Visual Diary as Prosthetic Practice in Bobby Baker's Diary Drawings

Abstract

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.