Collaborative Embodied Practice

This collaborative practice developed through an embodied encounter between three artists, working with movement, repetition, performance and objects gathered along the River Thames.

PROCESS

Before working with the objects, we entered into a physical process together, using movement and Meisner repetition to move out of habitual ways of relating and into a heightened state of attention to one another, the body and the materials.

The objects entered the process only after this embodied work had begun.

Bones, fragments of skull and mandible, scapulae, mother-of-pearl and Python and Typhon were placed into contact with the living body.

Rather than being treated as props or jewellery to be modelled, they became participants in the encounter.

The practice asked what happens when we come into direct relationship with the material remnants of other lives.

WHAT DOES DEATH
LOOK AND FEEL LIKE
AS ADORNMENT?

From an animist perspective, these materials are not inert and do not need to be brought “back to life”.

The process became instead, an act of listening and relating: allowing bone, mother-of-pearl, metal, skin, breath and movement to meet.

PAST ENTERS PRESENT.
What has been discarded, buried, broken or carried by the river comes momentarily into another form.

The photographs and moving-image works are not simply documentation of objects.

They are traces of a process that took place between three people, the body, the materials and the histories they carry.

Bone · mother-of-pearl · metal · skin · breath · movement

The encounter opened a continuing strand of practice around embodiment, river findings, bones, adornment and our relationship with the remains of other lives.