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Visual Diary as Prosthetic Practice in Bobby Baker's Diary Drawings
- Biography
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 35, Number 1, Winter 2012
- pp. 21-44
- 10.1353/bio.2012.0005
- Article
- Additional Information
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British performance artist Bobby Baker's Diary Drawings, created over a decade during a struggle with mental illness for which she was institutionalized forty-one times, explores and images aspects of self-experience that have been marginalized in the humanist tradition of autobiography. Refracting her self-portraits through various forms of the inhuman—animal, vegetative, machine—she develops a tropology of visual images that "unmirror" self-representation in the violence of self-misrecognition. Her refl ections on her own process chart a posthuman prosthetic practice that does not therapeutically reincorporate her to the human, but generates a culminating self-portrait as an ahuman landscape of the self.