Carol Laidler

‘Conversation - an intimate, playful exchange through space and place’   

It started with a light touch. Let’s just see what happens? A sense of exchange and the idea of being witnessed.

Carol Laidler and I are studio neighbours at Spike Island in Bristol. We both appreciate collaboration and the importance of conversation in the development of our work.

In 2020, during the second lockdown and away from our normal everyday encounters, we decided to make an exchange. It began by sending each other small artworks, a postal call and response. Later, a matrix was introduced allowing us to pick randomly from three columns: time frames, materials, and parts of the body. These generated instructions which formed the framework for our conversation.

The exchange became a live, shared sketchbook filled with humour, sorrow, questions, and reflection. The underlying theme was an attempt to communicate the experience of our own bodies. When we came to show our intimate exchange we were pulled to the politics of representation, though that was never an explicit consideration before. But something shifted when we placed the work in the public realm. It raised new questions and became another layer of the conversation.

We asked:

Can a woman’s body ever be anything other than political?

How might we frame this work to ensure that the conversation is not lost in the fleshiness of the body revealed?

How are these images received by others?

How can these questions enrich rather than distract?

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Eleanor Duffin