Artist Profile:
Vanessa Godden is a mixed media artist based in Melbourne, Australia. She received her BFA from the University of Houston (USA), MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (USA), and is currently a PhD candidate at the Victorian College of the Arts (Australia). Godden’s studio practice draws from and combines a variety of mediums including performance, video installation, and book art. The use of combined media offers a blending of time and space in an effort to record cyclical rituals and alters to the past, an unveiling of hidden layers of the mind. Her artistic narrative is built on an image of herself constructed from memories?records with no visual markers. Persistent and recurring imagery and themes include orality, inversion, the body, trauma, and lineage; each are enmeshed with a deep personal need to find a voice for something inside that desperately wanted to speak but was somehow unable to.

Residence Plan:
Godden plans to use her time at Youkobo to develop a better understanding of Japanese embroidery techniques and research forms of bodily abjection represented in Japanese horror films and Butoh Theater. In response to her investigations Godden will expand upon a sewn based book art project and produce a short film, which will convey the entanglement of autobiographical experiences of multi-ethnicity and the aftermath of rape.

Date	2016.11.01 - 2016.11.30
Place	AIR-2