Professionals and volunteers working with victims/survivors of domestic violence encounter women and men who are subjected to extremely traumatic experiences. We have to listen to survivors’ accounts of emotional/physical/sexual cruelty. It is inevitable that the worker will be affected by this, and it is commonly accepted that workers might be suffering from vicarious, or secondary trauma. I collaborated with five colleagues to create this socially engaged work. Over a period of about 2 weeks, we recorded our feelings around working with domestic violence clients. We used various media including writing, painting, drawing, audio recordings.

The final work was in the form of a video and a display of the work we produced after we had discussed our work and the experience of partaking in the project. A time for reflecting on the day’s work is often that transition period between leaving work and going home and so I filmed my colleagues as they left work, walking down the street. I focussed on filming shadows to represent the hidden, the subconscious and also the dark and sinister nature of domestic abuse.

The title of this work comes from a comment by one of my colleagues, who said that there is always something of the client’s trauma that sticks to us at the end of the day…a residue, she called it.