Work in Material Memory Exhibition, TENT Rotterdam 2022/23.
Cast Channels/ Dredged monuments is the third and final iteration of a body of (water) work. This installation collected rainwater fom the roof of the gallery and channelled it through a network of flexible tubes. The rainwater is circuited inside the gallery through windows and walls, between spaces, ghosts of plastic containers and pools. It emerged out of research exploring the colonial imposition of plumbing and gestures towards an alternative kind of plumbing; entangled, contingent, flexible and wholly corporeal.
Audio commission for Lake Radio Copenhagen 2023.
SLEEP UP / WAKE DEEP is a restless meditation on sleep and sleeplessness. Oriented to, and within the body, the piece lingers in the discord between internal, circadian rhythms and clock (work) time. SLEEP UP / WAKE DEEP includes augmented voice, instruments, found and field recordings as it loosely moves through the course of a day without sleep.
Listen here.
recuerdos materiales / legados liquidos (material memories / liquid legacies) CCB Bogota as part of ARTBO Fracaso exhibition 2022.
The second in the water works series was conceived and produced during a 6 week residency in the Art and Ecology department of del Rosario University Bogota, Colombia in summer 2022. The work draws from materials and forms observed within the city. In its aesthetic and form it is both more brave and more precarious than other iterations. Installed outside it takes in the voracious rainfall of Bogota and evaporates quickly under the strong sun of high altitude. Seen from the street it also inadvertently became a wishing pond where coins were thrown by the public during the exhibition.
Work exhibited at Growing Space, Wielewaal Rotterdam 2021.
BRINE BLOOD/SWOLLEN PIPE is a playful exploration of 'aquatic architecture' and water as liquid connectivity. It was exhibited at Growing Space, a greenhouse gallery, open for display 24/7 in South Rotterdam. In the weeks leading up to the exhibition I collected rainwater from the surrounding area and flooded the greenhouse with it.
The exhibition itself becomes a body of water; a sweating, enclosed pond. When it is hot the condensation collects on the walls and roof and drips back down to the floor. A series of fountains and pipes suck, drink, pump, channel, funnel and spray in a microcosm of the hydrologic cycle and the bodies and containers which constitute and mediate it. Cast from plaster, which is poured as a liquid and hardens into a soluble solid, these objects slowly melted back into the surrounding water during the course of the exhibition.
The work is inspired by ecofeminist ideas, particularly Astrida Neimanis' Hydrofeminism essay and Alexis Shotwell's critique of purity politics. It strives to imagine bodies beyond sovereign cells, to think about shared streams that pass through us; of culture, of microbes, water, pollution and immunity.
Video documentation here.
Exhibition at Available and The Rat Rotterdam 2021.
Installation with video (15 mins single channel with sound) and series of cast beeswax candles melting and being recast into the shape of funnels during the run of the exhibition.
This exhibition came out of both the research I did at Deltaworkers residency in New Orleans (2019) and my own embodied experience breastfeeding my baby for 2 years. The video meditates on connections between environmental and bodily landscapes and toxicities. It draws from personal experience, observation and the work of Eula Biss and Alexis Shotwell.
Beeswax candles cast in the shape of funnels melted as they burned, proxies for flesh melting into milk.
Research and writing commission School of Commons (Zurich), 2020. Whole commission (introduction plus five essays) published online here:
( https://www.schoolofcommons.org/labs/haptics-of-miasma )
‘Haptics of Miasma, a READ commission for School of Commons, explores contamination and loss of boundaries, through the concept of ‘Miasma’ (a pre-germ-theory explanation of disease). Miasma actually means ‘pollution’ but could also be foul odours, fog, mist and noxious gases that spread both ill-health and immorality through the air.Miasma theory is holistic, a relational and negotiated approach to our environment, its postulates that if our surroundings are not healthy, neither are we. Through its more atomised approach, germ theory is much more compatible with capitalism. We can literally ‘wash our hands’ of contamination, and separate from the filth of our environment. Miasma theory, on the other hand, has us always-already contaminated.
In our recent experience of a global pandemic, partly caused by the climate and ecological crises, myths of separability must be challenged. The present is a testimony to impossibilities of containment on a global scale. Deforestation in Brazil causes natural disasters on the opposite side of the world; within a matter of weeks a pathogen can spread across the globe irrespective of state borders.
Haptics of Miasma uses the frame of miasma theory to explore existing and imagined states of contamination, unsovereignty and borderlessness. The body of prose, poetry and essays speak from an urgent place of interconnectedness and terrestrial immanence.’
We Signal Voice Gardens digital commission / interactive online artwork 2020/21
https://voicegardens.org/
Commissioned by UP Projects London, Stimuleringfonds, NL (2020) and shown at VISUAL Carlow (2021/22)
Interact/ add your voice here.
This work is a digital commission from UP Projects/ Stimuleringfonds. It emerges from a period of research about the hierarchies of voice in the digital realm.
Participants press a button to record their voice into the website which translates the properties of their voice (volume, cadence, pitch) into a colour, shape and movement.
The work was displayed as part of the exhibition Woman in the Machine at VISUAL Carlow where it was adapted for installation.
Installation Showroom Mama Rotterdam June-August 2019.
2 channel digital video with sound projected onto lazer cut hanging screens with inset mirrors, watercolour paintings, perfume and scent installation. Dimensions Variable.
Full video (adapted to single channel) available to view here (10mins).
This work explores the symbology, social and biological evolution of the orchid, through the figure of the colonial orchid hunter. It followed an extensive period of research in Colombia and within greenhouses outside of Rotterdam NL.
Installation view images are from Showroom Mama Rotterdam 2019.
Glass Enclosed Audio Commission for Radiophrenia Glasgow / KUNSTRADIO 2019/20
Listen here (27 mins)
Hermits carry tissue boxes on their feet instead of shoes and keep plastic trolls under the sofa; birds bring them bread, they count their days with potatoes, they live in their own grave naked and hairy, or they wear woven cloaks of camel's hair.
Glass Enclosed is an epic, solitary incantation performed by a voice. Starting points are "Ancrene Wisse" (pronounced: Enkrin Wiz) and "Speculum Inclusorum" - handbooks for hermits, anchorites and hermits from the 13th to 15th centuries. Glass Enclosed combines myth, testimony and absurdist imagery in a placeless, cacophonous monologue.
