Artist Statement:

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A couple of years ago I began practising Butoh in a new way; more as an intuitive, embodied response to place, rather than choreographing movement for performance. I allowed myself to be led by the body, sensing both internally and externally: the elements, sensations, feelings and sometimes images that would arise. This reclusion to nature in my practice began partly as a way of healing from PTSD. I needed to reclaim my sense of self and my relationship with the world. 

This way of working has become the basis for my painting and video. I became interested in the sense of timelessness that can emerge through embodied attention, a feeling of being fully present while also experiencing something beyond ordinary time. Through the image, transient forms can crystallise - a moving body, flowing water, an internal state, a landscape; paradoxically revealing the timelessness of continual ephemerality.

There is a mythic quality to this feeling, something that reaches beyond individual experience and ordinary time. Water has no fixed form, yet through its perpetual presence it shapes stone and land. In a similar way, grief is not something we can simply overcome. We grow around it. We become bigger, shaped by what we carry.

Eventually, I began working with other Butoh performers of diverse genders through this process, allowing different bodies and ways of moving to enter into this dialogue with place.

My work draws on ecological posthumanism, eco-feminism, queer ecology and mythic thinking, but ultimately it is about just being a body in a place.

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