Between 12 – 19 July 2024, we – Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker – were working together (in person) within the frame of a short residency at Exchange Place (Yorkshire Artspace), Sheffield, to further develop our ongoing collaboration Dorsal Practices. We have been collaborating on this artistic research project since January 2021 and are currently in the process of exploring different ways for sharing this body of work with others, including through live ‘readings’, experiential testings and different forms of publication. During this week together, we engaged in different ways for returning to and reactivating material generated over the last few years – as a starting point for exploring how we might distil and organise research content in the direction of a future publication. We undertook several 2-hour ‘blocks’ of shared practice for returning to different foci or thematics within our enquiry – e.g. exploring the back and a dorsal orientation through lying, rotating, transitioning, moving-shaping, walking. At times, this involved a process of engaging in a period of physical movement practice, followed by an improvisatory ‘reading’ of textual material generated through our previous conversations and readings, and then a process of ‘dorsal’ conversation. Through this residency, we have been able to recognise distinct thematic constellations and emergent vocabularies (see documentation of the process below) for addressing different dimensions of the dorsal experience, which we will now further evolve by distilling textual scores and prose descriptions/evocations. We also activated various movement and reading practices for exploring dorsality in different locations (see images above), including both within the studio and outdoors in the landscape. Over the coming year, we are working together to bring this research project into the form of an artists’ publication. More on this soon! More about Dorsal Practices here.
