‘hysteria’; through photography, performance and autofiction.
Methodologies
Re-enactment
By revisiting historical documents and reinscribing them, re-enactment allows for a new version of history to emerge. In the image-text work by Sharon Kivland, A Case of Hysteria, 1999, she revisits Freud’s case study of Dora. My project offers feminist interpretations of Breuer and Freud’s Studies in Hysteria (1895). Re-enactment allows for new versions of events to emerge, ones otherwise ‘unthinkable’ [Lutticken], thereby ‘reinscribing’ [Irigaray] and ‘liberating’ [Blackson] the authority of history’s singular narrative.
Psychoanalytical Autofictions
The project builds on the legacy of the autobiographical artworks of Louise Bourgeois. I am interested in particular in her relationship with psychoanalysis and how the making of the artworks as a process is similar in its intention to that of psychoanalysis and how it can give form to a hysterical symptom through symbols and signifiers.
Autofiction [Doubrovsky, Saunders] performs versions of the self while freeing itself from ‘accurate’ forms of account [de Man, le Guin]. In her diaries Sylvia Plath writes of successful self-narration as that which touches on global themes and is not restricted to ‘naval gazing’.
Transcreation
The term transcreation is used in translation studies and refers to the transformation of one text or language into another in a way that involves both translation (including interpretation) and recreation whilst ensuring an appropriate context for its intended audience. For my purposes I wish to use this in relation to the transcreation of a text (Madame Bovary, Flaubert, 1856) into an interactive contemporary art piece through my own interpretation and transformation of the material in order to speak to contemporary female experience. I also look at how Susan Hiller does this in After the Freud Museum as an example for my own practice.
