Hello! My name is Jess and I am a white, cis-gendered, non-disabled 53-year-old woman born in the United Kingdom.
I have a BA in Graphic Design (Illustration) and studied at the Motley Theatre design course to become a freelance Set and Costume designer for theatre, opera and dance. I have been a freelance designer for 28 years in Europe and the United Kingdom and bring my professional experience to my work.
I also teach design practice (part-time) to first- and second-year BA Costume for Design and BA Hair, Make-up and Prosthetics for Performance students at the London College of Fashion, part of the University of the Arts, London. As a lecturer at UAL and a freelance designer I can access the resources I need to conduct my research.
I acknowledge these education systems and structures afford me unearned privilege. As such, I am committed to improving my understanding and practice, guided by people with lived experiences different than my own. I strive to be aware of my own biases and recognise how these may shape my research.
This statement of my position hopes to offer context to my work developing a diverse collection of figure reference images for my department to use in their teaching. It is also important for me to make a relatively formal statement at the beginning of this journal as I have learnt through the time spent working on this course how important personal contextualisation is in academic research.
Developing this statement has helped me, along with feedback from students, colleagues and peers, to interrogate my assumptions and methods of research, look for ways this could become a co-created tool, use it to discuss our unconscious bias, promote communal ownership of the resource, and make transparent what shapes this work.
Initially I found it confronting and uncomfortable to consider my privilege, feeling that it disqualified me from making meaningful innovations as they are uninformed by lived experience. This is a familiar sensation when teaching inclusive practice. However, as Sarah Homan says in her article for the Equality Institute:
“Stating your positionality is an action that demonstrates, publicly, that you are invested in the principles of decolonising research and knowledge production.”
Homan (2025)
When trying to create a resource that is representative, it is easy to become paralysed by a sense of your own inadequacies. I found another comment from Homan’s article, speaking about the work of decolonising, reassuring:
“ in the same ways we need men and boys to engage with gender equality work, I do think it is important that people from coloniser/settler backgrounds like myself, engage in the work of decolonisation in whatever tangible ways are available to them.”
(Harman 2025)
I borrowed from the practice of Christine Sum Kim, whom we were introduced to in our first unit, and began to draw a version of her round charts that would illustrate the various elements of the many identities that I hold and show how they intersect. I have found that drawing things out is a much less daunting way of processing, presenting and unlocking information. I hope that a visual resource such as the Fair Figure reference library also becomes a way for students to recognise some of their identities, potentially beginning a process of positioning themselves.
Fig 2 Visually exploring intersectional identities inspired by Christine Sun Kim ( Curtis 2025)
