The exhibition 'Our Wider Flesh' charts the first year of my practice-based PhD project 'Mothering Beyond the Flesh', which investigates the relationships between landscape, maternal agency and creative practice. Situated in the post-industrial and semi-rural landscape of West Yorkshire - where I was born, raised and currently live with my two young children - the first year of this research has focussed on uncovering the historical and theoretical roots of my own separation from this landscape, and how maternal and creative practice can generate narratives that might illuminate ways in which to attend and re-attach ourselves to the immediate environment. In addition to the video Our Wider Flesh, the exhibition presents a series of ceramic works made with materials foraged from the mines and fields close to the artist's home, responding to the flesh of the land through intimate and performative sculptures, installations using projections, photography and auto-ethnographic writing. Engaging with maternal, phenomenological, ecofeminist and landscape theory, the works on display are meditations on placemaking, geological deep-time intimacy and the cyclical nature of dwelling and caregiving, becoming research artefacts that trace the convergence of these different practices.
The exhibition takes its name from an essay written by cultural ecologist David Abram, who describes the journeys of migratory animals such as the Monarch Butterfly and Sockeye Salmon using the sensory exchange that guides them across the surface of the Earth to reproduce. These animals navigate thousands of miles over land, through oceans and along rivers to exact locations with no 'internal map' or representational image projected outwards onto the world, guiding them to their destination. Instead, it is performed through the sensations of the landscape experienced through their bodies. As Abram suggests, the landscape becomes part of their 'wider flesh.'
Suborbital (one moon, two shores), projection on board with plastic disc, 2024, is an installation using a shape taken from a map of where I walk each morning through the landscape around my home, which has a projection of two shorelines (one in Yorkshire, one in Lanzarote) and a hanging, rotating disc almost touching its surface. The disc randomly interrupts and captures an image of my children in the ocean, moving more frequently when a person moves within its vicinity.
Ambient Stones (sea egg), video projection on fired clay, volcanic sand, 2024 is an installation which incorporates a stage-like set featuring various fired clay sculptures painted with mine ochre that capture the projection and create a miniature landscape within the boundaries of the table. The video is of my daughter creating a nest on the shoreline and playing with a stone that she imagined was alive.
Shadows, fired clay, 2024.
Discrete pieces of fired clay incorporating found materials within different landscapes I frequent around Yorkshire (coastal, mine, fields) bearing forms that I sensed were operating like shadows of the vessels I was creating for the Guagua series.
Shields, Doorways, Apertures, 16 digital prints on recycled paper, 2024.
The arch is a reoccurring shape I encounter daily with my children as we move through the landscape of our homeland. In many ways it is one of the very few enduring forms that continue to exist as the environment and architecture changes to accommodate our ways of dwelling, serving as a a symbol of defence, doorway or aperture that bears witness to the decline of spirituality and/or perhaps a certain disenchantment with the landscape.