Intimating Touch

A contemplation on touch, intimacy and a sensuous world of interconnecting bodies.

Ways & Means
Exhibition of 19 artists curated by Skelf, virtual project space
22 July-20 October 2020

Ways & Means is a group exhibition of 19 new artworks selected through an open call. The curated selection presents work that has been made during the pandemic, as restrictions force artists to explore new ways of working. Selected out of 185 applications from 33 different countries, the artworks chosen reflect in different ways upon a unique time in all of our lives. Since 2016, Skelf has championed artwork that functions without physical form, allowing it to become more accessible and easily shared with a potentially global audience. These works are not the poor relation to something that takes place in real life, but a celebration of what is possible in the unlimited virtual space. @_skelf_

Intimating Touch evolved during lockdown as a reconsideration of human bodies, human scale and human contact in relation to other bodies (animal, human, planetary, amoeboid). The temporary pause and disruption in human activity and working rhythms, presented a sensory shift of being in, on, with the world, to feel part of things bigger, smaller, unseen. This screen-page-work evolved from the first weeks of lockdown March-April 2020. Making collage was a diversion and a space for thinking from which these simple organic configurations became a contemplation on bodies (human and non-human) and space (negative, intimate). Lockdown as a pause and disruption in the normal rhythm of working moving socialising in which to feel part of things bigger, things smaller and things unseen.

The Skelf call to be part of a group exhibition propelled me to animate these flat material static shapes. Learning how to create PS gifs and treating texts also as a shape (to suggest breath) was an exciting extension of my practice in relation to surface translations of movement; a new way to share ideas in a poetic distilled format.

As surface choreography these animated shapes intimate at and move around ideas of touch, scale, rhythm, gesture, pivot and bodies dancing together.