The Body in Time and Place

Through symbolic action Becky Bowley’s work evokes the relationship between the body and time through the medium of traditional making and the movement of the body within a place. Her interest lies in poetical dialogues between the memory and imagination of human feeling and experiences becoming a dynamic image of the mythical. Materials are composed as symbols of the elements that resonate with impermanence and hint at transformation - to move the body within time and place “To cross a territory, to walk, to open a path, to recognise a place, to comprehend symbolic values, to invent a geography”5.



Patience (Mirror 2009)




Patience, as a virtue and reference to the solo card game evokes the sense of extended time and endurance. Set to an ethereal play of voiced and embodied emotion the twelve minute performance is a story of an intimate and brief encounter with beauty, death and reconciliation.
-
"Through the 'negative space' a void exists so that the 'ingredients can be seen in a moving way or dynamic way"4
-
Photographed by Tamsin Drury (Green Room Arts)

Patience (2009)


The skin, bones, and landscape of our brief encounter.
-
(Twelve minutes; white satin, net curtain, white chalk dust)
-
Photographed by Mark Doyle.

Transmerge (2008)






Like a refugee, exchanging earth with earth, from one place to another 'to cross a territory' along The Hope Valley train line.
-
Transmerge is an artistic desire to merge body and land for peaceful purposes without boundaries. Prehistorically land art may have been used to define boundaries, and ownership of the land to indicate beliefs. These boundaries of land and people continue today causing global and personal conflict. Land and people are separated by differences that can be transformed into a merger of unique parts at peace with each other, ritualised in the performance of Transmerge.
-
" The impassioned inhabitant digs and re-digs, making its very depth active. The fact is not enough, the dream is at work. When it comes to excavated ground, dreams have no limit."3

(Two days; suitcase, dress, trowl, shroud and earth)

To view the full project visit http://www.beckybowley.blogspot.com/
Photographed by Julian Hughes.

Shadow (2008)



A walk: 18 hours, from Brighton seashore to falmer manor house; Falmer manor house to Brighton seashore; carrying a body of sand in human size and weight. An act of letting go: the body arises from the seashore, is carried inland and returned to the sea.
-
"A system of empty spaces (the sea of the archipelago) through which it is possible to drift"2
-
(Eighteen hours; blue dress, large suitcase and sand)
-
Photographed by Mark Doyle

Still Changing (Window 2006)


"It is as though something fluid had collected our memories and we our-selves were dissolved in this fluid of the past" 1
-
Still Changing (window), 9 hour shop window performance.
-
Photographed by Mark Doyle

Still Changing 2005





Constantly knitting, the knit work dissolves into water. Sitting still, but for the hypnotic movement of working hands and of threads coming undone, dissolving into water.
-
With every line created, a line dissolved. Still Changing is an embodiment of impermanence and dynamic life cycles. An elusive labour of the psyche, it marks the activity of knitting as a reflection on the reality of the body, and the body as myth, referencing still life painting and subverting traditional images of work and making into a rite of passage.
-
(Nine hours, nine days performance; ash wood, glass, water, white slip and socks, soluble fabric, knitting needles)
-
Photographed by Julian Hughes

(Im) Material (Bath 2004)



(Im) Material (Bath) is a twenty minute performance for video. The familiarity of the bath becomes other worldy whilst Becky Bowley is carpeted within it, holding her breath as it fills with water. Her visual form fades in and out of the image as the water builds until the form starts to shift, and finally there is a tearing of the veil as the naked fiqure emerges from the deep red flowing pool.
-
(Twenty minute video performance, bath, water and carpet)
Video by Becky Bowley


Making Connections (2003)





Becky Bowley weaves a fine silk red cloth in silence but for the sound of the loom, thread by thread we're lead through the process of weaving... watching in on a dream. Once the cloth is woven the character in the tale slowley takes the cloth apart. The threads dance and fall with the body, statically charged by the movement, until the character has done, and fades out of the dream leaving a grave like image of red threads and figurative empty space.
-
(Twenty minute video, two week Performance; silk, harris loom, bobbins and mill)

Video by Becky Bowley
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)