Within and Between: Women, Bodies, Generations

About

Within and Between considers the public and private worlds of women on the cusp of change measured through life altering events. For those who have experienced the physical transformations of motherhood with its consequent scars and debilitations, further transitions await. It is through such processes that selfhood is often sacrificed to the more urgent drive to ‘nurture’ the next generation whilst ‘negotiating’ the deteriorations of the previous one. At times physiological changes experienced across extended families collide creating a complex terrain characterised by the ‘metamorphoses’ of puberty, menopause, illness and death. Such uncertain territories can test the strongest of bonds. With this ‘landscape’ as the backdrop to their current work Chinnery, Howard and Richardson have chosen to bring together varied practices to explore themes and expand the discourses of ‘intergenerationality’ and ‘autoethnography’, examining how these are addressed by contemporary art, literature and thought.
 

For Within and Between, each artist has produced new works which reflect not only a diversity of experience, but also different approaches to thinking, making and dissemination. Chinnery uses methods of taxonomy and analysis to reconsider the physicality of human bodies as they emerge, grow, mature and die. She makes objects and images informed by material residues left behind by such rites of passage. In her film and video works Howard engages with philosophical thinking, translating and embodying complex ideas through poetic juxtaposition using footage and text sourced from differing times, locations and contexts. Richardson merges found and fabricated elements to make objects ‘activated’ by performance. Sometimes beautiful, often absurd, elements of her work take on playful and—at times—theatrical qualities through which women’s varied attachments across and between generations are referenced and enacted.