Lydgia Clark seminar

What an incredibly interesting and inspirational way to start the day! This weeks print seminar was with a visiting artist from the Royal Collage of Art Trish Lyons who predominantly works with sound, music and performance. I felt that this seminar would be quite separate from my practice and wasn’t sure how well I’d engage with it. I often shy away from sound and music, as I automatically relate it to technology, which I need to get over my irrational fear of using, and I’ve never used performance in my practice before either. I definitely need to reconsider these choices after this morning. Lyons spoke about the work of Lydgia Clark and we all participated in recreating a performance piece by the Brazilian artist, titled Baba Antropofagica that was one of a series of her “psyho-sensorial” (Rehberg 2006) experiments. Our participation involved one student laying on the floor, whilst the rest of us stood around her decorating her body with saliva stained coloured thread from the spools we has in our mouths. The performance felt oddly ritualistic, especially being inside four white walls in an institution. The lights were off so nobody could see the effect of the laying down of the threads, but the sound of the clicking of the spools against our teeth sounded like the clicks in some dialects or the call of a rare bird of paradise perhaps! This idea of hearing and “feeling the work rather than seeing the work” (Lyons 2011) is a really interesting concept, likewise with the using other parts of your body to create the work, these are some methods that I’d like to explore. When we turned the lights back on we were able to take photos of the event, it looked almost as if the body had been pollinated and was ready to grow beautifully coloured flowers, it also alluded to masks or maybe skin grafts. There was also a strange correlation to the way the thread was left scattered and the way I had used thread in binding my book!