Material Bodies is an interdisciplinary project that extends my use of ritual in the production of collage and body-based performance. In a collage, paper is like a skin. There is a kind of violence in the scratching, scoring, cutting, and incising of images. These actions speak to visceral expressions, and performative rituals contained in collage-making—the collecting, cutting, composing, and pasting are processes between language and the body. The process of collage also connects to women’s domestic arts like sewing where a whole cloth is cut apart and stitched back together to form a new structure. There is a reparative gesture in the acts of sewing and collage, a healing through revisioning and reconstructing alternative narratives. For Material Bodies, I will draw upon my familial roots in folk magic and craft forms to develop a series of collage drawings, a live performance, and a book that captures images of my work alongside research documentation, and critical writing.
The first seeds of Material Bodies derive from images found in an archive of scanned microfilm copies of High Performance magazine which was active in the documentation of West Coast performance art from 1978 through the 1990s. These are singular images of live time-based works that have been cleaved from their original context. The often dark and obscured pictures point to the precarity of performance and the potential for loss in ephemeral works. I will “read” these images to generate fifty-eight collages and a series of ritual actions that echo the aesthetic and material aspects of the found images.
Selection of resources related to ritual from sources including, folk magic, performance art, and craft books
