Power & Grace  the working process of my art practice…

My art practice researches the body and how its movement, emotions & energies connect to other bodies, objects and the space around.  It considers the body’s form and muscularity.  It reflects on the boundary of the body.  Where that lies beyond the skin and how bodies affect and bind to each other through invisible bonds and touch.  How inner and outer meets, reacts, responds & connects.

I love exercise and I train in different physical disciplines. Current favourites are weight training, running, boxing & ballet. I use these forms of movement to explore different aspects of fine art. Such as, The Stilling Point, where movement meets material surface in the making of art.  Or the trace of marks left by movement meeting a surface.  My work can involve a performative making process which carries stories of varying articulations of the body.  Sometimes there is an emotional and imaginative narrative embedded in the art practice.  In my practice I reflect upon the universal themes of love & our place in the world, how inner & outer connects and communicates. Occasionally I write poems to paint detail into the lyricism   of some of the art works.

Making Gym (1)

To train, to be physical, to make art…

 

‘Everything the body can do is potentially enjoyable…the body does not produce Flow merely by its movements. The mind is always involved as well…because enjoyment takes place in the mind…, flow cannot be a purely physical process: muscles and brain must be equally involved.’

(Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, Flow the classic work on how to achieve happiness, pp. 94-96)

‘These intervals – fed by the pre acceleration that is the movement to come – are the virtual nodes through which each initiated movement becomes the invitation of a step. In the interval, the direction we’ve chosen gains a texture that encourages the step to fold through movement moving…’    (Erin Manning, Relationscapes, pub MIT, 2009 p.31)

Rehearsing the dance  ‘Evocation’,  music by Perkelt choreographed by Liz Blake in association with Alison McFadden,  for a dance film by Gerald Zibwenga

Boxing into Being, performative sculpture making, The James Hockey Gallery, July 2016, for Farnham Art Society.

 

 

 

 

‘The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities’ (Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘…a polarity emerges between the assumption of the body as a mere psychic space upon which an iconography may be written and as a physical being who feels the role and feels it within his or her skin…’

(Judith Butler, quoted in an article, ‘That is why I go to the gym… p. 477)

 

 

 

 

If you want transformation,  part has to happen in the body, because the body carries as much memory as the mind.

To move the body is to align thought and body and for me, it balances the soul.

The Big Dance 2016, choreography by Akram Khan