PhD student, Rosalind Whitman, completes doctoral research

Congratulations to Dr Rosalind Whitman on the successful completion of her doctoral research, The Fire of the Imagination: An Artist's Journey, into the visual image, imagination, and the potential for mediation and transformation within the creative process. In her study she used a series of arts projects in painting, printmaking, sculpture and creative writing to reflect on the process of transformation of both materials and the artist herself through arts practice.

Using an alchemical framework as a way to navigate, conceptualise and interpret her work, she explored visionary experiences and their representations, powerful images of the feminine, and the mediation of perceived dichotomies through the practice of the artist.

This resulted in a recognition of the need to exemplify values and reactivate symbols cherished in traditional arts practice, to reconnect with the potential of the physical to symbolise, synthesise and transform. Her use of alchemical thinking within a contemporary arts practice facilitated perception of the recurrent mythos of the creative process arising from the heart of the creative response itself.

"The Annunciation", Dr R Whitman, tempera and gilding on gesso, after a 14th century panel by Melchior Bröderlam