JESSY MACKAY & Tyler Freeman-Smith
This exhibition is a collation of visual and written material, accumulated over the past year, as an ongoing collaboration between movement artist Jessy Mackay, and photographer and video artist Tyler Freeman Smith. Through working with an authentic desire-led embodiment practice, these images explore notions of encounter and relationship with the other-than-human landscape. Finding space for entanglement and enchantment, deeper ways of being with and in place, through working with the somatic and aesthetic body.
This work is about conversation and relationship, seeking embodied interconnection and interspecies communication. These images attempt to convey a phenomenological sensory experience and feeling of interconnection through visual documentation, in the hope of inspiring a kinaesthetic empathy in the viewer.
Something opening as head and tail drop into gravity, suspended, emptying, spilling over, into.
The Draped Body asks, ‘how can one disappear into the landscape and emerge out of it?’
Movement artist Jessy Mackay recently completed MA Movement Mind Ecology at Schumacher College, in Dartington, Devon. This exhibition sees early iterations of her emerging ecological movement practice, Draping. This work is tied implicitly to a childhood which unfolded in close relation with land, and now illustrates an expression of love and entanglement with places surrounding her home here in Devon. Her drive is to explore eco centric lenses of art making and movement work, and to question and advocate for the place of the body, and embodied knowledge, in environmental conversations.
EMMA HAMBLY
insta @emma_hambly
Situated interactions – investigations into material and physical understanding .
In a different century, and in response to different times, Hannah Arendt wrote that comprehension means “examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us – neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality – whatever it may be.” (Hannah Arendt, 1949)
Akin to others, I find that nature is good to think with, with its liturgical possibilities. The tangle of materialised figurations and entangled others. Rooting myself at a table and amidst wildness in an effort to understand and materialise potentials of interference; refractions. Diffraction; crystallisation. Resistance; refusal.
Attentive situated interactions / proximity / somatic refigurations I seek To be attentive Seeking sustenance in that endeavour. Nutrience
About Emma:
Formerly working as a marine microbiologist I completed a BA in painting in 2010 and have been working in that realm since, with analogue photography and drawing being my primary outputs. In an effort to deepen my practice, which is fundamentally embedded in a love of the physical world, I have just completed an MFA at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford.
instagram: emma_hambly
RACHAEL MELLORS – Embodied Earth
‘Embodied Earth’ explores intuitive responses to my immersive and embodied relationship with the living natural world. Artistic practice is rooted in Earth’s cycles and processes, in synchronicity with the seasons, the rising of the sun and the ecological and geological processes of erosion and regeneration.
On a shoreline in Greece using clay fallen from the eroding cliffs I make forms in my hand referencing my body, moving and immersed in the living world around me. I use clay as I find it, adding sea water and then laying the clay forms in materials close by – ash, soil, sand, silt. At dawn I make on the beach, and at dusk in the olive grove. I fire in a pit dug in the olive grove, burning branches cut from the olive trees at harvest. Forms emerge imbued with the primal and transformative energies of the materials and elements I work with – marks from the pigments in the soils, the sea, and the olive and fir trees.
Hands, body and fingernails are my tools. Clay, seawater, ash, silt, saliva and soils my making mediums. Fir tree prunings, soils and smoke are my mark and colour makers. Olive and fig branches are my fuel. The elements and natural world are my resources and olive grove and shoreline are my studios. Traces of imprints of my hands and body are embedded in the work.
I use the luminosity of the rising sun to capture through photographs the momentary shadow imprint of my body embedded with layers of soils and impregnated with shell fragments and fossils, layered over millions of years.
Experiencing an embodied relationship with the natural world changed the way I feel on a deep level. This physical feeling relationship can happen in a moment, evoking a feeling of ‘wonder’, expanded awareness and deep appreciation felt through our bodies. This embodied experience is a key to remembering our empathic relationship with the living natural world.
I work in collaboration with Pete Hudson who creates moving image.
About Rachael:
I studied Fine Art at Portsmouth and Ceramics at the Royal College of Art. I first exhibited during the 1980/90’s and have work in public collections. I took a break from making and had a career teaching art in adult education leading the Arts programme in community education Lewisham, in London.
Since 2010 I re-emerged as an artist, having made a radical change in my artistic practice through tending an olive grove in Greece and developing an immersive and embodied relationship with the natural world and developing ecological and sustainable practices.
In 2021 I exhibited in ‘Beuys Future’, Group Global 3000, Gallery for Sustainable Art in Berlin and in ‘Reconnecting’, Bermondsey Project Space, London. In 2020 I exhibited in Photo Fringe OPEN20, Brighton, and a solo exhibition ‘Embodied Earth’ at The Poly, Falmouth and in 2022 at Brighton Fishing Museum Gallery with Brighton Fringe.
In 2019 my new work was published in ‘WHAT’s NEXT? Eco Materialism and Contemporary Art’, Intellect Books. Linda Weintraub and in 2017 ‘An exotic Journey into the Commonplace’. Linda Weintraub. Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal, Vol 2 issue 2.
Currently I am working on 2 installations over several years which are time and place specific and embody sustainability and the circular economy process through materiality. The Time and Place installation explores my immersive and embodied relationship with the natural world. Artistic practice is rooted in Earth’s cycles and processes, in synchronicity with the seasons, the rising of the sun and the geological and ecological processes of erosion and regeneration. The elemental forces, expanded awareness and appreciation of the natural world are integral to my creative processes.
The Remembrance installation explores my maternal grandmother’s life and my mother’s childhood and generational relationships are echoed through the materiality. The installations unfold over time exploring changing generational relationships and my embodied relationship with the natural world. Intuition, circular economics and sustainability underpin all my work through the underlying principle of recycling, reusing materials. It is raw, spontaneous expression that fires my creative energy. Allowing chance and imagination into my artistic process, the unexpected happens.
I work in collaboration with Pete Hudson who captures a moving image record of the artistic process.
www.embodied.earth
SAM HODGE – Coal Tides
I am a visual artist working with paint and printmaking processes. I am not a dancer or a performance artist, but I do consider my work to be a type of contact improvisation between me and the materials. The intimate,physical reciprocal relationship as I respond to the activity of materials and they respond to mine is what generates the artwork.
Making my own pigments from found materials extends my interaction to the environment around me. I walk through particular places such as the Thames shore, London streets, Devon beaches and give attention to what I find there, connecting with the geological, biological and human stories embodied in the landscape. I have recently made a series of paintings and prints with coal picked up from the Thames shore. It was shipped from Newcastle to fuel the homes and industries of London from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, blackening the buildings and the lungs of its inhabitants. Slipping and dropped into the river while being unloaded from ship to dock, the coal has been washed up and down with the tides, smoothed into pebbles and sorted by the River into lines on the strand. Smashing and grinding the coal into pigment is slow and full of the friction of a direct encounter with hard rock, it reminds me of the hard labour of the people
who dug, carried, burnt and breathed this coal. The slowness of the process gives me time to think about deep time through which this coal was made from the remnants of Carboniferous forests and then came to meet me on the Thames Shore.
All painting involves awareness of your own body in space and a feeling for the movement required to make a mark with one material on another, but I am also interested in the agency of the materials themselves, what they can do and how they transform over time. My painting materials are not alive but they are active, dynamic and generative. The coal affects me in a physical way, I respond to it, but I also enable it to behave in certain ways. In these works the coal ink is dropped into pools of Thames water on paper. The paper buckles with moisture and the paint settles into the dips and diffuses outwards as it dries, or dendritic branching patterns emerge when coal paint responds to a release of pressure, creating biomorphic forms. The paintings, collages and prints that emerge then have their own life of interaction with their environment and the people who see and make something out of them.
About Sam:
www.samhodge.co.uk
Sam Hodge is an artist working with paint and print to explore material transformations. Born in Kent, UK and now based in London, she studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University and Painting Conservation at The Courtauld Institute of Art and then worked as a painting conservator including at Tate before becoming a visual artist. Since then she has exhibited widely in the UK, Europe and Canada, including recent solo show Vital Matter (2019, Muse Gallery, London); recent group exhibitions: Ground Work (2021 APT Gallery, London); Radical Residency VI, (2021, Unit 1 Gallery, London); Doom and Bloom (2019, Contemporary Art Society, London); As the Crow Flies (2019, Bo.Lee Gallery, London): In Residence (2017, Griffin Gallery). Opens and prize shortlists include: RA Summer Exhibition (2019, 2015); Wells Art Contemporary (2018); International Print Biennale (2016) and Creekside Open (2015). Artist’s residencies include: Merchant House Residency, (2019 Symi, Greece); Griffin Residency (2017, Colart, London) A Series of Unfortunate Events, (2013 Hack the Barbican, Barbican Centre); Repetition and Difference (2013 Chisenhale Art Place, London). Her artist’s book A Catalogue of Misfortune (published 2015) has been acquired by several public collections including The Met and MoMA in New York. Her paintings and prints are held in private collections across the UK and Europe and in the USA, Canada, Malaysia, India and Australia.
All painting involves awareness of your own body in space and a feeling for the movement required to make a mark with one material on another, but I am also interested in the agency of the materials themselves, what they can do and how they transform over time. My painting materials are not alive but they are active, dynamic and generative. The coal affects me in a physical way, I respond to it, but I also enable it to behave in certain ways. In these works the coal ink is dropped into pools of Thames water on paper. The paper buckles with moisture and the paint settles into the dips and diffuses outwards as it dries, or dendritic branching patterns emerge when coal paint responds to a release of pressure, creating biomorphic forms. The paintings, collages and prints that emerge then have their own life of interaction with their environment and the people who see and make something out of them.