London Conference of Critical Thought

University of Greenwich, Stockwell Rd, SE10 9BD

28-29 June 2024

MY WITS OR SALTS (performance)

Free but booking required

I’m v excited to be presenting at my first academic conference as a PhD candidate. The LCCT is an annual interdisciplinary conference that provides a forum for emergent critical scholarship, broadly construed. The event is always free for all to attend and follows a nonhierarchical model that seeks to foster opportunities for intellectual critical exchanges where all are treated equally regardless of affiliation or seniority.

There are 16 ‘streams’ across the conference and I will presenting a performance as part of ‘Watery Speculations’ curated by Dr. Lucy Sames which as one of the biggest streams will include 6 panels and 19 presentations across two days. As part of an ongoing project, I will present a new performance of leaky text and moving image, delving into the bodily and civic processes that we are often unaware of until something goes ‘wrong’. Shifting in scale between the body and industrial systems, through a series of absurd and humorous monologues, MY WITS OR SALTS alludes to the inseparable flows of capital, bodies and waste.

Along Comes Tera

SOAK, Leadworks, Plymouth, 30 May 2024

I will be presenting my rom-com lectureperformace, Along Comes Tera at SOAK alongside a wide range of wild and brilliant performance based practices.

SOAK Live Art is a platform for performance in Plymouth, U.K curated by Sarah Blissett and Kerry Priest. They showcase live art, dance, theatre and experimental sound and music practice in a regular series of performance nights, alongside artist-led events.

Funded PhD studentship:

University of Plymouth 2024 - 2027

I am over the moon to finally share the news that I have a funded practice-based PhD studentship at University of Plymouth in the School of Art, Design and Architecture beginning on April 1st 2024.

My proposal departs from an exploration into the politics of waste — as matter both in and out of place. Through the lens of queer, crip, anti-colonial and post human feminist thinking/being, I am attempting to explore waste as a metaphor, material and methodology.

My studentship was actually awarded last year, but due to losing my remaining parent, a long spell of illness and then some major surgery, it’s been on hold until this moment.

I am really excited to start working/thinking under the supportive care of my Director of Studies, Dr. Anya Lewin.

Performance:

Along Comes Tera, 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗹: 𝗔𝗰𝘁 𝗩𝗜𝗜: 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲

𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝟭𝟲, 𝟮𝟬𝟮4, 𝗱𝗼𝗼𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝘁 𝟴𝗽𝗺 

𝗧𝗼𝗿𝗽𝗲𝗱𝗼 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿, 𝗔𝗺𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗱𝗮𝗺

Really excited to be sharing a new performance work for the brilliant programme Playbill at Torpedo Theater, Amsterdam, this Saturday, curated by Isabelle Sully & Marta Jager and featuring two other performances by Sam Cottington & Toon Fibbe

☄️💘☄️💘☄️💘☄️💘☄️💘☄️💘

*Along Comes Tera, Bryony Gillard*

When Peggy falls ill with a mysterious ailment, the diagnosis is more than she bargained for…

A rom-com lecture performance with slides created using machine learning image generation software.

☄️💘☄️💘☄️💘☄️💘☄️💘☄️💘

Info on Playbill ACT VII:

ACT VII marks our first open call as a platform. Given that Playbill originally began from a perceived lack of presentation spaces focused exclusively on language- and text-based artistic works in the Netherlands, we devised Open Stage as we wanted to hand the platform over to artists working with similar concerns, assuming they were also desiring more opportunities to present their work. Applications were reviewed by Playbill in dialogue with Roos Gortzak.

The selected artists—Sam Cottington, Bryony Gillard and Toon Fibbe—come at text and its performativity from different angles, but together present a cross section of artists busy with it as material within their work, beyond it just being a tool for the dissemination of an idea. From appropriating the formal structure of a 90s romantic comedy, to a lipsyncing incarnation of a figure of finance, to a phone with a live actor suspended somewhere between art and theatre awaiting you on the end of the line, the works that will be presented for Open Stage are both wildly different and similarly contemporaneous, fully aware of the technologies through which language is shared, sub-culturally built and, inevitably and alternatively, co-opted.

Screening:

Kunstnernes Hus (The Artists’ House) Open Day

Oslo, Norway Dec 2023

I am showing a teaser/trailer for a new moving image work, MY WITS OR SALTS alongside an incredible line up of other artists and friends all bought together by the brilliant Clawson and Ward for Kunstnernes Hus (The Artists’ House) Open Day.

Info from Kunstnernes Hus website about the event: Welcome to our Open Day on December 9, with free entrance to our current exhibition, open artist studios, Christmas offers at out shop, a film program and a panel talk. On this day, the studio artists will take over the cinema and invite you in to short films, sketches and other small experiments from themselves and their artist peers, from Oslo & beyond.

Screening/ workshop:

PROMENADE, Weston-super-mare, 15-17 September, 2023

PROMENADE is a new project for Weston super Mare, that explores place, environment & the natural world through multidisciplinary contemporary arts and socially engaged practice. Rooted in Westons unique coastal landscape, Promenade considers an ecology of place, and our relationship with the environment we live in.

PROMENADE will be screening my film Unctuous Between Fingers (2019) and I will lead a ‘Seaweed Thinking’ workshop on 17 September.

Publication: Summer 2023

‘The cultures of seaweed: a singularly marine and fabulous produce’, New Bedford Whaling Museum, USA

My work is in a beautiful hardback book published in the U.S! I’m very honoured that Melody Jue wrote about my film, Unctuous Between Fingers in her thoughtful essay, ‘The Slippery Films of Seaweed’ commissioned for the very gorgeous catalogue for the exhibition, ‘The cultures of seaweed: a singularly marine and fabulous produce’ at the New Bedford Whaling Museum

The catalogue brings together 12 articles by interdisciplinary scholars - inc. Stacy Alaimo, William L. Coleman, Kathrinne Duffy, Melody Jue, Line Le Gall, Anjuli Lebowitz, Christina Michelon, Jessica Skwire Routhier, Marina Wells and Charles Yarish.

Friends in the US - try to visit this stunning exhibition on until Dec 3rd, it sounds utterly incredible.

Thank you to Melody and thank you to the New Bedford Whaling Museum for mailing me a copy of the book all the way across the oceans 📖🌊

Publication: Summer 2023

Field Guide (Boston USA)

https://fieldguide.art

field|guide is a collaborative multimedia art project that explores the liminal spaces between visual art, poetry, essay, sound, and silence.

The project blends fragments of the past with our shared sense of the present, merging scientific formal structures with esoteric wanderings, untangling and re-tangling the familiar and obscure.

I also highly recommend checking out the website which includes an archive of the digital components/fragments of the project. Loads of great work including a never exhibited before video work by me and some really fun video experiments that Aaron made from the recordings of Skype-improvisation hang outs w.contributors.

Publication: June 2023

‘Unctuous Voices, Seaweed Kinships’, Holding Sway: Seaweeds and the Politics of Form, Ed. Melody Jue and Maya Weeks, Foundry, Humanities Research Institute, University of California

Beyond thrilled to share my first text in an international research journal.

“Holding Sway: Seaweeds and the Politics of Form” is a series of photo essays that channels a visual curiosity about seaweeds with considerations of militarization, gender, Indigenous sovereignty, extractive regimes, and climate change. Foundry guest editors Melody Jue and Maya Weeks invited participants to create or curate images that literally and figuratively “hold sway” in two senses: capturing the attention of an audience, or conveying a relationship of being in touch with seaweeds by holding their swaying botanical forms. Contributors include: Sam Nightingale, Cecilia Åsberg, Jen Rose Smith & Jim Smith, Joe Riley, Angela YT Chan, Gwen Arkin & Bryony Gillard.

My contribution, ‘Unctuous Voices, Seaweed Kinships’, is a sort of devotional text which draws on the knowledge shared and generated by all the incredible humans I encountered during making this project. It’s an acknowledgment of the importance of collectivity and friendship in my project - and its relevance to seaweed & becoming seaweedy.

A huge thank you to Maya and Melody for inviting me, it’s such an honour to be in company with such an incredible group of Seaweedy folks.

Collaboration:

There are tides in the body / Bryony Gillard and Conway and Young

Spike Island Open Studios, Studio 19, 28-30 April 2023

For Spike Island Open Studios I’m really excited to be collaborating with Conway and Young to produce a run of 2 limited edition prints, that we’ll be printing live, using tidal mud from the river Avon

The prints are designed by Conway and Young - text works that relate to my new project, MY WITS OR SALTS - which departs from the question:- “what does it mean to make visible the systems that deal with our bodily waste?”

Visitors to Spike Open are invited to join us in Conway & Young’s studio to have a go at pulling a print (which will also be available to keep/buy) and chat about waste (leaky bodies, privatisation of water, where does it all go when u flush the loo…..?)….

There are a choice of two text works:

🚽’My wits or salts’ - the title of my project and a line from a devastating poem by Susan Hahn about emotional incontinence and leaky heartbreak (Incontinence, 1993)

🚽’There are tides in the body’- a quote from everyone’s fave V-W (Mrs Dalloway, 1925) which so perfectly encapsulates our transcorporeality and the inseparability of flows of waste and water and bodies (for the nerds - it’s also the quote in the front of Neimanis’s Bodies of Water 💙)

Dates/Times: Friday 28 April, 6.30-7.10pm; Saturday 29 April, 2.30-3.30pm; and Sunday 30 April, 2.30-3.30pm

We are Floating in Space, 13 Feb - 3 June, 2023

Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, Cornwall

I’m delighted to have my film, ‘Unctuous Between Fingers’ (2019) and a series of seaweed mono-prints included in the group exhibition, ‘We are floating in space’, at an institution that is very dear to my heart (& who gave me my first gallery job in 2007).

We are floating in space’ looks beyond the tradition of seascapes to showcase artists who use the coast to address themes within their contemporary art practice. In particular, it’s the space between the tides; the area that is in constant flux between being land and being sea, the overlap, the layering, a constant state of fluidity. It is this otherworldly place that artists have used to express ideas and themes within their work, whether its grieving, gender identity, the queer body, childlessness not by choice, looking for one’s tribe, and is illustrative of environmental concerns.

Working with Waste, Masterclass, Berlin (Sept 2022)

Institute Film University Babelsberg

Selected artist in week long masterclass led by artist Lucy Beech with mentors, James Richards, Mary Maggic, Riar Rizaldi and Jenna Sutela. Working with waste is a group of artists, facilitators, social scientists, environmental historians, students, filmmakers and writers that share an interest in the politics, processes and socio-cultural implications of working with waste.

The research group is designed as an experimental and supportive space for participants to develop research based moving image projects that activate waste materials and/or explore the meanings and potentials of waste materialities across different disciplinary contexts.

Podcast for Caraboo Projects (March 2022)

Free, Bold and Joyous: conversations with seaweed

Commissioned by Caraboo Projects for their LOOPS podcast series, and as part of my ongoing research project Unctuous Between Fingers, I have produced a podcast that touches on some of the seaweed thinking behind Unctuous between fingers, featuring conversations with invited guests, Melody Jue, Giovanna Di Chiro and Dani Abulhawa.

Through the lens of environmental justice, marine biology, community activism and media theory, these conversations explore seaweed’s slippery relationship to place, identity, community and responsibility.

Unctuous Between Fingers: website launch (Feb 2022)

I’m pleased to share the outcome of the second phase of my research project, Unctuous between fingers which poses the question, what can we learn from seaweed? 

Initiated in 2019 as a moving image commission for the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, this second phase takes a curatorial turn, with a series of commissioned contributions from artists, writers, academics and community activists, presented on a new website intended as a resource — a living repository of seaweed thinking. 

Unctuous Between Fingers unfurls its seaweedy fronds to touch on seaweed’s relationship to community, gender, queerness, colonial cooptation and the politics of naming. This endeavor is both critical and optimistic about seaweed’s importance in the climate emergency — celebrating its life-giving and science-fictional qualities, but also recognising the ease with which late capitalism has co opted seaweed as a bandaid with which to continue processes of extraction and oppression.

The commissions from Kayle Brandon, Frankie Dytor, Sarah Hotchkiss, Melody Jue, Maria Christoforidou & Sammy Paloma are available to view/read/play/enjoy on the website. Contributions range from a text based adventure game, a community action, a third person exploration of buoyancy, a speculative encounter between seaweed and the sculptor Mary Edmonia Wildfire Lewis and essays exploring seaweed's historic queerness and trail-blazing women phycologists.

The website also includes commissioned resources such as a seaweed photo-developer ‘recipe’ by artist, Laura Phillips (the result of a fantastic workshop co-commissioned Rame Projects, Cornwall) & a family friendly, downloadable, ‘seaweed fact-sheet’ illustrated by Pirrip Press.

To celebrate the conclusion of the project, artist, researcher & curator, Angela YT Chan led an online reading group exploring seaweed through a decolonial lens on February 25th. 

The website and its commissions and activities were made possible by public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England.