The work In Bloom is concerned with achieving a corporeal experience despite the displacement of a live performer due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. I have conceived sensory activation kits for remote broadcast. The components of the kits include a custom oil diffuser with a fragrance that evokes the body, as well as a form that resembles goddess statues. There is a consumable in the form of a blooming tea, and tactile ephemera from the performance. The design is an ode to FLUXUS kits that worked with a DIY approach and recombined everyday objects and actions into artistic expressions. The methodologies and techniques on how to re-create your own kit can be accessed on my website a for comprehension and reenactment. These kits are open and interactive, and with the inclusion of miniature sets and open-source instructions allow for accessibility to a wider audience. The objects in the kits may evoke bespoke delivery boxes or self care kits but by the reconceptualization of these forms elevates the design into an aesthetic experience with additional dimension. These objects acquire a magical aura and become a portable alter for a sensory experience.
In addition to the sensory kits, I am constructing Viewing Cells, self-contained spaces that allow for a solo viewer to experience a performance in a physical space. These Viewing Cells suggest a film set and use screens and architecture as surrogates for the body. The forms use material that has become ubiquitous during the Covid-19 pandemic, including translucent screens, makeshift vinyl barriers and latex.
The Viewing Cells offer a space for socially distant viewing of performances while also magnifying the sensory elements contain in the remote kits. I have been sourcing furniture from craigslist and salvage yards and have begun to reupholster them in sheet latex. The latex has many associations, including skin, but latex is also a barrier between skin to skin contact. There is also a false sense of security with vinyl and latex guards, we are not impervious to permeation. The forms of the diffusers and the latex remind of fetish materials and entities that are connected to a visceral experience.
The performance embarks on addressing personal and familial trauma in the absence of communal mourning response. Death can be a place of transformation and rebirth happens in Nature and the collective Unconscious. In the performance the body fuses with floral, collapsing botanical and human generation processes together, undergoing metamorphosis. This work also addresses my own sobriety as a rebirth. After years of self desstrucion and trying to kill oneself, this is the moment to try to life.
The audio is a manipulation of Myroslav Skoryk’s score from Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, based on the classic book by Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky. The film features a detailed portrayal of Ukrainian Hutsul culture. The celluloid is drenched in symbolism and color is ever present to represent mood. The film's imagery borrows from nature and mythology, space and time is manipulated.
With the inclusion of this score I am reflecting on ancestral bereavement and contemplate my own grief of living in a body. I meet the nature of having a body, one that is vulnerable to loss and to experience the loss of others. In To Mourn Beyond the Human Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman remark that our reality is built upon those that have come before us, those we survive and those that will survive us. I contemplate preemptive mourning responses and realize the suspension of loss that the virtual realm can hold. With recorded and uploaded imagery we defy our corporeal defeat. My image is projected, doubled and re-doubled in space. The body takes on the space and inhabits cultural memory.
My body shudders and hallucinates, oscillating between the past and present and conscious and subconscious. States of mind are marked by temporal shifts in time, my body becomes a trace of the present and a ghost of the future.
DIY
Ingredients:
- 2 tbsps carrier oil (like jojoba, sweet almond, coconut, or grape seed)
- 6 tbsps 100-proof alcohol
- 2.5 tbsps distilled water or rose water
- 30 drops essential oils (9 drops top notes, 15 drops middle notes, 6 drops base notes)
- 2 clean dark-glass bottles with air-tight lids
Instructions:
- Pour the carrier oil into one of the bottles. Add your base (cedarwood, Vetiver), then middle (musk) then top notes (rose) Add the alcohol.
- Secure the lid, and let the perfume sit for 48 hours. The longer you leave it, the stronger the scent. (You can leave it for up to 6 weeks.)
- Once you’re happy with the scent, add the distilled or rose water, and shake vigorously for 1 minute.
- Enjoy.
Glass forms fabricated by
DH McNabb
Director of Projects & Design
Public Glass
DH.McNabb@publicglass.org
www.publicglass.org