Vanessa’s research is the product of a fascination with the processes, materiality and performativity of art practice and the means by which they are implicit within the negotiation and transformation of artistic protocols, culture, history and society. In particular her attention to the historical specificity of art production is marked by a desire to read for the way in which the production of artworks may go against the grain of dominant ideology to negotiate marginalised, silenced experience. Thus her research considers the material and theoretical concerns of class, ethnicity and sexual politics within the context of cultural memory, displacement, migration and trauma. Vanessa’s articulation of process as a supplementary mode of signification in this research has been dependent upon a close reading of the methodologies of the history of art. Her approach again has been informed by an interest in those objects often silenced by discourse. Consequently, this work often underlines that which has often been culturally overlooked, or art historically dismissed as work for art rather than valued as a work of art.