Author Identifier
Date of Award
2026
Keywords
decolonial feminist art practice, practice-led research, cross-cultural visual art, embodiment and memory, Global South feminism
Document Type
Thesis
Publisher
Edith Cowan University
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
School
School of Arts and Humanities
First Supervisor
Nicola Kaye
Second Supervisor
Clive Barstow
Third Supervisor
Katya Johanson
Abstract
This practice-led doctoral research investigates how cross-cultural feminist visual art practice can generate decolonial knowledge through digital–material dialogue. Situated across Brazilian and Australian contexts, the research examines how identity, embodiment, memory, and cultural belonging are negotiated through, familial archives, participant-led image-making and materially transformed photographic installations. Working with photography, projection, fabric, thread work, and spatial installation, the project explores how gendered and racialised bodies can be reimagined beyond dominant visual regimes that have historically shaped representation.
Responding to contemporary debates surrounding authenticity, voice, and cultural appropriation in conditions of migration and cross-cultural identity, the research positions artistic visual practice as both a method of inquiry and an epistemological intervention. Emerging from the artist-researcher’s positionality as a Brazilian woman navigating shifting configurations of privilege and marginalisation, the study foregrounds material dialogue as a mode of feminist and decolonial resistance. Through processes of stitching, layering, illumination, and spatial reconfiguration, archival images are re-inscribed, producing visual traces that register memory and embodiment without fixing them as stable identities.
The theoretical framework draws on decolonial, postcolonial, and Global South feminist perspectives, centring Brazilian feminist scholarship—particularly Sueli Carneiro (2016) and Cláudia Pons Cardoso (2016)—in dialogue with Judith Butler (1990; 2024), Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984, 2003), and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988). This approach not only engages with the legacies of Western feminist theory but also question the ongoing epistemic exclusions that continue to marginalise alternative feminist perspectives within hegemonic Western feminist discourse.
The research culminates in a series of multimedia installations that integrate analogue photographic processes, digital technologies, textile interventions, and spatial practice, while developing an ethical framework for cross-cultural visual art practice that contributes methodological and epistemological insights to contemporary feminist visual art practices.
Access Note
Access to this thesis is embargoed until 4th July 2029
Recommended Citation
Amorim Da Silva, P. (2026). Re-inscribing the body: Digital-material dialogues in cross-cultural feminist art practice. Edith Cowan University. https://doi.org/10.25958/bm2v-e790