Meditations

Salt Space Coop
Axiom Building, Glasgow

31 May - 4 June


Awakening, oil on canvas


Meditations, presents the culmination of a new body of work created during the aritsts month long residency at Salt Space Studios in Glasgow. The work on display incorporates painting, photography, light sculptures, drawing, textiles and sound, opening viewers into a portal of transformation and healing, inspired by the solace Ocean found in nature.

This body of work celebrates a divergent mentality that shifts focus outwards from the human and social, towards the environment and other species.  Drawing inspiration from eco-feminist frameworks of trans-corporeality, that explore how our bodies are fundamentallly interconnected with the flow of substances and agencies of environments. Through such a lens we can acknowledge our part and responsibility in both the breakdown and upkeep of natural cycles and ecosyetms. This post-human framework challenges normative structures that continuously return to pain, eradication, destruction and suffering. Instead returing to queer paths that nurture symbiotic relationships between species, both human, organic, and technological. Through this lens, death and decay become radical sites for renewal, re-birth and regeneration, and philosophies for human and non-human relationships become centred.

The transformation of the Salt Space gallery offers a proposition to slow down, relax, and breathe in the sounds and visual gestures of the natural world. A chance to contemplate both the pain and destruction we are complicit in, but also the possibilties for upheaval and nourishment. Perhaps in a world where we are surrounded by suffering, the propsepct of self and collective care become radical methods of healing and liberation?



  

Ritual, Photographic Print
Trace, Paint on paper
Berlin, Moving Image
Portal, Photographic Print
The work created for this exhibition was made through a direct dialogue with the land, using olives as a painting medium and sound recording and photography to documentation moments in time and place. The artist drew material and inspiration from their time in a region of southern Spain that is dominated by mono-culture olive groves that suck the land of its nutrients and bio-diversity, leaving a thick sticky clay soil beneath the feet. MEDITATIONS echoes this feeling of the land being sucked of its life, these small traces and glances at this navigation of a single ecosystem become gestures for a larger story of environmental destruction. This anthropocentric framework continually poses human and nature at opposition. The transformation of Salt Space’s Gallery encourages the viewer to rethink these connections and become immersed into a more harmonious and caring connection to ecology.


Lumpi, olives and rain on canvas
Flower lamp, recycled plastic and bulb




Still from opening performance, photograph by Xinyi Liu
As part of this project the artist conducted a series of sound recordings cataloging a series of differing environments both urban and wild. Giving space for these voices of nature to tell their own story, for those who enter to listen and hear what they have to say about our shared relationship to this planet. 

“With reference to loud environmental concerns and catastrophes, one could say that nature nevertheless speaks out, and should be thus recognised as a voice in its Otherness – however differently it is represented from that of our own.”
- Maris Sormus

Ocean’s opening performance blended and layered these sounds with a selection of ambient records, to create a sound bath stretching across the closing hours of light as the sun set over Salt Space. Meditations offers a proposition for reflection and tranquility, to tune into the voices of nature and observe these visual gestures of our existence.  

A space to inhabit, pause, reflect and breathe.

Click above to listen to the Meditations 5 track EP on soundcloud




Still from performance, photograph by Eve Chen
Photograph by Eve Chen
Photgrpah by Xinyi Liu
Sun Colour, fabric over window frame