ART OF ATTACHMENT FILM INSTALLATION (2024/2025)
ART OF ATTACHMENT FILM INSTALLATION explores notions of home, family and belonging and considers the impact of trauma on women’s lives.
The Art of Attachment film installation makes explicit the devastating impact of physical, sexual and emotional abuse on women’s lives and explores the complex bond between substance misusing mothers and their children. The work celebrates the everyday hope, resilience and resolve of women and children overcoming adversity, whose stories demand to be seen and heard.
The work is staged across two large TV screens, with 5 smaller screens providing break out spaces and insightful resource materials and interviews. The work is watched seated around several large wooden trestle tables, with self-regulating craft activities taking place around the table during and after watching the work along with facilitated discussion.
Context
Available from Autumn 2024 -Sessions can be open to the general public (aged 16+), but this autumn VDT are keen to work specifically with invited groups of women affected by the issues involved (substance misuse, those affected by sexual violence, domestic violence and the removal of their children into care) and professionals who work in social care, family intervention, attachment, trauma, child psychotherapy and social work. VDT is also keen to share the work with adoptive parents and foster carers.
Discussions will involve attachment theory, the form and impact of the art work as a ’translation’ of lived experience and the emotional labour involved for the women involved and those who work to support them.
Combining testimonies from Brighton’s Oasis Project service users, provocative visual imagery and deeply moving performances by four women in recovery working alongside VDT collaborators Robert Clark and Antonia Grove, Vincent’s Art of Attachment is “agonisingly visceral, and often beyond words… a piece about love as an enduring source of hope.” The Psychologist.
“There is no sentimentality… it does not ask us to judge or to pity – but allows us to witness the exhausting labours involved in experiencing, acting out and recovering from trauma.” Rachel Thomson, Professor of Childhood and Youth Studies, University of Sussex.
Who's Who
- Directed and Designed by
- Film Maker
- Soundtrack by
- Text by
Supported by
ART OF ATTACHMENT was originally commissioned by Oasis Project and funded by Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England Lottery Funding, supported by academic collaborator Dr Cath Lambert, Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, funded by an ESRC Impact Acceleration Award, supported by the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender at the University of Warwick and by Arts Council England, through VDT’s regular National Portfolio Organisation funding.
In November 2024 and February 2025, VDT’s Art of Attachment Film Installation will take place in Canterbury and Warwick universities. To engage our communities, VDT will facilitate closed workshops with women and those self-identifying as women affected by substance misuse, domestic violence and childhood sexual violence, professionals / trainee professionals working in family intervention, child protection and social work, adoptive parents, kinship guardians, foster carers as well as open sessions for the general public.
Taking place within the installation space, these workshop sessions focus on the content and themes of the work and engage participants in creative tasks to develop a deeper understanding of VDT’s work as a ’translation’ of lived experience.