Exhibition & Events: Soft Tissue: Feeling-through Precarious Times

24 Nov - 10 Dec @ Metroland Cultures, Kilburn

As we delve into the dark and chilled months of ever darker and chilling times, we warmly invite you into the squidgy, fuzzy folds of the Squishy Collective.

Step into a circle of sculptures, materials, films, sounds and texts that offer and open up gestures, rituals and ideas for navigating precarious times. Can material be used to metabolise harm? Can physical processes help us sense inner emotional worlds? What constitutes ’safe’ touch’? How can touch be used to rehearse different ways of being and doing? Can a text be tactile…and why should it be?

The Squishy Collective are a research group-circle-coven I formed in April 2021 and we have been meeting online ever since. Comprised of sensuous ecologists, fizzy researchers, haptic writers, mermaid-whisperers, clay-crafters and generative gesturers, together we share methods drawn from art research to explore the intersection of touch, tactility and practices of care as part of a toolkit for navigating precarious times.

Exhibits and invitations will touch on milky motherhood, uncanny bodies, visceral clay, fleshy language, haptic ice and visibilising atmosphere among other subjects and alongside myself are generously offered by: Amanda Rice, Anastasia (A) Khodyreva, Catherine Monohan, Eliza Bennett, Georgia Perkins, Natasha Sabatini, Rhona Eve Clews, Rosina Godwin and Kate Langrish-Smith.

Come cosy up with us over a hot tea, leaf through texts, take part in quiet invitations, meditate over tactile films or join a rich and playful programme of activities designed to soften, fizz and feed you. Bookings to the private view are now available - stay tuned for a super-bumper events programme coming soon!