Writing & Documentation
Flora’s Performative Drawings combine bodily movement with large scale drawing as a way of knowing. The process attends to the sentience of matter and energies that surround us, and is documented as part of a practice in seeing and sensing. Each encounter is a communing with the subtle and dynamic qualities of place, tuning into the genius loci and its habitats. Through a choreography of marks, gestures and actions - drawing-as-movement, and movement-as-drawing - within her studio and outdoors, Flora experiences cellular memories, embodies forgotten gestures, and remembers ancestral heritages. These are sentient drawings which make visible the intimate connectedness with our animate Earth through body, matter and metaphor.
Text for Aesthetica Art Award
8 August 2022
Studio Fabre Hardy explores how art enlivens an embodied, authentic and ethical life. Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy’s art-making embraces choreographies of collaboration where we are witness to each other’s inquiries with the sentience of matter and naturalcultural habitats. Through this convivial praxis we co-create performative rituals, experiential drawings, photoworks and ecological assemblages, all stimulated by our fascination with found materials, the gestures of the body’s knowing and archetypal wisdoms. These emergent exchanges of sensing-thinking-making are expressions of a politics of care and consciousness that attends to and evokes the sacred in the everyday.
In 2022, Flora was called to explore the bodies of water at Orchid Glade, one of the SFPT’s Nature Reserves. From this celebration of the subtle and reciprocal relationships between our human lives and the life of water, a series of Performative drawings, photo documentation and a poem ‘Witness’ were shared as part of Suffolk Open Studios.
Performative drawing with Suffolk Open Studios, with spoken word by Miche Fabre Lewin. The poetic Witness was written by Flora in response to her visit to Orchid Glade.
If you and I were to go
To the water’s edge,
The first water, the still
Water, the edge of thrill and life;
If our feet sank into the soft mud
In amongst the hoof and egg and stalk;
If we squatted there,
Quiet,
Haunches and skirt,
And waited,
Would we fall or step or roll or sink
Into the water?
Would we break the surface tension,
Bend the reed?
How carefully would we enter into the
Perfect cool water
And drop down, fold down,
In absolute
Awe.
Below, a triptych of Witness to Water Body Drawing. Charcoal and ink on paper.
