Artist Elizabeth Ransom is holding her new solo exhibition Transnational in the James Hockey Gallery at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham from November 30 to January 22.

It will explore the themes of migration and bring together five years of PhD practice-based research focusing on the intersection of migration, feminism and alternative photographic processes.

Ransom's artwork challenges derogatory narratives of migration that are often disseminated through the media.

Instead she returns directly to the migrant to investigate and showcase the lived experience of displacement, providing space for them to tell their own stories.

Many of the artworks take on an autobiographical narrative as the artist explores her own lived experience of migration and how that has impacted on her sense of self.

Throughout the exhibition themes of homesickness, place attachment, belonging and memory are revealed through artworks created using alternative photographic processes such as soil chromatography, cyanotype, film soup and frottage photograms.

The final outcomes are rendered as abstract and sometimes brightly coloured objects printed on glass, metal and paper.

Ransom creates images that explore the materiality of the photographic object and the expansive opportunities of working with photographic chemistry and light sensitive materials.

The show features three series that explore the complications of being in between countries, including Homesick (2021-22), The Woods (2021-22) and Immigration Day (2019).

In Immigration Day, Elizabeth returned to her first home in the USA exactly 20 years after her immigration day.

Through using cyanotypes and photograms, she created a record of this personally significant location, cataloguing the rain that fell on that day, the textures of the trees and the cracks in the pavement.

In The Woods, Elizabeth retraced her childhood footsteps, collecting soil and plant samples. She then used the soil chromatography process to create abstract representations of the space.

The resulting images mapped this site, recording the changes in the environmental make-up of this landscape over the period of a year, each ecological sample captured on to the light sensitive surface of the chromatography print.

In Homesick, Elizabeth invited ten migrant women to share their stories and memories of homesickness. She first collected a list of liquids from each individual that reminded them of home.

This could be anything from a favourite drink they can only get access to in their home country to a soup they ate as a child when they were feeling unwell.

Elizabeth then soaked a roll of 35mm colour film in the liquid for one hour for every day since they had returned to that location. This ranged from 57 to 1,125 hours.

To accompany this solo exhibition there will be an artist talk and opening reception held in the James Hockey Gallery on December 7 from 1.30pm to 3.30pm, when attendees can hear Ransom speak about selected projects from the exhibition.

There will also be a Transnational reading group, inspired by Sara Ahmed’s text Home and away: Narratives of migration and estrangement, to be held in the James Hockey Gallery on December 10 from 1pm to 2pm.

Participants will investigate the meaning of home in relation to Ahmed’s seminal text. Copies of the essay will be provided as part of the reading group. There is no need to read the text before the reading group, as participants will read segments together as a group.