This exhibition 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.'