My current work explores breath as a site of recovery and resistance. Embedding breathing in performative and photographic acts; the work draws parallels between light and breath, labour and recovery, in the midst of the traumatised body of late-Capitalism.
In understanding breath as both the ephemeral material of a biological process, and the rendition of worldly affects, I consider it to belong to both the realms of biology and politics. BreathWorks stems from my own recovery from lung damage sustained during the collaborative work, UNION (Parts I-V), made in 2017 with Traci Kelly. In the aftermath of these works, I was diagnosed with previously unknown lung vulnerabilities and asthma. What followed was a six-month period of analysis and recovery; x-rays, oxygen monitoring, ECG tests, and medication. Now aware of these vulnerabilities and dependent to some extent on shifting doses of medication, the body has been retrieved, but operates within different parameters. A further heightened awareness of the ways in which bodies are always a process of negotiation — with themselves, with others, the environment, with the very air that we breathe. These are dialogues that are embedded in the lives of bodies that have been forced to occupy minoritarian or labouring positions in society. They are direct consequences of physical and ideological systems of erosion.
Breath must therefore be regarded in terms of its deeply politicised role in contemporary societies. Access to the apparatus of breath is neither neutral nor guaranteed. It cannot be considered outside of regimes of race, class, queerness, and other systems of oppression. Breath cannot be considered separately to colonial, capitalist, and environmental ideologies. The questions remain: which bodies are allowed to breathe, when, by whom, and how much?
The development of this work is key to understanding a pivotal movement in my practice over the last 5 years, shifting from durational performance-based work to photographic encounters. It exposes the inherently performative aspects of my photography as a material encounter, and locates photographic image-making as an embodied act. I am interested in questioning how these works function within a lineage of what would I would term, ‘Embodied Photography’; photographic works in which the images produced are inextricably linked with the processes of the bodies that produce them.