I stay grounded, by holding you up (2021)

 

This collaborative project came to creation by way of two separate bodies of work. The first of which was George Roast’s series, ‘Little Jacket for a Man’, a collection that explored the latent images of expired darkroom paper, arranged into minimal compositions of colour and shape. The second, was my own body of work, ‘Squaring each other to fit: As the space will be tiny, the days will be long’, which took inspiration from the video game Tetris, using the gameplay as a metaphor to reflect the physical and emotional impacts of the 2020 quarantine due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

As we worked on these two projects simultaneously we began to notice the similarity between the projects, we observed that as the pieces progress, they increasingly found common ground in their aesthetic composition.

‘I stay grounded, by holding you up’ was made shortly after we relocated our lives and practice to Hungary, a move which brought with it new aspects of interdependence. For me, it was home, but for George, it was far away, not just because of physical distance but also due to communication and language difficulties. We looked playfully at this difference exploring the interplay between the emotional support and equal burden that we placed on one another.

We addressed this by comparing our endowments and the proportions on our bodies that life has prescribed, finding different ways in which our bodies would fit into each other, yet put pressure on each other. It is an abstract perception of the burden and responsibility that we exert on each other, it addresses the fact that our relationship, like any other, is a self-supported structure requiring effort, strength, and constant adjustment in order to maintain balance. The compositions become metaphorical of this notion, by breaking the image into parts, it becomes evident that each part is integral to understanding the whole.