Public Defence Doctoral Thesis: Eleanor Duffin

This practice-led PhD project explores how artistic making can be a collaborative process between human and non-human forces. The research is grounded in a sustained body of sculptural and installation-based work, where theory and making are deeply intertwined. Drawing on Irish Indigenous animistic beliefs, the project challenges conventional ideas of authorship and material use in art, embracing a worldview in which materials possess their own vitality and agency.

At its core is Phantoms of Form (2016–ongoing), a speculative and evolving body of work that reanimates archival traces of historical female makers. These "hauntological" gestures disrupt linear narratives of art history and reframe authorship as a shared, distributed process. The research introduces the Slippery I, a conceptual strategy drawn from feminist theory and auto-fiction that navigates identity, collaboration and multiplicity in creative practice.

Through this integration of theory and material exploration, Making Holes contributes to contemporary debates on authorship, agency and material relationality within the visual arts.