Touch/Hunger
Touch/Hunger turns towards the attachments and tensions in relationships of and with the home. I am interested in the performance of care through embodied practices, gesture and haptic experience, as well as invisible mental and emotional labour. I consider the contradictions of intimacy and claustrophobia situated there, and maternal anxiety about loss or separation at the same time as the increasing detachment of children becoming adults.
The Covid-19 pandemic made the significance of home more apparent, blurring distinctions between public and private, work and leisure, and exacerbating the scale of domestic violence and coercive control behind closed doors. The roles (if not the valuing) of carework, kindness and touch were elevated through the isolation of lockdowns, distancing and grief. I experiment with ways of performing and representing the tension between vulnerability and protection inherent in the domestic setting and the close relationships taking place there, in the recognition that home is not always as safe or easy as we might imagine it to be.
