Through the lens of motherhood, the video Our Wider Flesh articulates ideas about bodies and land, maternal ancestry and the enclosure acts preceding the Industrial Revolution which enabled capitalism in Europe to spread across the world. Set around a building site in a field across from my terraced house in the semi-rural, post-industrial village of Denby Dale, West Yorkshire, an a capella composition emerges from responding to the sounds of machinery as the landscape is carved up and turned into future homes. Footage of moving through this landscape is thrown onto paper using a faulty projector that is in the process of breaking down, metamorphosing and composting the imagery as it moves across the surface. My seven year old daughter is projected dancing around the arches of the Victorian viaduct next to their home, weaving her body into the spaces, mirroring and reifying the sensory exchange that might have existed before people were separated from their land by the centuries of capitalism. This separation can be witnessed and experienced as the dualisms of nature and culture manifest within the landscape and ecological crisis that is unfolding throughout the current epoch of time known as the Anthropocene.
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.'
Estacion de Guaguas (bustop), 11 clay sculptures, 2024
The sculptures were presented on plinths each at different heights and arranged in a snake-like sequence cutting diagonally cross the gallery space. They all incorporate materials foraged from different landscapes around Yorkshire where I take my children, including the National Coal Mining Museum, the beaches at Flamborough Head, and the fields around our home in Denby Dale. Coal, mine ochre, glacial deposits from the last ice-age discovered in landslides on the coast, and clay from fields used for farming were applied as slips and glazes for the sculptures.
The use of the word ‘Guagua’ to describe these sculptures is explained in an artist book created to accompany the vessels, highlighting how it is as a response to the convergence of storytelling, carrying babies inside and outside of the body, migration to and from the island of Lanzarote, and the methodologies involved in tending to clay (the flesh of the landscape) creating vessels that reflect the chaos of caregiving, attachment, and separation to both bodies and land, and the forms that emerge from this convergence of methodologies.
Guagua artist book, 2024, incorporating text, photography, drawings, printed on recycled paper. This book informs the series of Guagua sculptures in the exhibition (see section 'Guaguas' in the header of this website for more information about the collection).
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.
