Personal Information
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Given name: Lisa









Surname: Metherell









Email: Lisa.Metherell@BCU.ac.uk









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Your contribution
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Title: Holes in Care: Material exploration through green woodworking to enable more representationally complex visualisations of adoptive families in crisis









Format: Project presentation (2)









Main language: English









Abstract:
This exposition explores the methodological processes of a creative research project concerned with representing the complexities of adoptive families in crisis with a wider backdrop of a crisis in care in the UK. Within this context, the domestic ‘private’ stresses faced everyday by families with lived experiences of trauma can be hidden and unsupported with devastating consequences. Yet understandings of families’ needs with care experienced young people at their heart is limited, with parents being failed or blamed if breakdown occurs.

Holes in Care seeks to expand and develop more diverse and complex representations of family life amid crisis that centres a more trauma-informed approach including one that is attuned to systemic trauma. Art practice research is particularly well placed to presence these informally recognised but institutionally marginalised narratives in its ability to embrace complexity through the urgent need to tell stories differently, including when there are too many words or none that are meaningful.  

Through an exploration of wood, a signifier of strength, support and nature but with circling narratives of climate collapse, a material vocabulary is being developed that can express ambivalence, overwhelm, trauma and unspeakability within the context of failing care systems for care experienced young people and their families.  Family Life (2025 ongoing) is discussed as a creative example of how non-hegemonic knowledges of families in crisis are visualised, in this instance feelings of overwhelm through systemic trauma.










Link to the Exposition :  (https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/4202555/4204399)









Image: https://test.sar2026.ie/system/files/webform/submit_contribution/341/Lisa%20Metherell%20Family%20Life%202025%20ongoing%20detail.jpg









Short biographies of the presenter(s):
- Dr Lisa Metherell is an artist and senior lecturer in Art and Design at Birmingham City University.  She co-leads the Art Activisms Research Cluster. She is also an adoptive parent. Her research is concerned with the challenges of caring well in difficult times, unspeakability and the limitations of language for marginalised subjects and how art has the potential to create representational complexity to resist normative and reductive categorisations. Her focus has been on queer identities and more recently on families with lived experience of trauma. 










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