Hannah Rowan & SHELL LIKE at Well Projects

Featuring sound works by Alex Borkowski, Leyla Pillai & Madeleine Stack.

19 April - 5 May 2019

I’M IN THE BATH ON ALL FOURS is a 3-phase visual art exhibition and interspersed series of talks, performances, workshops and screenings curated by Well Projects and artist Flora Parrott. Its premise stems from a research trip, undertaken by Flora Parrott, to learn about a recently discovered cave dwelling fish, the Cave Loach, that inhabits a labyrinthine cave network. In each phase of ‘I’m in the bath on all fours’ a pair of artists, artist-groups or researchers are invited to collaborate and expand upon notions of the sub-aqueous, engaging with the nature of water, embodied experience and the deep dark in relation to community and commonality.

Through technological apparatus and neoprene skin, a descent into the water necessitates a restructuring of the senses… You are always touched and touching the liquid volume, a three hour long slime hard squeeze marks a stuttered path down through twenty thousand years - further into the subaqueous towards a phenomenology of immersion and deep time… The work of Hannah Rowan and SHELL LIKE come together in these deep watery spaces.

A halo of artificial light, regulators and tubes... An image of a diver, slung with decompression cylinders as they slide through gaps in prehistoric rock, comes into sharp focus when considering Hannah Rowans work; which explores the frictions between the slow geological time of natural process and the frenetic and technology driven activity of humans. Synthetic and organic elements enmeshed in circulatory systems of flowing water and tubes provide a series of interconnected biomes in which material relationships are animated or begin to crystalize. These changes in material states allude to the delicate nature of ecological balance, questioning relationships between the human & the non human.

Punctuated by the soft crackle of underwater sonic space and modulated by both the fleshy and the technological; the sound baths presented by SHELL LIKE - featuring works by Alex Borkowski, Leyla Pillai and Madeleine Stack - flow through the gallery. This trilogy of slippery narratives guides the listener, sharpening their ears to achieve a trance-like state, pulling them by wet hair into a lake - hands circling lilac bath waters - as the conditions for life are rebuilt. Encircling words and their sonic counterparts imagine bodies which stand with one foot in an organic puddle, the other in a synthetic slipstream.

In these audio works  - as in the work of Hannah Rowan - geological time, the synthetic and the organic converge in deep bodies of water.

I’M IN THE BATH ON ALL FOURS, is kindly supported using public funding from Arts Council England.

 Text Well Projects Images Rosy Carr