Working up until the beginning of this residency, I have been thinking about our movement around material culture, increasingly during and after the COVID lockdown period. How our behaviours and actions interacting with technology have largely turned down or silenced much of our body’s intelligence in an increase of sedentary inactivity and a slow social agreement to sit down, say safe, and don’t take risks.

My work increasingly has found performance and movement to be the key process to accessing deep materiality and an awareness of states in flux. Myself included. Exploring at the edges of my own physiology through strength and play interactions, looking closely at bone mineralogy or bioapatite, and reexamining my practice in ceramics in connection to earth, soils, and of course clay. Noticing more so how we are collectively bound to the shared inevitability of gravitational pull. I want to learn from this pull. Tap into it through knowledge already in my body. Situating materiality as active or vital as ecological beings and beingness that are continuously being made and unmade by movement all the time. Many systems are at play, all at once. Inside and out.

It has become more apparent to me, now at the grand age of 44 years,  that the slow erosion of this embodied knowledge increases into our adulthood. Our confidence in our own anatomy to support what once we so at ease in childhood, is no longer there to catch us when we fall. Our trust and integral tactile and kinaesthetic relationships to navigate, regulate risk, and manage relationships with the wider world,- now feel more crackly, awkward, and achy and our main column of communication, the spine,  becoming more rigid. We seek out more comfort and more ease. We sit down. The body communication volume gets turned down low. Those sounds silenced. Medicated. Appeased.

Here in this residency context, play is an impetus and invitation towards creative conditions to act as a force of material animacy in the making of fresh ground, revitalized territories, a kind of communing a connection through making in clay, play, and forces that shape us. To carry weight, sit with tension, and fall into flux. Listen to what the aches are saying.

Play in this context does not correspond to fun, sometimes that can seem coercive, prearranged, or enforced to be in a state of perpetual happiness. Play can be a source of acknowledgment of experiencing both our collective pain and joy, freedom and effort, frustration and ease to sit with the weight of our discomfort to enable moves into these ecological positions – sense its pull, resonate with it, clearing space to make way for the new

So I have begun in the residency to rework elements in latex, build in scaffold tubing and expand my positions towards clay and ceramics, in a much less forced way. Capturing the processes with stop-motion photography,  and creating the conditions somatically and spatially map the unstable edges of disciplinary borders between art, performance, material science, and bioarchaeology.

Bioart has had a profound action upon me to open connect, disrupt, catalyse, and move between interrelational spaces and overlaps in research areas and be flexible to carve new territory as sculptural situations and interactions to share with people a way to commune towards common grounds. For me, movement and the earned freedom of improvised play movement are the way to access our childlike connection to our ecological selves that run through us and form the basis of our skeletal and social integrity. If we explore the discomfort and stick with the tension perhaps we can perceive alternate ways of being, and see through our bones how to move forward as made of both technology and terra.

As Donna Haraway’s introduction to her 2016 work, ‘Staying with the Trouble – Making Kin in the Chthulucene’; I paraphrase here and pull out the intentions from the text that set the framework for the next movements during the residency.

It’s very clear:-

….Our task is to become capable…

Our task is to make kin….

Our task is to make trouble in response to devastating events

Our task is to practice learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present….

 

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Soft Clay // Hard Play

Gail