Hiding in Plain Sight (film, photographs, and artists pamphlet)

‘Hiding in Plain Sight’ is a 17 minute film, set of 30 photographs and an artists pamphlet that explores visibility, status, performance and definitions of knowledge in care professions. The work was commissioned by The Cultural Institute (KCL, Courtauld and Somerset House) for UTOPIA 2016. The work grew from six weeks spent exploring how doctoral researchers in the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery transition from practitioners to researchers and their experience of the space and time of research as a ‘non-space’. Following photographic and discursive workshops seven care doctoral students were invited to play hide and seek. The physical act of hide and seek was employed as an experimental structure in which to explore changing roles and the different significance of looking, observing, witnessing and experiencing in care practice and research. A medical ward simulation centre was used as the site of play, the game calling attention to the material qualities of the space, its role in surveillance and training, and how we are at differing times constructed, enveloped, hidden and revealed by our environment. The film experiments with the viewpoint of hider and seeker by using technologies of surveillance and representation as active agents in the game. Rather than being simple procedures for recording and documenting the camera and sound recorder are objects of pursuit and concealment. As well as exploring how care becomes visible, the work examines the problems of visibility in the relationship between artist and subjects in participatory art works, and researcher and subject in research. By addressing the mechanics of appearance the work explores the connections between processes of visibility and representation in art, social art, research and healthcare, revealing how they are much more similar than they appear.