Thinking, Dancing (2019)
Combining silent, moving images with prayer-like text, this work explores the gap between ecstasy and distress, as endured/encountered/experienced by the maternal body. Drawing on official accounts of my fifth great grandmother's record of theft (of 'thirteen yards of Irish cloth, value 2l. 12s', among other things, from the White Horse pub in London, on 30th April 1801), and personal reflections of my grandmother's turn of phrase, 'Up here for thinking, down there for dancing', in Thinking, Dancing (2019) I consider historical dislocations of the body, testing philosopher Luce Irigaray's idea of the 'sensible transcendental' - the body's divine sensibility - and unsettling normative expectations of what and how the body of the mother can be, feel and bare. This video was first exhibited with the accompanying prose:
o god
I am
beside my self, quick'ning
an exchanging
rearranging
ec-stasis
between
one
two
o god
I am
a bundled, retted beet
steeping heavy
stinking sodden
with distress
cleft of
sin
hope
o god
I am
remnant of glory, gone
scutching, hackling
spinning fibres
becoming
loosely
wove
cloth
o god
I am
thinking, dancing, being
made and moving
seeing fragment
cells laid bare
looming
large
still
o god
I am
mercy
Rebekah Pryor, January 2019
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