FUTURE STONES
a look back at my week-long residency at Fabrica Gallery + other stuff
April 21-25 was a stone and community-filled week, and given the recent distressing news from the UK Supreme Court, my artist residency at Fabrica was a welcome delve into empathy, community and shared humanity. You can donate to The Good Law’s campaign to fight the Supreme Courts’ nonsensical and downright transphobic ruling here. It’s scarier than ever to be a trans, nb or gender non-conforming person in the UK right now, and we need active allyship NOT more ‘debate’ about who gets rights and who doesn’t.
I had meant to finish this update last week, but I caught Covid and that meant a week indoors feeling awful. Health, illness and disability is an important part of my practice, so I want to write about this first. This was my second time contracting it, and I was so grateful that this time it didn’t trigger a massive flare of my ulcerative colitis, like the first time, which I wrote about back in April 2022.
This time of course, the strain is different. I get seasonal vaccines, my circumstances are different and I know to preemptively increase my flare meds so I’m prepared. Despite feeling absolutely dreadful for a good few days, I tested positive for only 5 days and a week later I’m getting my energy back slowly and thinking about a walk to the park to get some proper fresh air: annoyed I’ve been stuck indoors for the start of a sunny May, but grateful I haven’t been pushed back into a flare and that I can get back to my daily life without too much disruption.
What’s scary to me is that despite covid still being out there, and still putting a lot of people in hospital, I wasn’t able to officially report my test result. I found it difficult to find any reliable, information online on current COVID symptoms and infection rates- there’s a lot of papers and data for medical professionals, but it’s difficult to find something the majority of us can read, so it doesn’t surprise me that most people treat it as a non-issue now.
I feel like I can’t really write about my community-based residency without a reminder to keep protecting your communities from COVID-19. It’s still out there and still can affect many vulnerable people. The official government advice about what to do if you have it is disturbingly lax so I urge you to continue protecting the people around you.
And so to my residency: each stone in the circle we built over the week represented the person who donated/lent it, and the stories, memories and emotions their stone carried. I collected these stones through an experimental life drawing session on the Tuesday I ran with artist & facilitator Jane Fordham, and through two group workshops on the Wednesday.
I spent Thursday gathering all of the written/spoken materials I’d received into a long scroll of text, which was read out communally in the circle with a public audience before a short and informal artist Q&A.
Tuesday: life drawing
Every month, artist Jane Fordham runs 2 experimental life drawing workshops at Fabrica. I have been a regular model for Jane’s sessions for over 10 years now (how time flies!) and so I asked her if she would like to run one of her monthly sessions collaboratively with me as part of my residency. The loose theme of the session was ‘drawing with stones’, using different drawing exercises and prompts to guide those drawing in experimental directions.
For the final section, our model Catherine performed a moving pose, walking in a circle whilst pouring yellow sand onto the floor (top right). This bright circle ended up forming the basis of the stone circle for the rest of the week, which was an unplanned piece of collaboration: something I wanted to be open to during the residency.
I chose this bright, unnatural yellow so the stones would stand out in the space, and also as a reference to the futurist aspect of this research: how we might use stone circles to send messages into the future with a bright, sci-fi-esque colour.
Wednesday: stone + story sharing workshops
Two groups of six people, alongside myself and my helper Helen, brought along a stone that represented a personal memory. We studied eachothers’ stones, discussed our stories and memories, wrote about them using prompts and finally 3D scanned each one before adding it to the temporary stone circle.
These workshops were quiet and meditative, and it felt really special to connect with groups of different people over these small and seemingly insignificant objects. The stones represented so many different things for people- memories of difficult times, grief and loss, as well as happy travels and experiences they wanted to hold onto.
I asked each person to write responses to questions relating to their stone, which the following day I intended to build into a communal ritual to mark the end of the residency…
Thursday: closing ritual and artist q&a
Thursday was the final full day of the residency, where I spent time by myself in the space, working with what I had gathered over the past few days.
I went through all of the written responses from the workshops, picking out specific phrases and words that could be put into a spoken-word ‘ritual for the future’. I then cut them up and rearranged them into a specific order on a long scroll. At first this task terrified me- that evening I needed to have something ready for people to read at a public event- but I quickly found my footing and got really into it.
The words almost put themselves in order, and I allowed myself to be led by them in my re-arrangement. That day I was able to spend time working on some digital work as well, to show on a screen throughout the evening.
The ritual was well-attended. For a small, short residency I expected a small group of people I already knew or had come along to things I’ve organised before, but there was a really good mix of both. Earlier in the day I had made a bowl of rose water, using the leftover yellow roses I bought to give one of each to my workshop attendees, pine and bergamot oil- all invigorating scents. I put some in a spritzing bottle and invited people to use some, which left the space smelling gorgeous.
I began the ritual with a bell and a traditional Druidry invitation, before passing around the text on a scroll for each person in the circle to read a line from.
You can read the ritual text here.
FOLKLORE exhibition | Toadlickers Collective
Back in April ‘a stone circle for the future’ was part of a fantastic and diverse group exhibition in Newhaven, exploring contemporary relationships with folklore. Having my weird nuclear stone circle surrounded by a vast community of artists and collectives looking at how we engage with tradition as we steer towards such an uncertain future felt powerful and positive. Toadlickers run regular events, talks and film screenings- give them a follow online to stay up to date.
Once I’m back up on my feet post-COVID, I’ll share the next stages of this project and some upcoming news related to it :)
Links + resources
https://goodlawproject.org/campaign/trans-fighting-fund/