The Dover Prize Fund would allow me to deepen my exploration of disability, trauma, and collective memory through a new interdisciplinary exhibition titled Echoes of the Unspoken. This project will experiment with multimedia forms—combining soundscapes, tactile installations, and participatory performance—to archive the intersection of personal and historical haunting. The funding will allow me to:
Expand Collaborative Research: Collaborate with disabled artists, historians of trauma, and community mental health advocates to co-create narratives. I will organize workshops where participants co-design elements of the exhibition, ensuring their lived experiences and aesthetic visions shape the work. This aligns with my commitment to co-creation as a shared journey, where authority is distributed and decisions emerge from collective wisdom.
Experiment with Mediums: Financial support will enable me to experiment with non-traditional mediums, such as immersive soundscapes capturing the sensory realities of grief and disability, or kinetic sculptures & installations that transforms how we interact, theatre that expresses through images, etc.. This pushes beyond my current focus on publication-based work, allowing me to engage audiences bodily and emotionally.
Address Accessibility and Logistics: Secure adaptive technologies (e.g., audio descriptions, touch-tour materials) and cover participants’ accessibility needs (e.g., travel, childcare). The bursary will also fund a mentorship with a trauma-informed curator to refine my approach to ethical storytelling.
Artistic Impact:
The Dover Prize’s emphasis on risk-taking aligns with my goal to challenge institutional narratives around disability and trauma. By centering marginalized voices as co-creators, I aim to disrupt static representations of suffering, instead framing it as a dynamic, shared healing experience. This award would provide the time and space to refine my methodology, distilling lessons from Soft Haunting into a more ambitious, multi-sensory project.
Long-Term Vision:
The prize’s network and platforms would amplify my work’s reach. I envision Echoes of the Unspoken touring community spaces and fostering solidarity. Ultimately, this project will advance my practice by demonstrating that collaboration and experimentation aren’t just tools—they’re the foundation for art that heals, disrupts, and reimagines collective futures.
By supporting this work, the Dover Prize would affirm my belief that meaningful art arises when the boundaries between artist and participant dissolve, and when vulnerability becomes a site of creative power.
My work centers on amplifying marginalized voices through collaboration and accessibility—values that resonate deeply with fostering creativity in Darlington. This project will directly engage Darlington’s community by partnering with local disabled artists, mental health advocates, and cultural organizations, such as Creative Darlington, to co-create narratives and multimedia elements. The resulting exhibition, displayed in Darlington’s public spaces, will attract regional audiences while highlighting the area’s commitment to inclusive art. By centering Darlington’s residents as co-creators and audiences, this work will not only elevate the town’s profile as a site of transformative art but also inspire future artists to embrace collaboration and accessibility as pillars of their practice.
JINGYI (b.1998) is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, researcher based in London. Her practice often explore the effect of identity rupture phenomenon and subconscious linguistics through visual art, photography, installation, performance, video, all with a research-led and socially engaged focus. Her recent works focus on an ontological approach to disability studies, by looking into the phenomenon of involuntary personality change often found in the disabled experience through psychoanalysis, cross-cultural mythology, and the ritual effect of mise-en-scenè in personal & collective narratives. SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:
2024
Mythology-Inspired, Loosenart, Italy
Violent Divinity, Luckypot, UK
2023
I Just Had A Blood Test, Let’s Have Coffee, Float, UK
2022
UnderPLAY, Crypt Gallery, UK
TALKS & WORKSHOPS:
2025
Where Are The Disabled Photographers, Stills Edinburgh, UK
2023
Guest Lecturer, UAL: Central Saint Martins, UK
THEATRE:
2023
Bird and the Curiosity, Hollywood Fringe, USA
Winston Went to War with the Wireless (assistant design), Donmar, UK
2019
Rainmaking, Wuzhen Fringe, CN
MFA Scenography in Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London
JINGYI is now the project leader of Soft Haunting, an ongoing photography art publication project that reflects on the journey from trauma to self-discovery in the disabled experience. As a disabled woman herself, JINGYI approached the project by partnering with fellow disabled participants to co-edit narratives, ensuring their lived experiences, not her assumptions, shaped the final work. JINGYI is the lead curator of Violent Divinity, a multidisciplinary art exhibition commissioned by experimental musician by Siteng Liu in London.
JINGYI’s artworks have been featured on the 2025 April Issue of The Skinny Magazine, LoosenArt 2024, and reviewed by Gallery Bagging “Waiting… waiting… waiting….Patient, patience”, and British Asian Collective “Exhibition Review:Violent Divinity”.
Email: jingyi_studio@outlook.com
