My project is situated within a phenomenological and practice-led framework, exploring how lived experience can be articulated through material engagement and photographic processes. Phenomenology, is described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty as the study of “the basic structures of human experience and understanding from a first-person point of view” (Phenomenology of Perception, viii). Central to this view is the idea that perception is not a detached act of looking, but an embodied, sensory negotiation with the world.

Through constructing and photographing sculptural assemblages and obscured portraits, this project becomes an embodied inquiry into the tensions between control and collapse, visibility and concealment. The gestures of balancing, arranging, wrapping and revealing operate through what Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘body schema’, the pre-reflective, lived sense of one’s body in action (pp. 100–102). As I work with objects such as buckets, organic elements, fabric and fragmented materials, the process becomes a form of thinking through doing. Meaning emerges not entirely from symbolic intention alone but from tactile negotiation with weight, texture and instability.

Following Merleau-Ponty’s discussion around how perception arises from the intertwining of body and world, my project considers how sensory engagement with materials can reveal aspects of emotional and physical experience that are otherwise intangible. In other worlds it provides visual realisations for the typically invisible. The still life images and portraits do not simply depict internal states; they enact them. In this way the work operates as a phenomenological expression of experience, where meaning is formed in the relationship between the body and the materials.