Manju Sharma
In the Negative Space: A Poetic Study of Sibling Care of a Mothers
This artistic endeavour is a deeply personal journey into the layers of my family history, and the imprints and residues of postcolonial migration. It investigates the undocumented emotional impact through a poetic film essay. At its core is an inquiry into my mother’s long-term depression – an unspoken condition shaped by the trauma of the 1947 Partition of India and her subsequent migration to the UK in the 1970s. The central research question asks: How can experimenting in film, grounded in visual autoethnography, illuminate the silences surrounding maternal mental health in postcolonial diasporic families? This inquiry is situated at the intersection of visual autoethnography, post-colonial partition and affectionate familial practices. The self comes forth from the intersection of being female, migrant, stemming from a UK lower class.
This project emerges from a long and intimate witnessing of my mother’s depression – a history that has profoundly shaped my inner world and the way I exist in silence. As a child, I absorbed the unspoken weight of her suffering, cultivating an interior life that was noisy, shifting and full, though externally quiet. This inner world has grown over time, and through this work, I seek to break that silence – to let the internal ‘body noise’ spill outward. I guess it had to come out at some point and now that my parents have both passed there is room to do this. This research therefore attempts to bring back all the parts that I lost in shame in my past.
Tracing my siblings and mine inherited shame and resilience from the past to the now, this work weaves the intimate with the historical, the personal with the political. This poetic film essay shares the effects and affection of children with a mother suffering from depression. How our life unfolded because of her forced displacement. Through this work, I aim to address a historical and cultural silence surrounding the mental health of South Asian migrant women. Depression, particularly among first-generation women, was often unnamed, unacknowledged and untreated.
This investigation is a personal necessity, but also carries broader societal urgency. It speaks to the experience of those – especially children – who grew up with a parent suffering from depression, particularly within the contexts of migration and postcolonial trauma. My work asks: How can the felt weight of internal sorrow take form in the world? How might the internal landscape of inheritors be visible, felt, heard? By addressing these questions, the project contributes to decolonial and feminist discourses, opening third space for untold narratives of female silence, intergenerational trauma and the coping mechanisms forged in the borderlands of identity, history, and family. Inspired by Didion (2003), this work embraces the idea that identity is not anchored in fixed places but is shaped and reshaped through the unfolding of lived experience. It is also a call to break patterns of quiet suffering and to open a wider conversation for those who have endured similar inherited wounds.
Methodologically, I adopt a narrative inquiry of visual autoethnography to bridge lived experience with affectionate storytelling practice. My siblings and I participate in informal, unscripted conversations using an approach I call ‘hanging out’, with images and stories recorded via mobile phones and handheld cameras. This process allows for intimate nuance and relational ethics in storytelling. In the process of film making, I transcribe and re-write from these exchanges and record my own voice as a narrative layer. The narration is accompanied by sensorial footage – water, fabric, skin, household objects, being with nature – that express internal and external states of trying to stay well. It seeks to recognise how we exist in the world as enriched human beings honouring the non-human and how these presences offer rich sources for reimagining historical memory.
Rather than show a mother with depression directly, I aim to shape its presence through gestures of sibling care that took place around her. A key conceptual strategy is the use of negative space visually and narratively. I learned how to use the artistic form of negative space in painting, drawing, sculpture classes at art school. I now use this as a way of defining my siblings and my relationship with our mother in an affectionate manner reflecting the emotional terrain of growing up in a household shaped by depression
This research explores the concept of border thinking, an in-between zone of encounter and transformation marked by colonial difference, hybrid identities and poetic rupture. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Bhanu Kapil and Lata Mani, I investigate how in-between spaces can be activated to challenge speech, visibility and composition.
Moving on from Spivak’s question ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ I am drawn to a more embodied and affective formulation: ‘How does a contemporary subaltern speak?’ My work inhabits feminine third spaces, where storytelling emerges through the body, through what resides at the tip of the tongue and through intuitive or soulful registers, what Anzaldúa calls ‘la facultad’. These are spaces of continuity, of heart-speech, of deep listening across thresholds.
I am a multidisciplinary research-based artist working with various mediums though which my core practice is learning to speak again through the visual arts. In my art practice, I am developing the concept of ‘never leaving never arriving’ through the examination of colonial heritage. I like to use tools of painting, sewing, filming, and writing to express female silences. This leads me to pursue the following questions in my research: How to use gifts from the privilege that comes from being a daughter of colonialism? How to extend personal struggles into broader societal issues? How to create a multilayered visual narrative that explores emotional geography sharing both the articulated and unarticulated?