SHIFT/WORK: Portraits of Precarity is a layered, immersive art experience that amplifies participants’ voices and honours their work and their complex intersectional experiences by transforming data from the project “Precarious Work and Mental Health: Exploring Uncertainty through Research-Creation” into artworks.  Collaborators Dr. Breanna Lawrence (counselling psychologist), Prof. Lisa Wood (visual artist), and Dr. Rachel Herron (rural health geographer) sought to learn about and describe the lived experiences of people who are experiencing precarious work, and the intersection of uncertainty, mental health and family life in rural Manitoba.

To create SHIFT/WORK: Portraits of Precarity Lisa Wood worked with three artist research assistants, Renata Truelove, Michael Vachon and Dhairya Vaidya. The team created narrative collage-like drawings from photographs and text submitted by recruited participants. The drawings synthesize participant responses into artworks that describe the context of precarious work and everyday life.  

Participants were invited to participate in an interview on camera about their intersectional experiences with precarious work and family. The interviews were coded for body language, looking for repeated gestures that could reveal their felt experiences. From this information, Lisa Wood created participant portraits—with multiple hands and faces – subverting the traditionally stoic, static postures of portraiture and revealing the emotional and psychological impacts of the multiple life factors shared in the interviews.

Three dimensional sculptural elements are intertwined with the figurative paintings as a physical representation of the structural systems of precariousness and the impacts of intersectional marginalization and vulnerabilities. Reproductions of the collage-drawings were shredded and rearranged into various forms such as knots, tangles, nets, and woven elements, becoming visual metaphors for chaos, multiple roles and responsibilities, uncertainty, imbalance and anxiety, as well as coping mechanisms, family support and relief.

To accompany the visual artwork, Wood worked with sound artist Brendon Ehinger to compose a multichannel audio collage using the participants’ recorded voices to create fragmented thematic narratives as told in the participants’ own words. The audio clips—identified through qualitative analysis— reveal themes such as the reality and stress of work, experiences of precarity, family support, coping and resilience and the meaning and purpose of work. The result aurally mirrors the visual metaphor of weaving and entanglement.

Art can move people and reach audiences in a way that other forms of research outputs can not, and in this way SHIFT/WORK seeks to generate empathy and create social impact.