Who is Dolly Chamberlain?
She's me, Rosie. I am a multidisciplinary artist working through self portraiture, performance, and staged photography. My primary vehicle is Dolly Chamberlain - a surreal, theatrical persona who parodies the narcissist themselves. A grotesque mirror held up to the kind of personality that manipulates, gaslights and erases others in the name of control.
Inspired by my own experiences, Dolly borrows traits from both the narcissist and their victim. I examine the lasting trauma inflicted by narcissistic abuse. Exploring themes of identity distortion, gaslighting, and the devastating aftermath of psychological control.
Psychological abuse is difficult to see and even harder to explain - it does not leave bruises, but it destroys your ability to trust yourself. It rewrites your memory, undermines your instincts and teaches you to doubt your own sanity.
The goal of my work is to destabilize my audience. Dolly's personality is controlled and composed - until she isn't, her behavior swings between self-importance and fragility, dominance and despair. The goal is not clarity, its confusion. I want my audience to experience the same emotional whiplash that occurs when being under the spell of a narcissist. My work uses intense visual effects - saturated colours & surreal compositions - to recreate the internal disorientation victims often experience: the sense that reality has become warped, staged and quietly hostile. Dolly helps me work through my own personal trauma while simultaneously mocking the source of it. The works are unsettling on purpose, I want the viewer to feel unsure and uncomfortable - just like I did.
Ultimately, my goal is to expose what narcissistic abuse leaves behind. My work is not just catharsis but a way for me to raise awareness about the psychological damage caused by narcissistic abuse and the complex ways victims rebuild themselves after it.
Wait, who's Rosie?
Roseannah Holcombe is a girl who was born in a small country town in the late 1900s. She moved to Toowoomba, Queensland to pursue a Bachelor of Creative Arts at the University of Southern Queensland in 2019 after applying for lots of different options and pulling the winner out of a hat. After making a number of decisions she would later come to regret, she decided it's better not to worry about things in the past that cannot be changed. She now lives with her cat and runs a successful factory producing organic breakfast products.
