Wellcome Collection, Sunday 26th January 2020, 12:30 - 13:30
Join artist Joshua Bilton for a performance lecture on his research exploring the role of the spirit double and how it can be used as a form of processing loss, grief, uncertainty and emptiness. The immersive experience will include birdsongs performed as laments by cellist and composer Gregor Riddell and movement as lament by Sim Gray and Frieda Luk. You will also be invited to take part in a meditation on weight and make an offering that will form part of the artwork.
Part of No End and No Beginning curated by Persilia Caton
Experience a day of performances, discussions, screenings and workshops related to ‘Misbehaving Bodies’ on the closing day of this exhibition. Throughout its duration, artists have been responding to the exhibition and here they will present their research and projects. These events are focused on themes of care, loss, mourning, death, illness and dying – each highly personal yet universal experiences that continually change, with no clear end or beginning.
Thanks to Lorena Sanchez-Nelson for your amazing textile work on the disc and to Paula Barnard-Groves for making the large metal disc.
Photographs by Wellcome Collection, Video documentation by Janneke Van Leeuwen.
67 Laments
67 laments developed out of a research residency at the Wellcome Collection and a three day workshop at Tate Exchange, both of which created a space to reflect through material processes on care, loss, mourning, death, illness and dying.
67 laments explores ways of relating to the human and nonhuman through touch. The works are concerned with absence in their effort to find ways of remembering, reliving, sustaining and returning to a point of touch and empathy with our body and in turn the bodies of others. They portray acts of holding on, prolonging, casting and looping as photographic, filmic and sonic methods of reflecting on beginnings and endings.
Running throughout the pieces is a preoccupation with lament, what we are lamenting for and how this can be carried through gesture and held in bird forms. During the last year I’ve been interested in how birds have been used to process loss, crisis and grief in their nature as both creatures of the earth and the sky. In poetry, literature and mythology they are often seen as spiritual animals directly connected to the threshold state between living, dying, beginning and ending.
Objects for meditation to be held in the palm of the hand.
Clay objects and found stones from eroding coastlines, wrapped in thread, dimensions variable, 2020
I started collecting these stones on a series of walks around the UK coastline during my residency at the Wellcome Collection. I brought them to workshops and used them as a means of conversation and meditation on loss, grief and healing. Using multiple threads of cotton on a central spool, participants explored the process of encasing, covering and veiling the stones.
As a continued research interested, the act of veiling e.g the covering of the face when we cry, closing of the eyes or lowering or turning away of the head, confront the difficulty in expressing loss. I am particularly interested in the history of veiling in ancient Greek culture and how this practice illustrates that the gesture of covering is an expression or symbol of loss in itself e.g the abstract language of loss relies on an object to hold the void.
Stones collected from coastal walks at Beachy Head, East Sussex; Charmouth along the Jurassic Coast, Dorset; Happisburgh, Norfolk; Easton Bavents, Norfolk; West Runton, Norfolk; Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex; Hunstanton, Norfolk; Fairlight Glen, East Sussex; St Agnes, north coast of Cornwall.
A gathering of objects used during the workshops at the Wellcome Collection. Each workshop focused on conversation, sharing, covering, plaiting, wrapping, weight and encasing. Through the process a large tangle of plaited thread was formed with many objects, words and drawings enclosed. The thread was worn throughout my research performance as a way of reflecting on how we deal with weight, emotion and abstract feelings and the ways we may find of collectively processing and sharing these.
Wellcome Collection, part of Misbehaving Bodies Drop-in Workshops.
Saturday 21 September 2019 12:00—17:00
This creative workshop explores the idea of a ‘Spirit Double’ and how it can enable someone to process grief and healing. Artist Josh Bilton will lead you through the discussion and the creation of a collective offering, including writing, ink-blot printing onto fabric, and plaiting.
Photographs by Wellcome Collection
A collective meditation on weight as part of the performance lecture Wavering Between the Sun, the Bird and the Lament. Movement exercise taken and adapted from The Invisible Actor by Yoshi Oida and Lorna Marshall, p16-17.
Offering
Fri April 26 - Sun April 28, 12 - 17:00 as part of Age/ncy, a three day programme at Tate Exchange. I was invited by Flourishing Lives and ACAVA to devise and facilitate a three day workshop within the Tate Exchange programme with residents from North Kensington.
The 3 day workshop takes inspiration from a few lines of a poem by Alis Oswald titled Tithonus.
“very nearly anonymous now / having recently turned five thousand with the same wedge of / yearning lodged in my chest as ever”
The poem is envisaged as a performance and begins in total darkness. A figure sits alone in a room, he has been granted immortality but forgets to ask for his body not to grow old. 5000 years old now, decaying and alone he sits waiting for dawn who he has fallen in love with. As she gradually arrives and the room fills with light his body is exposed in a state of decay and collapse. The poem is about dying, mourning, nostalgia, love and loss and light. It is also about memory, the things that we remember and perhaps forget that are deeply buried in our body.
My research began with this poem and when my mum believed that my grandmother’s soul had passed into a rose quartz stone that she held in her hand when she was dying.
Using this as a beginning I ran a 3-day workshop at Tate Exchange asking people to make an offering and to share their responses to threshold objects, Spirit Doubles and rituals that allowed them to process of remember a state locked in the body.
The workshop took ritual (an act repeated) as a form of remembering, locating or simply meditating. Participants would sit down, make a plait from orange twine and print or write their memory, longing or story onto a fabric square. I then offered them the option to take this away or to leave it in the space. If they chose to leave it, the piece was then wrapped, sealed and knotted to a thread of offerings that expanded over the three days. It was quite an intense three days, I didn't realise how emotional this experience would be for some people, one lady broke down into tears and there was a general feeling of letting go or offering up from both young and old. The workshop made me consider developing further this idea of a space for collective ritual where participants could process something alone but amongst others who were carrying out the same action. This research was continued at the Wellcome Collection as part of a research residency.
Part of: Ageism is getting old: marking 50 years of the anti-ageism movement at Tate Modern curated by Flourishing Lives.
