Sharon Young is a PhD student at the Royal College of Art and lectures at the University of Roehampton. In 2020-21 she received a research grant from the Southlands Methodist Trust to support her project exploring hysteria using photography, performance and writing.
Overall, this project consists of an art exhibition and a series of corresponding satellite events. Over the year events and exhibitions will be held both at Roehampton and external institutions such as The Freud Museum (London) and the Royal College of Art (RCA). The project is premised on her practice-based PhD research at the RCA and aims to generate public engagement concerning societal frameworks, historical and contemporary, of the repression of women.
One output of the project is a book entitled ‘Ms B. – The Hysteric Episodes’. On her website, Sharon describes this work as follows:
This image-text work is a transcreation of the masterpiece of realist fiction Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert published in 1856. My project holds a particular focus on the hysterical descriptions of the protagonist Emma Bovary and re-enacts these scenes through imagery and poems made from appropriated portions of the original text. This project aims to represent hysteria through non-stereotypical imagery, in contrast to those so associated with the medical representation of an illness; but seeks instead to adopt a language of interiority with the author in self-identification with the experiences described by Flaubert over a hundred years ago. As Flaubert himself wrote; “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!
You can view the book by clicking below:
Sharon Young Ms BovaryImage on news page also by Sharon Young.
