Blue Goggles and Ducting by Katherine Smith

About the artist

Transcript

Hello! My name is Katherine, this is my studio. I am a performance  artist and sculptor and I also work with children in hospitals /  galleries / community centres which I see as practice-based research for  my studio work, and the other way round too.

The work is an investigation into embodiment, into how to connect to  the body, using materials as an interface. I am neurodivergent, I have  ADHD, and for me this means that I can find bodily, non-verbal language  easier than the verbal. I also have experience of dissociation; so in my  practice I am trying to connect back to my body, and through this, to  others too. 

My practice relates strongly to play theorists like Stuart Lester,  Wendy Russell, phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty,  Hans-Georg Gadamer, pedagogical theorists such as Paolo Freire, bell  hooks. Joanna Grace’s work for individuals with Profound and Multiple  Learning Disabilities and her book – Sensory Being for Sensory Beings –  is a strong influence.

So, what sort of materials facilitate embodiment?

I’ve particularly seen in my work with children in hospital that this  is different for everyone; how we approach materials – and by materials  I mean what we want to work with, which can be anything really –  depends so much on our life experience, our own experience of  embodiment. So my practice has been an investigation into how I choose  my materials – what facilitates embodiment for me.

I am drawn to materials that are really responsive / sensitive to the  body, that easily connect sound and touch through bodily action. 

These pipes reverberate easily and create different tones of sound,  vibrations, depending on where they are brought together and what types  of movement are used to bring them together.

So a big part of my practice is gathering materials that are  responsive to my body. And then, once I’ve done this, I work with them,  play with them, experiment with them. I love Elly Thomas’ practice and  she talked a lot about spending time with materials; it was really  important to her. So I look at how can I spend time with materials? How  can I get to know them? The work is about me though, about my  projections onto materials: through spending time with materials I spend  time with myself.

So, through spending time playing with materials, being present to  myself and to the materials, I find moments that surprise me / that  aren’t what I expect / in which the material shows me something /  teaches me something about it / about my own reactions to it / my own  body. And then the works I create are based on this moment – how to  investigate what this moment is, this unknown wobble / shake / discovery  between us.

In Walking on Tin Cans, I was interested in the vibration  that went through my body as I walked in the shoes and the feeling of  incorporation – that I was sensing the floor through the vibration of  the shoes, not really sensing the shoes as an external object to the  body. But, with the shoes, at certain points in the movements, e.g. when  the shoes scraped, it became clear that they were not part of me. So to  walk in the shoes was strange – feeling that the shoes were part of me –  for example when lifted in the air – and then not. It made me very  aware of my body and the shoes, the connection between them, the joining  point.

On another level, this work was also very much about isolation and  the difficulty of connection; I am alone on the stage, not really  connecting to the audience with my body at all, focusing on my own path  around the stage. The piece could seem like an example of dissociation /  disconnection, rather than embodiment. However, there is also humour /  absurdity: going for a walk in these giant, clanky shoes. The idea of  failing to connect is held gently, slowly. Acknowledging the failure to  connect is connecting.

This tension between disconnection and connection, through working with materials, is something I look at in the next piece too.

In Dancing in Scaffolding Foam I further developed ideas  about incorporation, isolation / connection. The body sock is a  grounding, proprioceptive tool, telling my body where it is in space,  and it is also a shield. The tension between isolation and connection is  in general at the core of my work. It is important to connect with  ourselves and others, and at the same time very difficult. 

In the piece, I was looking at the sound of the noodles when they  bumped together. What I wanted to do at the start of this was to stick  all the foam noodles onto the body sock. But it wasn’t working out; I  tried a couple of different glues and couldn’t make the join stable  enough. Then I realised I wasn’t really being present / open to the  material itself, it was more about what I wanted and me controlling it.  So when I realised this, the piece then became an acceptance of that, an  acceptance of what the material wanted to do. I set up the task of  dancing to get all the foam noodles off my body, and what was exciting  was this task was set up with a deep understanding of the material  properties; the task was kind of co-created between me and the material.  And the task taught me a lot: the sounds of the noodles changed as they  fell off and there were fewer on the suit; the movements that I made  were not movements I had pre-planned / known about before the piece. So  then I started looking at task-based play.

I looked at this more in this piece, 4 piece scaffolding pole.  I developed the task of balancing the 4 pieces on top of each other  over time, through working first with a 3 piece scaffolding pole, which  was quite easy for me to balance. It as in fact too easy – and I didn’t  really get into the task because of this. I didn’t really discover  anything about my body / the material, and it was over very quickly.  Therefore I decided to split the pole into 4, which was a lot more  challenging. So I realised that creating situations of effort /  challenge, that I have chosen, can be a factor in facilitating  embodiment. In writing about task-based play recently, and how to  develop tasks that are appropriate for our bodies, I spoke to Tehching  Hsieh, an amazing performance artist. In Time Clock Piece he  said that he chose to punch a clock every hour on the hour for a year,  because this rhythm was good for his body, his expression; he was  developing a rule for himself that suited his capacities. I find this  very interesting – how we develop structures that suit our own bodies. 

So, how does all this translate to my work with children?

In terms of external structures, I’ve wanted to work within framework  that prioritise play. Since 2014 I’ve been running group sessions  focused on creative expression in community spaces. The focus has been  on materials and the potential of materials to act as a starting point  for role-play, creativity, world-building. For the last 18 months I’ve  done quite a lot of work with the Great Ormond Street Hospital play  team; I’ve also worked with the Polka Theatre, a children’s theatre, St  George’s Hospital Play Team and different community spaces and  play-focused gallery spaces. 

So what are the internal structures to the sessions? Sometimes in  this work I just bring materials; materials can provide all the  structure that is needed for the particular children and setting of the  session. As I investigate in my studio work, materials can invite you to  roll them / to stick them / to scrunch them / to jump on them / to  handle them in certain ways / to combine them with other materials that  fit well with them. In a festival in 2018 for a three day project called  ‘Build an Imaginary World’ we collected waste, recycling materials each  morning from the festival, and then built them into a communal  imaginary world. These materials, which are easily transformed, are a  really good starting point for facilitating play / embodied making.

In a hospital context I’ve sometimes translated this to create a  world in a box – a world with all the child’s likes and dislikes. I’ve  seen that this can be a good starting point for some children, as it  makes clear that the session is all about them – their likes / dislikes –  their experience. From there, the child can tell me what they want to  do next / we can make a decision together.

So, for some children, in some settings, the materials can provide  the structure for the session, acting as an interface to a way to build  and make together.

For other sessions, we might need a more specific starting point, some sort of task to get started.

At South London Gallery recently I provided each child with a silver  sack – a material I’ve seen is appealing and easy to use for many  children – and I also gave them a checklist of movements to make with  the sack. This checklist was just a suggestion – there as a starting  point if they wanted it. The checklist was sort of a way to hold space  for new things to take place. This is similar to what I did a couple of  years ago with What is a Wheel at Thought Foundation, Aspex and  Chapel Arts Studio. On the checklists both times were ‘invent a  movement for the wheel/sack’. So the checklist contained within it the  possibility of newness. It could also be totally discarded when the  child was ready. 

Working with children with PMLD, I developed different small  sculptures / accumulations of material to provide a structure for the  session. Some of these sessions were on zoom, and I gave the playworker  in the room with the child the same sculpture that I had on zoom. I  moved with the sculpture in different ways, creating sounds / rhythms  through touching the sculpture. The child would communicate with the  player worker through touch / small movements to say whether they wanted  more of the material I was offering, or not. So to work with the child  in these sessions was a constant process of learning about the child and  their bodily reactions to the material.

So how do I translate these ideas about play, the body, materials, to working with children? 

I’ve realised through working with children for many years, that  facilitating art and play needs to be an incremental process of working  out what works for each child / group of children. If I want the child  to feel safe to make choices, to discover and play with materials, I  know that the most important thing is to respond in the moment to the  child – to who they are. And this is done through spending time with  them – noticing the choices that they make and responding to them.

It’s about noticing what the child wants from tiny cues / gestures  that might not be verbal. Through being aware, which is a constant  process of learning and reflection, and of course I may make mistakes  which I then reflect on, improve on, I can hold a space that is as open /  safe / nurturing as possible for the child, so that they can create an  embodied structure for their own play and art, a structure that is not  imposed by me.