I have been creatively engaged with the Afon Dulais river that flows close to my home since 2006; a practice of listening to the river’s shifting seasonal frequencies whilst attempting to materialise these in sound. Immersing myself physically within the river I use the machinic sensitivity of a Fender Stratocaster to allow places of eddy, surface movement and interference in the river’s body to express themselves through the guitar’s strings. I am interested in what I am able to Read More
With/Gyda Simon Whitehead & Kirstie Simson In this next iteration of Practicing Places, alongside collective studio practice we will spend time in the local Afon Cych and Dulais river catchment. Journeying upriver this time to explore the wider ecology of the valley and its mythical landscapes, we will immerse ourselves with the river’s course and its ecosystems. Learning ways to be in correspondence with its ongoing-ness, responding to its life forms and movements, we will lead practices Read More
Thanks to dance artists Neil Callaghan, Saffy Setohy & Joanna Young for their generous contributions to this event and to all those who came along and took part. The stitching and re-activation of the gloves eventually formed a strange and wonderful blanket/shroud/caul, which we moved with/in with those assembled. A motile, generative thing it will now have future lives as choreographic object/actant. Photos by Jack Wrigley
Stitching soft matter is an artist book featuring performances of touch, drawing, sewing, photography, pandemic touch journals, pull-out scores and a short essay on touch touching itself. This project continued throughout the pandemic and the book has become a place to share all the materials and relationships developed during this time. It feels good to have something to share and hand to people in the physical world… Book launch on 31 January at ARC, University of Read More
Creative Companionship An opportunity to lean in, to find support for your practice at this time… I am currently offering a process of one to one, or small group mentoring and creative companionship for artists at all stages of their working lives. This includes dialogue through relational movement practice in different landscapes, plus embodied approaches to working and moving with the material realism of a place/ecosystem. We will be able to develop a bespoke process, responsive to Read More
Re-pair As a way of experimenting with how dance can re-pair itself, this project asks 6 dancers from different parts of the world to pair with each other in order to re-think the analogue in the digital. Each dancer will be sent a score, emerging from the stitched gloves that I am making for the soft matter project (http://simonwhitehead.net/2020/05/07/soft-matter-process/) and asked to improvise with the objects that they will then share with the dancer they are paired with. Read More