Gestures with the Ground - Exhibition
Tue 20 - Sun 25 September
at Samphire Hoe Visitor Centre, Dover, UK
Gestures with the Ground explores the idea of physical contact (imprint) with the different types of terrain that shape and characterise the Kent Downs Geopark area.
The artist has been thinking of the project in relation to his photographic practice, in particular to the act of mapping, tracing and transferring information from one surface to another through contact printing. This led him to imagine the landscape of the Cross-Channel Geopark as a body, a breathing body in constant transformation and in sensorial correspondence with our own bodies.
Travelling across the AONB to roll his body in different terrains – chalk, clay, marl, greensand, grassland and woodland - Manuel Vason attempts to activate a dialogue between bodies, an exercise of modelling while being modelled and an opportunity to grow a tactile eye.
The resulting exhibition of photographic and moving image with earth-stained white suits seeks to convey both the variety of terrains and the connection set up between the body of earth, the body of work and the human body.
Here some close up images of the stains and marks on the white boilers suits
