seven walks (where there is sorrow there is holy ground), California Institute of the Arts, 2019
For my piece in the group show “Art and Activism” at California Institute of the Arts, I invited each of the artists participating in the show to accompany me on a one-on-one grief walk over the duration of the exhibition.
The rules of the walk:
We started the walk by digging our hands into a block of raw clay, finding with our fingers and palms an appropriate amount to hold onto.
We had clay in our hands, and had to keep our hands moving with the clay, throughout the duration of the walk.
We ended the walk at the gallery, where the performance was closed out by each of us silently placing the clay grief shapes we had been molding into the landscape of the seven walks (where there is sorrow there is holy ground) installation and washing each other’s hands in a crystal bowl filled with water.
seven walks created itself over the course of the exhibition, each day gaining more materiality and mass as another grief walk was performed.
What happened on the walks is recorded by the clay we held in our hands: a tactile documentation.
What does it mean for performance documentation to be haptic rather than visual? For us to encode experience through the affective or energetic, rather than the literal or representational?