About Sarah CrowEST

Me, my other self and I: exploring the functions of the alter-ego in contemporary visual arts practice

The focus of this project is a creative investigation of the significance and function of the alter-ego in contemporary visual art, specifically in relation to sculpture, installation and video.

Artists, including myself, frequently develop characters or different personalities in and through their work in order to present an alternate, idealised or transformed self or as a tactic to investigate a different approach to their practice. These alternative constructed selves can function in diverse ways, often as a strategy for transgression, dispensing with accountability and/or for maintaining the freedoms and possibilities of a mutable identity.

Central to my research has been the development of a body of artefacts and texts that are made through, about or in response to a variety of my own alter-egos. Initially I inhabited three discrete alter-egos that were variations of myself, as an artist, in order to be able to observe and compare how they might operate and form an intra-subjective discourse. These version excursions, being Winifred, Edith and Sadie, can be more accurately described as semi-alter-egos because although the personalities are not entirely mine they are not different from but rather simply mutilations of my personality. They were initially outlined as Edith the struggling, self-effacing but creative loser, Winifred the straight faced, repressed, serious investigator brimming with curiosity and Sadie the successful, relaxed and happy self-enhancer for whom art and life flow.

The alter-egos evolved through changes of my appearance, behaviour and biographical data. Evidence of this approach is manifest through the amassing of fragments of images, artworks, video and photo documentation. The conception of Winifred, Edith and Sadie as artists allowed me to ground my activities in the studio around objects and materials through a project that was essentially a process. A critique of the art world is implied through the various strategies and responses of the alter-egos. The process eventually involved killing off these particular personae to more fully engage with questions of becoming through a less contrived more unknowing approach to emerging alter-egos.

The artefacts were not conceived as an exhibition but are residue of the research process and constitute the greater part of my thesis. The written exegesis elucidates the line of research undertaken within the studio practice with reference to personal perspectives and contemporary conceptions of the self. The exegesis also documents an exploration into the device and use of the alter-ego in recent visual arts practice and analyses how these constructed selves might permit, reveal, conceal or operate as projections of inner states or fulfilments of desire. My studio experiments and construction of artefacts have been informed by critical analysis of these functions and the ways in which they related or diverged from my own motivation and utilisation of the alter-ego. I briefly consider the area which includes abnormal psychological conditions such as the multiple personality and the splitting of the subject.