Water Bodies, 2020
Cara Farnan and Jennifer Moore with Emma Brennan
Catalyst Arts Gallery, Belfast
Water Bodies was an exhibition which materialised from a collaborative process between three practitioners and friends; Cara Farnan, Jennifer Moore and Emma Brennan. The exhibition and its associated events were born out of an online dialogue that opened up between the three which was both specific and unique in its nature as it ran concurrently with initial Covid-19 quarantine and isolation practices.
Spilling, soaking, swimming, flowing, absorbing, dissolving, drifting, washing, clinging, falling, rushing, pulling, meandering, trickling, rippling, draining, pouring, ebbing, flooding, dripping, pouring, sinking, floating.
In our pool of communication, each of us became a channel or current for things to move through and between - various texts, podcasts, music, interviews, writings and essays, as well as personal writings, poetry, ideas, images, sounds and videos. The intimacy of friendship provided space for listening and sharing not only thoughts and interests but also feelings, frustrations and daily habits. This process of pouring out and absorbing not only intellectually but emotionally and physically has anchored this collaboration.
Water Bodies, as a physical exhibition, existed as one of a number of expressions of this dialogue, lifting the content and character of this ongoing conversation out of a virtual world and allowing the viewer to walk around within it. It was a show that relinquished ideas of ownership, moving towards a desire for collaborative practice that is free of hierarchical structure, and existed more truly as a representation of flowing rituals of communicating, sharing and making.
This process guided our collective focus toward the expanding and contracting flow of knowledge and feelings as they passed endlessly, shifting in shape, through interactions and exchanges between ourselves, places, things and people. Dancing boundaries. Opening bodies.
Cyclically, ideas of distance and desire have surfaced throughout our conversations as ever-present forces, both powerful and subtle, affecting the pace and depth of these flows of exchange. Over time, the colour blue and the medium of water became recurring symbols whose essence and nature coloured our language and approach to materialising this show.
The virtual exhibition space will remain live at waterbodies.hotglue.me
