PV Thursday 23rd August 2018 6.30pm - 9:30pm
Friday 24th 11:00am - 6pm and Saturday 12:00pm - 5pm
Gordon House presents 'Breath: Fear & Medicine', an investigation of breath through sound, installation and philosophy by artists/makers in residence Anna Westin and Ruth Fox.
From August 17th, Anna and Ruth engaged with spaces during their residency at Gordon House. They explored how a breath can be a messenger and signifier of the body's states of being, whether it is calm, happy, content or alarmed, anxious or threatened.
Ruth said, "Our breath is a signifier of our body's comfort or discomfort, usually governed by our brain alerting it to a situation which can evoke a flight, fight or freeze response. The breath can be seen as a product of inner unity or inner conflict."
POETRY EXCERPTS BY ANNA WESTIN
BACK (fear embodied)
It used to come easy
this
basic thing. Now, rupture and
labour without
food for feeding.
Lungs are still
hungry for
breathing.
Space shrinks and body
plays a fatal
game of catch up. A poor whispered exchange
of grey
air on paper lungs.
These bones are raw white
cold hard and clean.
but I used to be
a living thing.
ADAM-AH
The tidy bone piles
can’t speak
can’t scream
can’t whisper or sing.
So what will
bring breath
back into being, make me
live again?
SHE
She speaks
breath with a regular rhythm
without needing to think.
Her freedom is
that she just is.
Just living.
MARGATE LUNGS
Inhale slow.
Cool breath blowing
billows from the sea
into the cavernous
lung depth of me.
And I and the sea and wind sky
are now
essence of one thing
breathing.
Anna Westin is a folk singer-songwriter who has performed internationally across the UK, in the Middle East and Canada. She also holds a PhD in the philosophy of addiction, engaging in the existential and phenomenological approach of Levinas and Kierkegaard at St. Mary’s University, London. Anna has published in places such as the Journal of Medical Ethics and the New Bioethics Journal and is a visiting lecturer at LST and Canterbury Christ Church University. She is the Director of The JAM Network UK, a creative anti-trafficking collective and is involved in various independently affiliated research projects and creative collaborations.
-Web: http://www.annalouisewestin.com/music/
Ruth Fox is a textile and sound artist exploring the body as a home and new ways of seeing that channel a reconnection with our bodies whilst celebrating diversity. Following a successful solo show featuring abstract and figurative body portraits stitched on to denim, silk and neoprene, as well as a few group shows last year, Ruth also released her first sound art work on vinyl, Sounds of My Skin in 440hz about the awkward mind/body divide with psychedelic rock musician and composer, Steven Young. She is now working on her second vinyl, A Symphony of Salt, a joint show in London with a filmmaker artist and more group shows. She has also been invited to give a TEDx talk in November about the body as a home, the body's relationship with water and the ego as an assassin and assistant to body 'image' at Royal Holloway University.
- Web:
https://www.ruthfox.co/