Washing camellias, Chiswick House and Gardens, February 2019
DESIGNED WITH MOVEMENT IN MIND
A practice-based PhD research at Chelsea College of Arts that engages with landscape design, particularly the 18th century garden designs of Capability Brown and William Kent, as ‘choreographic objects’ (Forsythe) and ‘landscape[s] of sensibility’ (Caruso) in order to evaluate the role of embodied thinking in spatial design.
It aims to expand choreographic practice beyond the field of dance and build an argument for an expanded notion of choreography as a disruptive technology to re-think and re-configure material environment and create new ways of experiencing public spaces as creative spaces.
Key words: choreographic thinking, choreographic objects, landscape design, spatial design, embodied research.
Insights from this research have been presented in an exhibition installation titled Labour of Love at Millbank Tower, October 2023.
DISFOCUS
I use William Forsythe’s principle of ‘disfocus’ - an inverse movement operation that he discovered with his dancers - to allow for different ways of experiencing and documenting choreographic objects to emerge. In my case, I embedded myself as a garden volunteer to explore movements that are not usually experienced by garden visitors. My intention was to create a landscape of movement developed in direct contact with the garden. I also wanted to acknowledge the labour implicit but not often visible in the maintenance of the manicured grounds associated primarily with movements of leisure, pastime and entertainment.
Created using GoPro during my gardening sessions at Chiswick House and Gardens February - June 2019 the film collage ‘Disfocus’ was first shown at the exhibition Mercator: Distortions and Projections in Discovery, Triangle Space Gallery, Chelsea College of Arts, October 2019