Bodily Encounters

About

Allen, Leshem and Woolley’s work share a common interest in the body as a site through which they explore different ideas around memory, cultural and material traditions, vulnerability, protean experiences of womanhood and being messy. This exhibition brings together the work of these three artists for the first time to coalesce these themes through a generative haptic experience.

Although varied in their appearance, the included works have a unified overall ‘unmonumental’ aesthetic, using materials like fabric and silicone which are affected by gravity and whose softness suggests vulnerability. In some works these soft materials are supported by scaffolding or a tent frame, however these support structures are always collapsible.

In all the works a body (individual or collective) is implied. By employing bodily traces, fleshy textures, stand-in bodily elements, architectural interventions and functional-looking objects that suggest human interaction, Allen, Leshem and Woolley’s works force the viewer’s body to become an implicit component of the encounter. 

This show hopes to use the haptic as a technique of knowing; encouraging the viewer to consider the wider cultural, social, political, and emotional web in which their physiological selves are embedded.