counterbalance, 2015

3 channel video

Counterbalance interrogates transformative practices of the body. It questions the effects of culturisation and expressive capacities inherent in movement, individual expression and adornment. Referring to the body as a cultured zone the work questions the idea of beauty and its interference with sensory perception and experience. Hair which is evocative of the body and historically feminine, having religious and cultural symbolism holds a certain power that demands it be concealed or displayed.

As a response to cultural/religious/societal expectations the work records a process of binding/wrapping with human hair to create movement that obscures and masks. Hair as a substance emanating from the body evolves into a sabotage of the body’s agency, questioning what is conscious, what is enforced by external factors, what is consciously chosen. The repetitive and repressive self-binding reflects on how the act of conforming may leave us with no agency - bound, disfigured and in pain.