ANNA HUGHES

ARTIST / WRITER / RESEARCHER

CYBERCRIP ART - Ebook out now - Hardback out April 2026

CURRENT PROJECT:

CORPUS LUTEUM:
Digital Reproduction

WORK

I use the 3D imaging software Blender to create digitally rendered animations that incorporate sound and text to explore sensuality and embodiment in digital space. My research engages with disability and crip theory, new materialism, biopolitics, and feminism to explore sensuality and embodiment in digital media. Grounded in my art practice-based PhD (completed in 2024) and developed further in my recent artwork and forthcoming book Cybercrip Art (Palgrave Macmillan, April 2026), I advocate for an embodied reclamation of digital space that embraces the mutability of bodies to resist biological essentialism. In an era where digital media is increasingly dictated by capitalist imperatives that occlude the biopolitical realities of mutable bodies on the ground, I argue that digital disembodiment further marginalises bodies, becoming a strategy to distract from violent and corrupt practices while restricting bodies that resist its systemic limits. As opposed to rejecting digital media altogether, I call for embodied resistance and alternative modes of being with technology.

Drawing from the experience of adopting a more accessible digital practice after becoming sick, I explore the enabling aspects of digital making and its subsequent encounters. My sick perspective gives me the heightened knowledge of feeling the presence of my embodiment in cyberspace through symptoms, and I produce digital expressions of this once-invisible reality. My software gives me an accessible mode of expression, and I use this understanding of embodiment in cyberspace to theorise a more caring and abundant way of living with digital media. Finding ways to live symbiotically as a body with digital media counters the logic of competition enforced within a neoliberal society, a problem that foregrounds my work. Without this incessant need for competition and qualitative comparison, sick and disabled people can thrive without being othered, and my digital renders can resonate with all the matter they come into contact with. These animations feature forms and textures that resonate with the exploration of my own embodiment. In turn, the work draws from my embodied experience to develop sites of potential affective encounters. Although the work features bold, seductive, and gory imagery, my body’s main influence on this work extends beyond visual indulgence. It utilises rhythmic, viscous, textural, and melodic expressions of my fraught embodiment to explore this resisting body through digital media.

BIO

Anna Hughes, PhD, is a visual artist, writer and researcher based in London. Anna studied at University of Reading (BA), and Royal College of Art, (MA, PhD). Her work has been exhibited with institutions across the UK and abroad including Southwark Park Gallery (London), ICA (London), Beaconsﬁeld Gallery (London), QUAD (Derby), OUTPOST (Norwich), Hackney Picture House (London), Flat Time House (London) and ArtCopenhagen. She is a recipient of the Axis Fellowship 2025. Anna’s research has featured in publications such as I Care By, Prova, and Disco journal funded by CHASE. Anna has been a visiting lecturer at institutions such as Royal College of Art, Liverpool Hope University, Bath Spa University, and Camberwell College of Arts.

Last Updated 24.08.47