Where Freedom Resides

In 2019, for Cockpit winter Open Studios, I created my first big wall painting. Working with Max Richter’s music Recomposed, I gave myself two full days to produce the piece using acrylic paints. It became the springboard for a continuing series of work Where Freedom Resides which began in the first weeks of the first covid lockdown in 2020 and continues to evolve in paint and in metal.

Liminal

This film was made thanks to The Performance of Craft Award sponsored by The Artista Foundation and was devised in close collaboration with Adriana Paice, the Foundation’s curator and trustee, in response to craft business incubator Cockpits’ aim to communicate stories about the concepts and ideas that form the basis of craft created by artist-makers. It was featured on the Cockpit website, following a private viewing at 29–35 Rathbone Street in London on 26 April 2017.

In its literal sense, liminal refers to a transitional or initial stage of a process, often occupying both sides of a boundary or threshold. Through a work of dance, jewellery or drawing, each piece becomes a moment for reflection, for looking and seeing, and a springboard for future exploration. By collaborating in this case with a film maker Deborah May, each person can bring her particular knowledge and experience to the project.  Information and ideas can be pooled creating an environment where unfamiliar questions can be asked, new processes tried and unexpected outcomes reached.

Then, and then.

Then, and then was created during a residency at Volterra Werkstatt, Voterra, Tuscany in 2014. I choreographed a short movement piece which was filmed by writer, director and producer Emma Macey. We used the natural light against the stone walls at the same hour every day over a week. I did a series of research drawings using the movement and returned home to make a small collection of jewellery. The jewellery is now in private collection.

Body 30’57”

As jeweller in residence at the British Library in 2012/13, I took graphic music notation as my starting point, working with the 193 page score Treatise (1963-67) by Cornelius Cardew.

Using the idea of a central line or spine running through the original score, I anchored my own physical responses on paper. Eventually moving onto five metre lengths of lining paper, I created a new set of notations. Each drawing took 30 minutes and 57 seconds to complete - the length of the musical interpretation of the score. These drawings became the starting point for a jewellery collection.

What Isn’t Here Hasn’t Happened

Commission by Siobhan Davies Dance in 2011, artist and bookbinder Tracey Rowledge and I collaborated to make a series of graphite drawings which explore mark-making through choreographed movement and the movement through mark-making. The process began with us collecting words and phrases that expressed emotional states. The chosen words and text became a spring board for movement research, and eventually became a working structure in which to develop a piece of choreography. The resulting drawings explore the potency of marks, how physical presence can be experienced through a drawing made by the human figure. The drawings capture the particular qualities and character of the movement without the body being present and in this way, the mark making and the body’s physical and emotional state are inseparable.

The drawings were shown at the Bargehouse, London (2011), and a selection was shown as part of a solo show at Circus Gallery, London (2016).

Photos: Pari Naderi.

Lying In Wait

Lying in Wait (2009), Idris Khan and Sarah Warsop, was a co commission by Victoria Miro and Siobhan Davies for the group show The Collection and had been exhibited at the Victoria Miro Gallery, London, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and ICA, London

Lying in Wait was also shown on The Space, the online gallery from the BBC and Arts Council England.

Photography: Stephen White

Endangered Species

A collaborative film work by choreographer Siobhan Davies, film maker Deborah May and myself,  Endangered Species was originally created for the Cape Farewell exhibition, The Ship: The Art of Climate Change (2006), at the Natural History Museum, the projection Endangered Species shows a small, semi-human figure inside a museum display case. Her movements are exaggerated by a costume of long bending rods that increase in number as the dance progresses. At first they extend the boundaries of her body allowing greater range, but eventually the many rods restrict and extinguish her life form.

Photography: Vicky Long, Marije de Haas