Current Exhibition
Out of Reach: The Enigma of Consciousness, 11-20 April 2024
A group show curated by Ismini Chimona and Yuying Chang titled Out of Reach: The Enigma of Consciousness. Out of Reach: The Enigma of Consciousness’ 11- 20 April 2024 exhibiting at Art in the Docks, 25 Shackleton Wy, London E16 2XJ. Private View: 1800 - 2100 on 11th. 'An exhibition where art serves as a portal to the intricate realms of the mind. Within the recesses of our minds, memory and subconsciousness often appear as strangers, elusive and enigmatic. This showcase offers a captivating exploration of memory and the subconscious, inviting viewers to contemplate the essence of being. Through a blend of artistic expression, each piece becomes a mirror reflecting the complexities of human consciousness. As we traverse the landscapes of perception, unravelling the mysteries that lie beyond the surface of reality, visitors are invited to experience the transformative power of creativity illuminating the essence of existence. The exhibition is curated by @isminich and @yuyin The artists are @amandacornishstudio @artist._.jay @kvduongart @margot_wilson_art @ningyueqian Nova Ma @chromosapiens aka Sara Christova @shaneberkery victorguerin.fr The exhibition is promoted by @artinthedocks With the support of @notting_hill_genesis Private View: Thursday 11th of April, 18:00-21:00. Artists & Curators in conversation: Thursday 18th of April, 14:00.' |
I will be exhibiting over 400 Protean Venus figures in an installation titled Venus Resurrection (2024). Venus Resurrection is an installation that explores emergent orchestral spiral flow as cosmos, community, and the kinetic bio-electric body. The term 'planet' means 'to wanderer' and Hellenic astrological Venus signifies food, production, sex, reproduction, love, movement in music, rhythm, capitalised production, and the moving appetites. Astrological Venus first resurrects the latent harmonising potential in humanity to balance the unbridled appetite of global capitalism. Then as a ‘the body collective’ she/they reclaim prehistoric and classical Venus as Protean non-gendered and non-binary cosmological movement that flow, follow, lead, wander through, past, and beyond all borders of conflict. |
To date no one truly knows where we come from or to where we will return. Tibetans believe the Bardo is our greatest teacher. Socrates believed the purpose of life was to prepare for a good death. The body's life is possibly only because of the fusion of bio-electric chemical currents and the breath. There is no single centre of control, not even the brain or heart, instead the body functions like its own cosmos birthing and dying cells like stars and galaxies. In every moment something holds us in place, our notions of self, or sense of place and space and relations, at the same time a turbulent material recycling takes place, renewing cells, senses, and pleasure. We are always rising and falling, stretching, and tensing, giving and resisting, opening and closing, the preciseness of the action though is never this, it is the colour beige, the memory of blue, the taste of a rippling wave, the smell of a scar.
Current Projects: Electric Bodies
I am a London/Surrey-based Scottish artist interested in the agency of breath and dreaming in performance art and creating site-specific immersive installations that range from examining body dysmorphia to the relationship between oil and war as a poetics of failure. Following my recovery from bulimia nervosa in the 1980’s and in tandem with careers in television and technology, and academic and art studies, my life has been devoted to Eastern spiritual and esoteric research and astrology With degrees in philosophy and art my practice investigates the bio-electric body and poly vagal neuroscience as highways of agency in consciousness and dreaming. My research Intersects Buddhist impermanence and emergence theories as the eternal returning breath and fluid Mobius surface topographies including: the spiral nature of energy as Yeats’ ‘gyre that will not hold’, disk-spiral galaxies that breathe, levitating kundalini energy, and bio-electricity's role in generation of internal light. In 2005 I developed breathing and hypnagogic visualisation techniques that re-situate breath induced vivid dreams and I continues to explore immersive and improvisational breathing practices as ‘orchestral space holding’ with Breath Quartet @breathquartet, a collaboration of students and external artists committed to improvised rituals that honour the seasonal solstices and equinoxes.
Research paper is available on Academia.edu:
"How can we use bi-handed drawing, breath, and sound to investigate cyclical spiral energy (2023)"
Eighteen Hundred Days and One Night (2024)
My practice is both social and auto critical. This installation speaks directly to my personal refuge as recovery from bulimia nervosa in the early 1980s, mediated by the sanctuary of a year in an NHS hospital where along with behavioural therapies I taught myself how to lucid dream and meditate.1800 Days and One Night contemplates refuge, dysmorphic fear, and gargantuan courage to outgrow crippling patterns of self-destruction. Inspired by the 40,000-year-old Venus Hols Fels sculptures these Venus figures emerge as voids and rupturing of porcelain clay depicted as half-formed incomplete bodies.
This research also examines astrological Venus commencing with the oldest known figurative sculpture, the Hohle Fels Venus. Astrological Venus rules food, love, security, self-worth, material production, money, sex, beauty, the appetites. A complex journey, I decided to start with a deep dive into and resurrection of what I term, Protean Venus. Considering prehistoric Venus permits a pre patriarchal discourse that offers surprising outcomes! That said, this body of figures titled Venus Resurrection, responds to Kurup's view that the large pendular breasts and buttocks of Hohle Fels Venus (c.a. 40,000 B.C.E.) provided enhanced capability of ‘floating’ in marsh and mangrove waters (Kurup: 2022). Kurup concludes these figures to be effigies depicting human evolution from water to land, further claiming pre-patriarchal Palaeolithic Venus as non-gendered and explicitly non-binary being/s (Kurup: 2022). Venus Resurrection also responds to Berlant’s arguments against misogynistic patriarchal readings of Venus of Hohle Fels as a ‘pornographic’ sex object (Mellars: 2009). Berlant instead evidences the bulbous breasts and bloated belly as depicting mushroom sprouting life giving mycelium networks (Berlant: 2011). Finally, these ‘Protean Venus’ installations explore embodied orchestral spiral ‘movement’.
Sleepwalkers (2024)
Sleepwalkers I & II synthesise my odyssey through hypnogogic visualisation and lucid dreamwork in the small hours of the night, saved by my childhood conditioning of not being allowed to make any noise at night. In fear of waking my father, a dairy man who had to rise at 3.30 am every day of the year bar Christmas Day, I never yielded to my eating disorder once in bed. Night, sleep, and horizontality became the only refuge in a virtual gymnasium of freedom from suffering, a practice that evolved into my creative methodology across all areas of my practice and life. Sleepwalkers I&II introduce the floating timeless emergent imagery, sometimes figurative, sometimes textural, always luminous. This aspect of my practice is about generating agency in sleep and dreaming, using the virtual space as a portal to inhabit and evolve, birthing new positive soma (body) neuro (brain/nervous system) holding patterns. Breath Quartet advances these themes extensively through performance.
KINETIC ENTROPY (2023)
Kinetic Entropy explores 'performance making' as research methodology. My aim was to take 9 sheets of tin plate steel and join them as a 9 ft square sheet, the maximum size I could interact with and shape unassisted. The film is largely continuous, recording the emergence of the figural through human touch. The performance is a tactile improvisation inspired by the thrumming rhythms of the overhead M25 flyover and passing trains on the London Waterloo to Woking trainline. Birds also join in. My aim now is to make 9 of these figures in different locations using the making process to think about birth and death, what constitutes a minimal life, what shapes belonging, what enables happiness, and the flow of relationships.
Crossing: Death the Horizontal (2024)
Crossing: Death the Horizontal is a short film that re-imagines the crossing of life and death as a gallery experience. What if we could 'see' our ancestors in paintings, spaces, animals, and certain poetry? What if death was the antithesis of ontological certainty and instead the vital pulse of life. This film is not about the act of dying but the potency of entropy in life. The older we get the more visceral the ancestral textures. The poetic move has no end or beginning, on the cartography of breath.
Premiere Screened at Genesis Cinema, RCA Contemporary Art Film Festival (2024)
* this video contains artistic nudity
Premiere Screened at Genesis Cinema, RCA Contemporary Art Film Festival (2024)
* this video contains artistic nudity
Hypnagogia (Light Cones) 2023
Hypnagogia introduces my life long explorations into sleep, dreaming, and the in between states of hypnagogia and hypnopompia. This research borrows and aligns the concept of Lyotard’s libidinal band with breath directed bipedal uprightness and aspects of cosmic breath-directed spiral verticality in disk galaxies (Ghosh et al 2022a). In contrast to bipedal uprightness the research also links my Breath Induced Vivid Dreaming [BIVD] (Wilson: 2005, 2016) method that posits dreaming, hypnagogia, hypnopompic visualization as horizontal circadian paradigms. Drawing upon recently published research that makes such contemporary speculations possible and correlations in ancient Eastern metaphysics, in particular early Buddhist teachings (EBT) on impermanence and the inter- spiritual concept of kundalini spiral energy1 and Zen this research approaches existence and being as continuously cosmologically emergent.
Lament for Gaia (2023)
M25 Lament for Gaia Il is a Longtone voice recording using a vintage Naumann microphone. The video explores the entangled and interdependent nature of electromagnetic corporeality and manufactured electricity and is inspired by the Longplayer (2000) project, a Tibetan bowl playing recording by Jem Finer playing for 1000 years. My longtone breaths are based on 1 minute yogic breaths and Tibetan throat singing The lament is continuous and uncut and speaks to shame and regret of our planet's future squandered.
Colonial Drift installation, London (2022)
Situated as a discourse in the liminality of human agency this enquiry examines ontological absolutism as the cubic space of breath. In Liminal Agency I compress my ageing body inside a 120 cm? lightbox and use breath-directed spontaneous postures to explore the contact points of capitalist ontology as unitary commodification. Agency here is confined by universal dualistic systems.
in Colonial Drift I use astrology and food mould to visualise the future-state climate crisis: extinction is a human choice. Using the astrological chart of the Conference Of the Parties (COP) 2030 1.5° Charter I illustrate the contradiction of global economic growth and climate crisis management as a live expanded drawing performance inside the cuboid lightbox. This is intended to be performed live as a protest against dualist socio-politic- economic finitudes. Mould Cartography is a wall mounted plaque to be enlarged to 400 × 250 x 20 cm. Rotting mouldy food set in plaster cubes are arranged as a map of the United States of America, still the largest consumer nation on the planet.
in Colonial Drift I use astrology and food mould to visualise the future-state climate crisis: extinction is a human choice. Using the astrological chart of the Conference Of the Parties (COP) 2030 1.5° Charter I illustrate the contradiction of global economic growth and climate crisis management as a live expanded drawing performance inside the cuboid lightbox. This is intended to be performed live as a protest against dualist socio-politic- economic finitudes. Mould Cartography is a wall mounted plaque to be enlarged to 400 × 250 x 20 cm. Rotting mouldy food set in plaster cubes are arranged as a map of the United States of America, still the largest consumer nation on the planet.
Song of the Harmonicones (2022)
Harmonicones I (2023) explores John Cage’s ‘impossible silence’ as circulating resonance. While experimenting with cone shapes a curious ethereal sound occurred. This project tried to recreate the sound but instead discovered another. The archive comprises of the original recordings and gives voice to vibrating material emergence as a synecdoche of clay-human connection. The shaping of the cones using old credit cards opens a discourse on capitalist ontologies of commodification. The hand thrown porcelain cones circulate breath and sound as allegoric spirals that oscillate between expanding and static energy states. The project mobilises ephemeral Buddhist materiality that enables individuation but resists ontological separation and with it binary division. It is dynamic emergence as breathing stable /unstable motions that uproot conceptual and material dualism.
Cones continue into my Investigate project as light cones articulating cyclical spiral energy, the 7 ‘inner planets’ and ‘light cone’ physics. Resonant vessels form the thread between my Impossible Silence, Systolic Waves and Hypnagogia projects as clay, flesh, fabric, and light cone spaces.