Mark Bleakley, 'A Nude Descends into a Lump'

About

Collective is delighted to present A Nude Descends into a Lump, a new exhibition by artist Mark Bleakley developed as part of Satellites Programme 2016.

Mark works across dance and visual art, exploring the body as a site for analysis and reflection. A Nude Descends into a Lump consists of an audio installation and a series of performances that consider the relationships between bodies, the cinematic and sculptural form.

A new audio work, A Nude Descends and other Gestures, features a series of proposed movements that slip between actions grounded in the landscape surrounding the gallery and gestures that transport the listener to imaginary sites. The work is intended to be listened to while looking out of the gallery windows, marked with numbers that site each action at a location in the park. Disrupting a concrete sense of place, the spoken movements have the potential to incorporate the actions of passers by and gallery visitors into this imaginary performance. Pulling everyday actions into the field of performance, Mark’s work takes influence from artists such as Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, who radically re-imagined what dance could be in the 1960s, foregrounding everyday movements and task-based processes.  

Four live performances will take place during the course of the exhibition, developed by Mark in collaboration with three dancers – Philip Alexander, Katie Miller and Carolina Ravaioli. The starting points for the performances are a written score devised by the artist – A boy stands in for a rock or vice versa – and a soundscape by Sam Purcell of Blank Mind Records. The dancers shift between roles of passive viewer, sculptor and material; the body is manipulated in relation to traditional sculptural processes, such as carving, casting and modelling clay. Through instruction and improvisation, the dancers build up forms and then gradually explore the breakdown of the body as a material and image, slowly falling into a lump. Taking inspiration from musical deterioration in The Disintegration Loops by composer William Basinskis, both the performances and soundscape explore ideas of decay and the breakdown of physical material over time.

Mark Bleakley is an artist and dancer based in Glasgow and Edinburgh. He works across performance, film and text. Mark has recently exhibited and performed at Harris Museum, Preston; The Northern Charter, Newcastle; DanceCity, Newcastle, Dancebase, Edinburgh; Radiocity, Tate Britain and Resonance FM, London. Mark is one of the four dancers currently taking part in Dancebase’s D.E.B.S (Dancers Emerging Bursary Scheme) programme 2015 – 2016.