Selfhood Under Pressure: A Year of Practice

This past year has been about selfhood under pressure: the strange labour of staying human while surrounded by noise, screens, memory, illness, grief, digital intimacy, and the constant demand to perform a version of yourself.

My work has circled presence, attention, and survival. I have been exploring how identity forms in fragments: through virtual worlds, personal archives, repeated routines, bodily limits, emotional weather, and the small rituals that keep a person intact. Rather than treating digital space as separate from real life, I see it as another room of the self: one where memory glitches, relationships deepen, personas evolve, and the body still quietly insists on being heard.

The Work

Across this year, my practice has moved between Second Life environments, video, sound, writing, digital image-making, and reflective installation. Self Being, the central project of my Level 6 degree work, crystallised around toast as its conceptual anchor: the tension between the data-self and the felt-self, between what tracking systems say about a body and what the body actually knows. Personal tracking became the artistic material itself, not illustration but substrate. The primary output took shape as a Second Life build layered with text fragments, clinical data voice set against felt self voice, ambient sound, and a captioned screen-recorded walkthrough.

The theoretical grounding drew from Jenny Odell’s work on attention, Tim Wu’s work on the attention economy, Seneca on time, and the Zhuangzi on letting things be. Reference artists included Bill Viola, Pipilotti Rist, Olafur Eliasson, and Agnes Martin: artists who understood slowness, light, repetition, and the body’s quiet insistence.

Alongside Self Being, a mythology exhibit called The Gods Are Still Speaking took shape for World Building Hub in Second Life, built collaboratively with Lissena and Shyla. Creative writing deepened throughout the year, with literary fiction pieces, including The Sound He Could Not Bear and Five Minutes, developed in tandem with the visual practice.

The dissertation, Disability, Visibility and Politics of Embodiment in Contemporary Art, examined how disabled bodies are represented, erased, and reclaimed in contemporary practice. It was submitted, passed, and refined across editing sessions with tutor feedback.

The Pressure

These works ask what it means to pause inside a culture that constantly pulls us outward. They resist the pressure to be endlessly available, endlessly visible, endlessly consumable. As a disabled, neurodivergent artist working in carefully managed energy windows, the question of pace is not theoretical. It is structural. The work cannot exist without acknowledging the body that makes it.

The Return

The central theme is not escape. It is a return.

Return to the body.
Return to attention.
Return to the place.
Return to the unfinished, inconvenient, breathing self.

My work from this period gathers the personal and the virtual together, using digital spaces not as fantasy, but as sites of care, distortion, mourning, play, and reconstruction. It is a record of trying to remain present in a world that keeps asking us to disappear into content.

Roxksie