Experimentation with personal work

“If teachers really want to provoke our students to break through the limits of the conventional and the taken for granted we have to experience breaks with what has been established in our own lives we have to keep arousing ourselves to begin again”         

(Greene, M in releasing the Imagination, 1995, 109)

Over the last few years I have been keen to experience new ways of working.  Experimentation into continuous action between movement, making and recording through video has developed a new understanding. By initiating a flow between these activities it is  an attempt to almost switch off and work from an unconscious level. A different perspective of my experience was captured from the recording of the camera. This appeared to encourage the next step of the work to emerge bringing forth new understanding in order to cultivate a very intuitive way of working. As I used this approach to research 'what attracts me to working in the inflatable medium' it highlighted my attraction to its metamorphic, ephemeral qualities but also its slightly humorous and playful qualities.

Capturing Air... Capturing Life (2013)

The bag of air filmed in Capturing Air... Capturing Life almost gave me permission to play, interrupt and block space in the Institute of Education building. It also put me in the position of the learner like the students I taught at Camberwell, encountering the unknown, risk taking, and experimentation in order to take ownership of this piece. As a consequence more personal interests and concerns became apparent.

Sculpture: Col de l'alba 

A breathing landscape sculpture that incorporated the technology produced in Breathing Walls for Harvey Nichols

This technology enabled the creation of an installation piece shown in Imaginary Landscapes at The Hub in Lincolnshire and in the Oxford House Gallery London. Rachel was inspired to make the work from time spent in Spain practicing yoga in the hills; from feelings felt during practice of a oneness with her surroundings as if the land breathed with her. The form relates to the distant horizon of how the landscape is seen as it is reduced to a slither as it meets the sea. The resulting piece produced a very meditative surrounding within the gallery space which mesmerised viewers and reportedly slowed their breathing in time with the undulating breath of the installation piece.