Pick & Mix
Left to right, top to bottom: still from Florence Peake’s performance, Your Meaning Not Your Materiality; Franko B archive image, Bristol Live Art Archives; Memory Traces workshop for Spike Associates; set up for Dennis Dizon’s Elegy performance.
The past month or so has been filled with a wonderful variety of creative activity and opportunities. From making to showing, playing to performing.
It actually started for me at the end of September when I joined Spike studio artist Rod Harris in an informal series of workshops introducing us to ways of working with clay. I don’t think I’ve used clay since my Art Foundation course back at the start of the 1980s so this opportunity was a real treat, to learn about different clay types and play with ideas and form. Initially I was very drawn to porcelain, a material I’ve not used before. At the time I’d been revisiting elements from my solo performance, in my skin, and thinking about My Mother’s Bunion, a small dance that I perform near the end of the piece. This was the inspiration for a small relief work imagining the bones of my right foot.
My Mother’s Bunion, my first experiment working with porcelain.
Having created one work I was excited to make another - but this time I wanted to make my whole right foot, referencing a photo that I had taken a number of years ago for an exchange with artist Carol Laidler. I finished that piece in brick clay last week and the firing will take place on 20th December. It’s been joyful and exciting working with new materials in this playful way, with no expectations and no pressure on outcome. I don’t know if I’ll continue in the New Year but the experience has reminded me of the benefits of working with my hands while also considering other surfaces of the body to shape and mould a piece. Big thanks to Rod for all his encouragement and support.
At the end of October I was approached by Communications Assistant at Spike Island and freelance curator, Ruby Taylor, inviting me to be part of a small group show, Samhain - Let Slip Your Hags. The exhibition explored works borne of performance and explorations of the body, looking for the trace of process left in artists’ works.
Samhain is an ancient Celtic festival that begins as the sun sets on 31 October, marking the start of the dark half of the year. It is one of four annual hinge-points when the boundary between worlds thins, allowing the unseen to seep into the fabric of our daily lives, and for us to remember our dead. Samhain was married with the theme ‘let slip your hags’, enacting the folk belief that looking through the hole of a hag stone reveals the true form of a supernatural being.
My two pieces shown as part of the group show, Samhain.
Selecting a nightdress that belonged to my mother, part of the in my skin performance, and a photograph from my series ‘Body in Landscape’ Turner saw these works as ‘suspended in a state between activation and dormancy’. In the exhibition space each piece could be viewed through a hag stone, suggesting a portal into the otherworldly.
It was a real privilege to have my works shown alongside other Spike studio artists who I highly respect - Eleanor Duffin, Natasha MacVoy, Mary Hurrell, Louise Bradley and Buoys Buoys Buoys - and to witness the resonances across our practices.
Other works shown as part of Samhain. Left to right, top to bottom: Exhibition catalogue by Curator Ruby TAYLOR; performance remnant from Buoys Buoys Buoys; Louise Bradley; Eleanor Duffin: Mary Hurrell; Natasha Macvoy.
Towards the end of November I ran a workshop for Spike Associates drawing on Spike Island’s beautiful current exhibition, Dan Lie: Sleeping Methodologies. Titled Memory Traces the workshop explored memory, grief and loss through the senses. Starting in the gallery space, we touched on themes of restorative rest, recovery and emotion, using practices such as writing, gesture and personal objects as anchors of memory. Participants were invited to bring an object that signified someone who is no longer with them, touching on the visibility of what Lie refers to as ‘the secret society that must hide their emotions’.
“The essence of memory lies not in perfection but in imperfection – the gaps, the absences, and the human need to fill them with love, meaning, and a deeper understanding of our own evolving identities.”
Quote from Eternal Life? A Conversation with Hiroshi Ishii on TeleAbsence.
On 28th November I took part in Elegy, an Associates workshop at Spike with research-based artist and writer Dennis Dizon. The focus was on exploring the pagtatawas – a diagnostic and divination ritual in the Philippines for interpreting what may be causing illness or distress. We played with elements of the ritual, using candle wax, water and heat, creating masks from molten wax that were worn for the accompanying collaborative performance the following afternoon. The performance also reimagined the practice of bulong – whispered verses animated in the ritual – bridging individual meaning-making with a collective worlding.
As described by Dizon: ‘Inhabiting a shared space for feeling and not-knowing, the performance threads fragmented memories and predictive data with inarticulable emotions between living and dying, both human and beyond.'
Inspired by the workshop and writings I found by my mum I used the practice of bulong to share these words:
Memories of the lake
frozen surface,
fragile ice.
Walking on water.
Scarfs wrapped tight.
A childhood of dreams blended with visceral absence -
a place of traces,
bruised and tender beings.
How much of me is shaped by these wounds?
How much of you is in me?
You wrote of your shroud,
a shroud of tiny fragments of glass
which tear and mutilate the flesh as it passes.
I do not carry these scars
but like a moth fly free,
until drawn too close to the flame.
Dennis Dizon,'Elegy' (2025). Performance at Spike Island, Bristol. Photography by Lucy Bentley.(Second photo is of me whispering my text.)
Taking part in this performance got me thinking about my own performance work. Perpetually Stew is a brilliant live art platform in Bristol that I’m now considering as a potential space for sharing. I’ve begun exploring the reframing of aspects of in my skin alongside the book I’m currently working on, creating a piece that is a shared duet with my absent mother. Plenty to think about as this year comes to an end and the new year beckons.
