As the Cosmos Unfolds: Closing Party

Millie Brown

Developing on themes explored in Brown’s regurgitation performances, Re-Germination toys with ideas of life-cycles, development and embodiment. It is structured around the movement of seeds that germinate only after passing through a living creature’s digestive system. Among the most resilient objects in nature, densely packed with latent life-force, such seeds are normally eaten by birds; here, they make their progress through Brown’s own body. After travelling through the artist’s digestive tract, they are used to make pigments which will in turn be used in a performance-painting carried out on the show’s opening night. Subsequently growing and altering in form, this work will shatter the idea of the artwork as a stable artefact, replicating instead the same cycles of growth, development and change that have been integrated into its making.

Victoria Fornieles

Created by means of camera-less photography, this ongoing series of works uses time, light and space to depict the physicality of human presence through performance. Created while sleeping, walking and masturbating, the images make use of a traditional photogram process to reveal and record an intimate cross-section of bodily movement, capturing the body’s physicality at its most vulnerable and literally ‘exposing’ the physical trace of a personal and intimate experience. Skin prints, and the discolouration caused by bodily secretions, leave physical reminders of both the artist’s presence and the passing of a particular moment in time. In the process, they gradually shift and change, replicating the perpetual movement of the cosmos and the natural cycles of decay and rebirth.

Kate Heath

This edible artwork re ects the restless transactional movement of energy and nutrients through food. Visitors are offered ornate, petit four-sized cakes imbued with Heath’s sins, packaged in paper and sealed with her initials in black wax. Drawing on the Victorian tradition of the funeral biscuit and the folklore gure of the ‘Sin Eater’, the work offers spectators the chance to cleanse Heath’s soul by eating the sin- lled cakes. In the process, they enter into a mutually-bene cial exchange relationship with the artist, who is puri ed by the sel ess act of their consumption. Her sins are transformed from negative into positive energy, and the modern-day Sin Eaters conspire in the production of the artwork’s symbolic potency. In this way the act of spectatorship is pared down to pure ritual, with the contrast between the transitory nature of food-consumption and the conventional permanence of the artwork throwing an acerbic light on the nutrient cycle of culture.

Craig Lawrence

Named with reference to figures from Greek mythology and presented as a large-scale installation, these sculptures are created by the processes of knitting and knotting. Each will represent one of the exhibiting Formationist Movement artists, who will occupy their allotted spaces on the opening night as if in constellation with one another. In this way the sculpture will affect its environment, turning the artists into static objects and transforming their guests into an orbiting entity. Re ecting and interrupting the patterns of movement that would naturally develop within such a space, this draws the spectator in, at the same time making them aware of their position within the structure of the spectacle. But while this rubs up against the tendencies of modern culture and technology, Lawrence’s use of carbon refers to our preoccupation with the universe’s most abundant element, alluding to the ways in which mutuality and collectivity subtend the seeming separateness of contemporary life.

Lina Iris Viktor

Rendered in a strictly constrained colour palette and gilded with 24-carat gold, these eleven mixed-media paintings form a miniature constellation. The nude body is Viktor’s, but physicality here is not personal; instead the figure is apprehended as pure form, its individuality refracted into a tremor of pure vital force. Mounted on a penumbral backdrop, the paintings emerge into the gallery space as if from dark matter, throwing the gold that accompanies Viktor’s body into striking relief. Among the least reactive of the elements, gold is a conduit through space and time: born at the expiration of stars and associated with human death rituals the world over, attending the human body’s passage into the hereafter. Retaining its seductive shimmer, the gold in these images peers over into the blank space beyond mortality, hinting at the ephemeral endurance of the soul.

Walter & Zoniel

Echoing the movements of the stars above us, the people around us and the cells within us, this new body of abstract,multi-layered works takes its cue from the energy that resides within and connects all things. Walter and Zoniel’s Pro-Creations works are salt print photographic images of the solar system, using the artists’ sexual fluids as a substrate in the creation of the artworks. Each of the resulting works is thus imbued with the creative potential of its creators’ bodies. In a world characterised by both intricacy and nebulousness, the artists play with concept of the ‘creator’ by weaving together cosmic, social and cellular orbits into one fabric, with the traces of their own physicality forming a ligament between the micro-acts of human creation and the macro-scale of the cosmos.