Your skin is dancing with, and rising up towards the sun

Screen-print, A1, 25 copies, 2021 - - - - - - This poster is based on a text I wrote about a memory of swimming in a very cold reservoir with dear friend Olivia in Marsden visiting Lucy back in Autumn 2020. - - - - - (...) My first memory of swimming in cold water was early January 2019 with my friend Soizig on the north coast of Brittany. I was experiencing bullying from someone who had employed me for a project, and really felt an urge to do something that would be so all-encompassing that it would bring my attention back into my body and pause the anxiety at least for a few moments. - - - - - The sunday morning swim (usually with one other friend, often Hannah or Sophie) felt like a lifeline throughout the winter lockdowns. Not being able to touch friends, but sharing a body of water with them and feeling similar sensations in parallel often felt like my highlight of the week. - - - - - (...) I wrote it as part of Victoria McKenzie’s ‘Ecological Self’ class: an invitation to choose an object or element and explore its entanglements with others. The programme is based on the image of a spiral that starts with the self, before spiraling to the community and then the wider world. Victoria’s teaching enabled me to move beyond the human community and my/our relationship to water and to expand to the wisdom of the water itself, its cycles of relationship to the rest of the world. - - - - - (...) - - - - - I also loved finding out about the idea of “embodied writing” in Rae Johnson’s Embodied Social Justice: “embodied writing offers vivid depictions of experience intended to invite a somatic response in the reader. (...) Embodied writing is inclusive of internal and external data but is written from the inside out, letting the soma’s ‘perceptual matrix guide the words, impulse by impulse, sensation by sensation”.