Gestures with the Ground - Exhibition

Tue 20 - Sun 25 September

at Samphire Hoe Visitor Centre, Dover, UK

Part of the Salt + Earth: Festival of Landscape, Seascape & The Envirnment.

The project consists of a series of actions performed and documented in which I made contact with different terrains of the Cross-Channel Geopark so to expose its richness.

Gestures with the Ground explores the idea of physical contact (imprint) with the different types of terrain that shape and characterise the Kent Downs Geopark area.

An area that surrounds the place where I live.

I been thinking at the project in relation to photographic practice, in particular to the act of mapping, tracing and transferring information from one surface to another through contact printing. This led me to imagine the landscape of the Cross-Channel Geopark as a body, a breathing body in constant transformation and in sensorial correspondence with our own bodies.

Travelling across the AONB to roll his body in different terrains – chalk, clay, marl, greensand, grassland and woodland - I attempted to activate a dialogue between bodies, an exercise of modelling while being modelled and an opportunity to grow a tactile eye.

The resulting exhibition of photographic and moving image with earth-stained white suits seeks to convey both the variety of terrains and the connection set up between the body of earth, the body of work and the human body.

The following two videos were displayed next to each other synched on large screens.

Here some close up images of the stains and marks on the white boilers suits exhibited.