WORK IN PROGRESS:

SHE HAD NO SENSE OF PERSPECTIVE

Jini Rawlings is an LDA, a relatively new term for Late Discovery Adoptee, which is mostly used in a North American context. Over the years, Jini has developed a body of work that tries to explore the liminal spaces of contested identity and in-betweenness. She uses various methodologies and several material and archival sources to make video and mixed-media installations. Jini’s PhD by publication/exhibition was an attempt to make sense of her journey and search within a broader theoretical context. This is an ongoing project. 

In addition to fragments of stories of child migration, outsider women such as Emma Lady Hamilton, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (one of the (m)others I never had, Jini has also interwoven stories (or what can be extracted from archival sources) of her birth ancestors. These range from an impoverished boy sailor who sailed with the East India Company in 1858, to a silk ribbon weaver in Coventry in 1860 and her own unmet birth mother.

The creative aftereffects of trauma are an underpinning of Jini’s artwork. Her first response to finding out that she was adopted was visceral. The maelstrom of images and feelings no longer made linear sense and so she began to make work with fractured narratives – a bricolage effect.

Jini’s work in progress continues to explore these after-effects, the importance of gesture, and the mirroring across unseen familial fissures and chasms. She is investigating those few evocative objects that remain as evidence of an unseen/unknown maternal presence.