FRAMING STATEMENT
My art practice has been in a process of disintegration - a falling apart of what was before, a disorientation and not knowing. As a way to establish some ground, I have been following instinctive pulls to enact rituals that root me here, in my body, feet on earth. These rituals generate tentacular doorways and attunements, and open a sense of deep ancestral time and belonging. They are the beginning of learning how to prostrate to a larger body of matter and consciousness; to not only meet, but to bow down to the multiplicities of ‘others’ that surround me. My art work wants to de-centralise the human perspective and status quo and enter into the horizontal entanglements of nature, as nature. It is a physical and intuitive practice that performs and honours an inter-subjective field of relations.
These ritual rootings and attunements are born from a feminist and queer position. They require a slowing down and a deeply porous embodied listening. They allow indeterminate forces and feminine principles of receptivity, desiring openness and surrender; and they ask the question: What is needed here? Bayo Akomolafe, quantum physicist, speaker and poet, acknowledges the painful process of becoming-with, but he says that it is this vulnerability and incompleteness that has the emergent capacity to shapeshift and transform alongside our many other-than-human siblings.
My menstrual blood has informed many of my rituals - it is both a symbol of life and death, of woundedness, healing, pleasure and pain. It disrupts, disorganises, and incapacitates me so that I cannot function in the conventional Western world. It is also a continuous sensual thread through time linking me to all women, mythic and domestic realms. Like shamanic ceremonies, where the medicine woman or man wears animal skins, bones, or bird feathers to ignite healing potentialities, I wear my blood to call for healing (personal and collective). The indigenous perspective acknowledges the potency of every living being or agency. By bringing my menstrual blood out from the shadows of shame, denial and concealment, I am reclaiming the power of it. As contemporary artist and performer Florence Peake’s work places the primal erotic body as a force of protest, it also releases the ‘intuitive body’ form its silence and repression to become a source of innate strength and wisdom.
IMPORTANT LINKS TO WORK:
ZOOM BLOOD RITUAL (2020)
RITUALS OF RELATIONSHIP / WAYS TO ENTER THE WEB (2020)
MOON RITUALS (2020)
LUDO: SENSUAL SHAMAN (2019-2020)
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/397222648
At this moment in time, I'm not sure whether these rituals should be seen as a film documentary - or edited/ developed into a mediated filmic experience for the viewer. Or whether they are live performances, that exist in the moment, enacted with an audience (other-than-human) at the time of event. I don't know if my practice will develop into a live-performance-ritual-enactment to a human audience situated in an art context. They are spontaneous and not overly constructed. They are raw and 'undone' - naked - exposing. Documenting them can feel troubling to me - to capture / encapsulate them - and then regurgitate them for human consumption (although there is this urge to have evidence they happened, that they are an artwork). I have performed others with no documentation, honouring the privacy. This is a constant tension in my work - where is the work situated - the live encounter or the mediated / constructed experience for the viewer? How can I make the intimately private encounter public? Do they have to be oppositional? Can they be both? It feels much safer to film myself perform and enact ritualistic encounters with no human audience. I acknowledge that whenever I perform a ritual it is a collaboration with the community of others that are 'place' - whether in the river dart, the woods, my garden, inside my home - I am surrounded and accompanied and becoming-with the other-than-human forces surrounding me. I should rather say 'we enact the ritual together' rather than 'I enact the ritual'. There is the use of ritualistic objects, or agencies - eg. my menstrual blood - I am uncomfortable with the term 'use'. I am also uncomfortable with situating my work in the mythical realm. However, my work does evoke the mythical, but does this alongside the domestic and the ordinary everyday. Having a period is both totally ordinary and yet somehow places me outside of the normative structures of society. It drops me deeply into the unconscious, where there is easier access to dream states, intuition, vision, creativity and meditation. Healing, woundedness and potential/potency/power are all important themes in my work - my art work is an invocation for healing and transformation but only in the sense that it exposes the wound. It speaks of the 'hidden' - that which has been repressed or denied or concealed. And this is a delicate process, as what is hidden needs to be respected, and listened to - there is no driving agenda for illumination - the darkness has healing potentialities just as the light.
Another body of work which is still raw and emerging is working with my wild and free voice. I have been having sessions with a 'voice midwife', however these have stopped due to lockdown restrictions. This is definitely work in progress, as it's about developing my confidence to express through my voice, pre-lingistic, pre-cognitive - an embodied and raw expression that wants to happen. And this remains unknown - tt's not to be understood or planned by mind. It is an uncivilised way to communicate, in that it is not constructed or learned.
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