Recently I’ve been working on several projects at once. This has been an essentially good experience: it allows me to jump between projects and leave a particular one for a moment when I’m feeling stuck and need to think about other things.
I’ve become increasingly interested in abstract concepts, and my work has been developing towards subjects related to space, body, movement and time – either as related subjects or separate.
Space // Movement is a project I’ve been working on since October/Novemeber. It’s a collaboration with four London-based dancers, who study Theatre Dance at London Studio Centre. It started as an individual project of mine, which dealt with the notions of empty space and how 3-D negative space could be inverted to become positive space.
This quickly lead me to thinking about the concept of body and how one’s body occupies and moves in space. Struggling to understand movement on my own, I contacted these four dancers and started an open collaboration. We’ve worked on the ideas of spatial explorations and interpretations through movement essentially on an improvisation basis.
At the same time, I felt the need to try and represent movement in a more permanent and physical way to a recording made on a camera. Through attaching drawing and painting materials to the dancers bodies and having them dance on paper, we managed to trace out movement and the body, to record it physically, as it happened.
I presented this project at my class’ Interim Show ‘Medium Rare’ at the Truman Brewery in January – the one you can see in the video. The performance included almost all aspects explored during previous exercises, bringing them together as one. The dancers and their movement produced a painting, which remained as evidence for the rest of the show.
I think having a performance as an exhibition piece was crutial. It allowed me to stress the notion of movement being ephemeral and belonging to a certain moment in time, one which you can only experience once – and after it simply watch recordings to remember it.
This is a project I feel could go on for a while, but for now I’m producing prints from several photographs I took, putting together the clothes they wore as evidence and the painting produced at the show, as well as making a final publication, which takes the viewer through the process, using mostly images.
