Together | To Gather | To Touch
Together | To Gather | To Touch 5th March - 30th July 2022Mixed Media solo exhibition at The Barn, Banchory Scotland
As Phos’, Lucy and Luke Pell collaborated with The Barn in Banchory between 2020-2022.
We first encountered The Barn as participants through Becoming Earthly - a programme bringing together artists and organisations interested in, ‘developing practices that generate new ways of living on Earth, being aware of the critical zone of atmosphere and soil, (the ‘skin’ of the Earth) upon which all life is dependent’ (>>The Barn/ Becoming Earthly).
After this we proposed and hosted a series of workshop encounters with Barn volunteer staff during the pandemic and then curated the micro-festival Phosphorescence in October 2021.
In Spring 2022 we created Together | To Gather | To Touch - an exhibition in which the Barn’s gallery was re-imagined as a lyric essay bringing together elements of our work from the two previous years through a playful and gently provocative assemblage of words, images and ideas. Through our expanded poetics and choreographic practice, we invited visitors to pay close attention to one another, to the landscapes of our bodies and those of the wider world as an essential act of respair.
Dr. Johanna Linsley On Phos:
Lucy and Luke (Phos) are an artist duo who work with scores and expanded poetics. What is expanded poetics? It could mean an unfolding conversation between two people halfway across the globe, or the way a camera lingers on a moving body, or a writing practice that is also a long walk. It is a way of making things that emphasises close attention to all the ripples and currents and unexpected turns that emerge along the way. These kinds of extensions into the world around us suggest how we might see things differently, be together in other ways – a queer politics of taking care.
Phosphorescence was a micro festival in October 2021 curated by Phos that brought together artists across forms concerned with different modalities of attention, the choreographic and deep care for the environment. In a time that was defined by uncertainty, the festival was a space for gathering and for acknowledging absence. A key dimension of absence was that – for a variety of reasons – Luke and Lucy were not able to be physically on site. And yet, those of us who were there felt their presence. These two who had assembled us together were somehow everywhere.
I was invited to act as ‘host’ of the festival and became a witness to the unfolding actions and encounters. Two of the scores in this exhibition are my responses. The first aims to capture the possibilities of palpable absence and the way imagination rushes to fill in gaps and so suggest alternative realities. The second acknowledges the dizzyingly inventive work at the Phosphorescence Festival arising from grounded practices of attention, from Ieva Grigelionyte’s experiments with land and ice cream, to Elizabeth Reeder & Amanda Thompson’s collaborations across text, image, and the hard work of making home. My hope is that these scores offer one further layer, one more expansion, to the poetics that Phos have set in motion.
Dr. Johanna Linsley is an artist, researcher and producer of performance, and lecturer in English at the University of Dundee.
From Phos
Hello and welcome here to a gathering, a togethering, a touching of words and images, colour and sound. Welcome to a gallery space that’s a notebook of ways we’ve been working with the Barn through the turning of a year.
First as part of Becoming Earthly in summer and then through Turning Out Tuning in - a project working with volunteers in spring; followed by Phosphorescence - a festival in autumn on the edge of winter, and now, once again in spring, with this exhibition.
We are Lucy and Luke, we call ourselves Phos – to remember the minerals that comprise us. We sow, seed and tend to listening, doing the invisible work as does the soil. We call this work quiet queering. We ask ourselves can we attend with a tender attention?
We wrote these words imagining you arriving, settling yourself on a hay bale. Taking a breath in as the trees outside the window breath out their O2 and letting your breath out as those same trees breath in your CO2. Imagine that ebb and flow, that tide of elements, passing from you to the world and back again. In and out, out and in.
Feel your sit bones on the chair, the air on your skin, the light moving around the room… Imagine a lichen growing on a tree, that becomes a boat or a barn
A lichen as caress… A slow-motion gesture in a time-scale we’re too quick to notice
How to tread lightly and leap or fly, or fall (as a leaf) from lichen to moss to broom? Broom the colour of gorse (but not as sharp) pulling hope from the dark, from despair. Hope in the shape of the word respair. (So very close to the word, respire).
Imagine, the mirth of mouthing a mass of moss. How does moss move, so old and slowly, alongside and out
A deep time and generous host, hearth and heart and home Is a mass of moss a murmuration
A flock A congregation of volunteers Or constellation A convergence A boundary layer
“Mosses inhabit surfaces,” says Robin Kimmerer. “The surfaces of rocks, the bark of trees, the surface of a log, that small space where earth and atmosphere first make contact. this meeting between earth and land is known as the boundary layer. Lying cheek to cheek with rocks and logs, mosses are intimate with the contours and texture of their substrate.”
And we try this here in this place on these walls, a meeting between/of our words and worlds, our bodies and yours.
