Four Australia based artists Nikki Lam, Melissa Gilbert (Offerings), Frauke Huhn and Kate O’Boyle joined Priya Mistry in an exploratory week of grief, celebration, anger and beginnings. They met online for over 4 days. Central to their time together they explored “The body as a ‘vessel’ physically and neurologically, holding experience and trauma whilst storing information, impulses and patterns. And the question, “does human expression need to be more ‘psycho’, more ‘imagined’, ‘extreme’ or shamanic even?”
During their sessions they questioned: How do we take something that was intended to be a deep, intimate delving, a physical meeting of multiple bodies in one space, and convert it into digital platforms, Zooms, Messenger chats, File sharing, performing to camera, wailing and bashing objects into sound files and being held to account by a stop clock and a clanging sound you can’t see but can hear?
A short textural response for the 4 days they spent together:
An intimate exploration rippling into something new, unexpected, yet expanding.
A collective conjuring, drawing of lines a coven of notes, gathering foreign bodies and an exhalation of sounds.
Unexpected.
Objects oscillating between apparition & function, fixing lines and pulling scores from our bodies.
Evolving subtly through disparate electricity penetrating our day to day lives.
The artists together created a palette of shared images, drawings, sounds, performances and texts.
Body as a Vessel was….
Shape and sound downloading
from the storage space of your body and soul
transferring energy through the digital space
disappearing -getting lost- finding access-login in
into my body evoking new spaces…
and has opened up possibilities in their practice about digital bodies and gestures.
Image credit Nikki Lam, Melissa Gilbert (Offerings), Frauke Huhn, Kate O’Boyle edited collage by whatsthebigmistry