SoDA WORKS 2015

The Work / _fieldnotes
THE OBJECT
The artist has appropriated part of a structure commonly
found in public playgrounds, specifically, the
entrance to fenced ball courts. Normally from these rectangular
enclosures a perpendicular L shaped extension
emerges. This extension forms an enclosed threshold
that dictates performing a series of turns, in order to
gain physical entry to the court. This sculpture, however,
recreates only a corner of one of these structures,
a corner from which emerges an enclosed threshold or
‘entrance’, as described.
Created from industrially produced units of zinc-coated
steel fencing – a ubiquitous material for defining public
and private spaces – one is free to move around the
structure in its entirety, whilst also able, significantly, to
move through it.
Imposing in scale and material, elegant in form and
linearity, the artist has placed this structure within an
empty dance studio, apparently co-opted as an exhibition
space. Yet the specificity of the context appears
significant, as the accompanying literature suggests:
we can consider this untitled sculpture a ‘somatic structure’,
but in what sense?
If we were to simply read the sculpture as a body, why
should we be able to pass right through it? Does the
somatic emphasis rather enable us to read it as an
experience of body, specifically an experience of body
as movement? The dance context would suggest so.
what it is to do somatics. The process of experiencing
one’s body from within necessitating conscious attention
to the organic diversity of one’s body: observing
activity.
As a barrier that may be penetrated, the sculpture also
performs division and integration. The steel grid that
constitutes the fencing is itself semi-permeable, it
permits some things to pass through, sight for example,
and other things not. This is all analogous to understanding
the structure as a membrane.
The somatic philosopher Thomas Hanna describes
a cell’s membrane as ‘not so much a separative wall
as it is a series of windows and doors through which
elements of the environment are made to go in and elements
of the soma are made to go out’ (Hanna 1987).
The selective osmosis of the cellular membrane is echoed
in the nature of the organism, echoed in the nature
of society, made up, as it is, of human organisms. What
is true at the level of the cell resonates in all instances
of life. This is what makes somatics significant beyond
the experiencing subject. In this time of bodies breaching
borders, refugees, national politics facilitating or
refusing passage, we might be tempted to read this
sculpture as a statement on existing mass migration,
but this is too narrow. Membranes – barriers, borders
– in/tangible – im/permeable, exist everywhere. The
polarities of division and integration constituting life
as we know it, as even a cursory consideration of one’s
relationship to others – or oneself – would confirm.
rounding space and this sculpture does the same. By
intersecting space it creates a multitude of spaces, each
with their own feeling quality, but each equally part of a
unified spatial experience. That you may move from one
space to another, through the transitional space of the
threshold, emphasizes the plastic potential of space as
experienced – be it intrasomatic or extrasomatic.
If somatics is a journey towards integration, the
threshold represents the physical navigation necessary
within that process. It is also a space between spaces,
balanced between open and closed, it is the moment of
embodied movement.
Perhaps a somatic practise, on account of its subjectivity,
its paradoxically intangible experientiality, has
necessitated the creation of a concrete object, as an
objective testament to a lived process. A process the
artist offers other bodies to experience as passage,
movement from one quality of space to another, the
consistent properties of our experiencing body echoed
in the consistent properties of space in general.
This sculpture is a somatic structure, then, because it
articulates the experience of a body through staging a
process of transition.
Acknowledging this structure’s provenance, we recognize
it possesses properties of activity and observation,
in keeping with a ball game, yet also in keeping with
So this sculpture may be experienced as an intrinsic
kind of structure. Membranes define a space whilst
simultaneously order that space’s relation to sur-