Maria de Lima and Nicole Morris: INGEST / digest / excrete

About

Having won the election, she forcibly shoved a piece of cake into my mouth, asking ‘which tastes better?’ She forgot my claim to my body is greater than hers. I protested then nominated the other cake best. Belly aching, I shat out a grey arch and marvelled at it.

The exhibition series, INGEST / DIGEST / EXCRETE presents a new body of work that reacts to the female body as a contracting and expanding space responding to the urban environment through acts of absorption, consumption and expulsion.

Originating from a series of email conversations that began in January between Glasgow and London, Maria de Lima and Nicole Morris have used writing to explore how expanded definitions of the domestic can be experienced as portable. Paying close attention to the transference from the private to the public, they set out to explore how toil and customs relating to the ‘home’ can play out in public space. The writing, and images it draws in, focus specifically on embodied accounts of aging, intimate relationships, child rearing, part time jobs and social technologies and how these affect the processes of making, discourse and display.

The inaugural exhibition, INGEST, brings together the conversation so far into the printed medium of a zine. The zine being a portable, technology-facilitated space that uses acts of shared labour in response to limited making spaces and exhibiting costs. It is presented in relationship to other objects held within a constructed vitrine. The zine establishes the exhibition’s ethos of portability and sets the foundations for a space of ongoing dialogue that will exist across exhibiting venues.

INGEST initiates two new bodies of work through the media of audio and textiles that consider the theme of absorption – or more specifically the objects, narratives and gestures that enter into our bodies. Working collaboratively for the first time, de Lima and Morris have created a new series of fabric works that act as portable reading rooms to temporarily house a new series of audio works. Both systems of display purposefully setting out to house another work, evolving a continuing interest in the discourse of sharing space and cohabitation. The concept of ingestion, as both a temporary and permanent action, is reimagined through these new structures of presentation.

Accompanying the exhibition at SPACE, de Lima and Morris have co-curated a podcast series, REGURGITATE, to explore building space through sound and consider acts of rejection, exclusion and convulsion found within the female body. Using the layout of the home as a way to choreograph different works, 8 women have been invites to contribute a new or already existing audio work that is site responsive to a room in the house. Contributors include: Alberta Whittle (Kitchen); Alice Martin (Spare room) Jasleen Kaur (Dining room); Josie Cockram (Hallway); Katriona Beales (Bedroom); Rebecca Ackroyd (Bathroom); Rebecca Bellantoni (Living room) and Susan Conte (Garden).