[ISEA2015] Artist Statement: Laurel Terlesky — Intersubjectivity of Touch through the installation project: Hallowed Winds

Artist Statement

Hallowed Winds is a participatory audio and soft sculpture installation I created for exhibit at Quest University, in Squamish, BC Canada. This project draws upon my recent research to explore the intersubjectivity of touch and tacit knowledge which stems from my concern into how interpersonal communication is affected by current social technologies. I find that current social technologies promote communication across distances bringing us in a sense closer, but often with limited connectivity to implicit body awareness. My creative practice explores bodylanguage and interpersonal communication by encouraging participants to interact with objects, sounds and other people also experiencing the artwork. With this project, I engage in a dialogue with research participants and materials by using methods that reveal the felt experience of the body activated by audio narratives.
My artistic research leading up to envisioning Hallowed Winds explored how the body leaves its trace in materiality. In considering the presence and absence of how the body marks a space, the movement of my bed’s pillows and sheets after the horizontal shifts of the body once entwined with them offers an eloquent description and metaphor. For six months during 2013, daily, I photographed my marked sleep space and then continued to hold this space by meditating on each of these photographs while translating my observations to a series of graphite marks on paper.
The drawings are descriptive portrayals ranging across feeling open and inviting, hiding something, being pushed aside, grasping for security and conveying a sense of being lost. They build a language of perceived vulnerability, where a body embeds a mark from an unconscious, and yet tactile, journey. Carrying the language from the twists and folds of the bedding, in 2013 I developed small fabric and cotton stuffed sculptures, which I have labeled as polyps in my research work. They are marked by knots, stitches and growths of excess fabric. They also hold a dialogue of a tactile journey of the maker and thus expose tacit information; a language left in the felt surface of these soft sculptures.
Making use of my research gathered by the bed drawings and the polyps, I made similar soft sculptural objects, but larger with white bed sheets. These are assembled on top of a mound of sandbags that house organic materials from locations around Squamish. The mound of sandbags and soft sculptural forms span an area of six meters in diameter. Two channels of audio form the remainder of the installation. Participants lie on the mound to hear the audio recordings of readers who act out empathetically with memories that recall a gesture of being touched and touching that was meaningful to them. The second audio channel focuses in on the installation that play a recording composed of breath, wind and environmental soundscapes gathered while collecting material for the sandbags.

By creating Hallowed Winds I gained a lens to how an audio activated interactive sculpture affects each participant. Using this installation as a mediator to reveal tacit knowledge I furthered my research the intersubjectivity of touch.

  • Laurel Terlesky is an interdisciplinary Canadian artist. She holds a Master of Fine Arts Degree in International Creative Practice from Transart Institute (New York / Berlin), accredited by Plymouth University (UK) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Victoria (Canada). Her works have been experienced internationally on screen — television, large-scale projection, and the internet — and in exhibitions. She has been awarded residencies in Spain, Germany, Thailand, U.S.A and across Canada. Her work has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, B.C. Arts Council and various local community initiatives. Terlesky’s work examines the use of technology to communicate and for building relationships. She explores what is often left out: tacit recognition and implicit awareness through a physical encounter: visual, touched and sensed. Through installations that include touch activated audio and motion triggered lights, objects and drawings, Terlesky’s practice acknowledges the permeable boundary of our skin and the careful exchange between interior and exterior awareness that happens during tactile encounters. These are leaky places where we become unbodied, begging questions about the nature of embodiment. How are memories stored in our flesh? Why do they become unleashed upon an encounter of touch? How does the body mediate our past / future and remain present? Terlesky’s process aims to bridge gaps, lessen disconnections, grey out false dualisms and repair places of missed, and perhaps misused, communication. laurelterlesky.ca

All illustrations (PDF)