Self-Portrait on Exhale (with Covid)
Richard Hancock Self-Portrait on Exhale (with Covid), 2023.
Breath — as both a material and conceptual device — has long been a recurring element in my work. In 2001, as an undergraduate art student, I made a performance-for-video called Untitled (Out), in which I repeatedly approached a mirror, clouded it with my breath, and inscribed the word “out” with my finger; leaving it to slowly evaporate. In 2005, Traci Kelly and I made With Held Breath for the National Review of Live Art, a series of vignettes sewn from recollections of moments that left us physically gasping for air. There have been unfinished works that saw me collect my own breath in plastic bags, and let them cascade to the floor infront of a projection of falling rose petals; alongside — now unimaginable —workshop tasks that asked participants to exhale into bags, exchange them, and inhale one another’s discarded breaths.
In 2017, Traci Kelly and I were buried within 1500kg of coal, as part of UNION. The resulting bronchial trauma took me back to a childhood with asthma in a house of heavy smokers, and a grandparent fighting for his breath against a lifetime of mining coal. What followed the performance, was a six month period of analysis and recovery; x-rays, oxygen monitoring, ECG tests, and medication. What remains, is a body which is recovered but not unchanged. Now — aware of these vulnerabilities — 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.
With the assistance of a #TakeHeart Research stipend from Fonds DaKu and Neustart Kultur, I am about to begin a three month investigation into breath as an act of recovery. Breath as a tool of repair for the body, and as wider metaphor for recovery from the damage of late-Capitalism. I am beginning with a set of questions:
What constitutes recovery?
What is necessary for recovery?
How might recovery be performed?
What are the relationships between recovery and repair?