|
Artist Bio & CV Elizabeth Ransom is a PhD candidate at the University for the Creative Arts where she is completing a practice-based PhD on the use of alternative photographic processes to visualise the lived experience of transnationality for migrant women. Ransom is the Founder and Director of Women Alternative Photography Group (WAPG). Ransom teaches at Western Washington University in the Art and Art History Department and runs courses and workshops at various art institutions in the US and the UK, As an artist, Ransom takes from her own lived experiences of migration to explore homesickness and transnationality. Ransom’s research builds on theories of migration, place attachment, and declarative episodic memory, particularly from the perspective of the migrant woman. Her work has been exhibited internationally in the UK, India, Mexico, China, and the US. DOWNLOAD CV |
Artist Statement
Within Elizabeth Ransom's creative arts practice she explores the lived experience of transnationality for those who identify as women and those who identify as migrants through the visual language of alternative photographic processes. Much of her work is autobiographical and draws from her own lived experience of migration.
Ransom's practice challenges derogatory narratives of migration that are often disseminated through the media and instead returns directly to the migrant to investigate and showcase the lived experience of migration providing space for migrants to speak for themselves. She does not aim to create an indexical account of migration as there are many truths to the migrant experience. But rather Ransom catalogues, archives, and investigates transnationality using a process based approach. Ransom's practice considers the significance of time, memory, reflection, chance, and autobiographical memory. By challenging definitions of home, rejecting fixed understandings of identity, and embracing multiplicity a more authentic visualisation of migration can begin to emerge.
The journey of transnationality is complex and often involves a spectrum of multifaceted emotional experiences including feelings of hope, fear, anxiety, grief, loneliness, and resilience. Through Ransom's practice she reveals the emotional landscape of transnationality. These emotions may derive from various motivations for migration, the process of leaving home, adjusting to a new culture, the experiences of discrimination in the host society, and navigating new languages. As transnationality involves a spectrum of experiences Ransom's recent practice specifically investigates place attachment, homesickness, memory, declarative episodic memory and multiplicity in relation to identity. She transcribes these key themes using slow process based and experimental photographic methods such as soil chromatography and film soup. She gathers materials from site specific locations and brings them back to the darkroom to explore complex personal narratives that effect those who have left their place of origin to make homes in new lands.
The final outcomes are rendered as abstract and sometimes brightly colored objects. Ransom interrogates what a photographic image is by using photography in non-traditional ways to create images that explores the materiality of the photographic object and the expansive opportunities of working with photographic chemistry and light sensitive materials. Furthermore, her research driven practice uses a unique interdisciplinary approach that combines oral histories and interviews that reveal stories of migration with experimental photographic techniques.