Touch Wood Residency

In 2019 - 2020 I was Artist in Residence at Phytology/Bethnal Green Nature Reserve, London - my project became 'Touch Wood'.

I made artwork and experiments in the Writer's Hut, herb garden and nature garden.  I produced movement experiments,  5 live public performances, an artist's book and 3 large scale billboards.

I was invited and supported by Hari Byles and Michael Smythe.  

In 'Touch Wood' I devised a series of ‘manoeuvres’  - finding ways to connect myself, my body, to the plants and trees of the Nature Reserve – whilst thinking about ritual, personal history, our bodily adaptations/expressions, and how that enables us to connect, or not, with nature, and in turn finding myself/ourselves there.  Often using my hair, or wool or parts of my body to physically connect myself to the plants and trees, or to hover or move between them.  I would then find language to describe the manoeuvres, which became distilled into poetry, an artists’ book, and hand-painted full-size billboards.  I re-worked these texts and physical manoeuvres to become live public performances, within the Nature Reserve and elsewhere, with the final one transplanted to the Feminist Library where I attached myself by my hair to a hatstand rather than a tree.  The manoeuvres and surrounding works employed absurdity, endurance, arduousness, inversion, futility - delicacy, intricacy and intimacy – ritual, repetition, connection – communication, description and instruction becoming discovery and expression - to explore the feeling of our bodies fitting and not fitting with nature, and the rituals that can connect us to it.

 

TOUCH WOOD

LOOK UP AND TURN

FACE TO SUN AND 

BALANCE ON ONE

FOOT

STAY

 

Gail Burton is manoeuvring with the trees, plants and soil in the Nature Reserve, touching and not-touching, on one foot and two. Finding points of contact, fragility, entry and repulsion in a series of experimental movements, repetitions and devised encounters, sometimes simple, sometimes intricate and absurd.  These solitary performances become writing, slowly.  The billboard is the first extract from the book of manoeuvres.

'Touch Wood' performance 1. Stills edited by GB from film documentation by MS

'Touch Wood' performance 2. Photo HB

Pages from 'Touch Wood' hand-painted artists' book

Hand-painted full size billboards.  Photos MS

'Hat Stand' performance, Feminist Library. Photo Trezzi