Pariwhero

2022 

Projected Video Installation, 12:11

The performer introduces herself to the body of water, rocks, seaweed and sand, responding to the various textures, patterns, rhythms and tempos of the beach and the vast body of water she faces. She explores how the skin, and bones of the body move over the surfaces of the site, and how the textures reverberate through her body. The performer is responding to both the visible horizon line before her and her body’s internal horizon line, located at the base of the rib cage. I am guiding her into an awareness of the site’s rhythmic content, allowing her body to be pushed and pulled by the ebb and flow of waves, and strong gusts of wind.

Her body absorbs the seawater, just as the ocean receives her sweat, in an aqueous exchange of microbiome. From this active movement of listening and responding, a dance emerges. From this awareness, I noticed a fluidity in the performer’s movements, as she draws from the buoyancy we all once experienced within the amniotic fluid of the womb and our own internal landscape.

In this way, our watery bodies are fluid sites of exchange and interconnection, yet we are also differentiated by water, and the membranes it must cross. I am aiming to demonstrate this porous and interconnected relationship with the natural environment, and to hopefully create a shift in our binaristic thinking about human bodies as either ‘natural’ or ‘cultural’.