The body in time and place

Through symbolic action Becky Bowley’s work evokes the relationship between the body and time through the medium of traditional making and the movement of the body within a place. Her interest lies in poetical dialogues between the memory and imagination of human feeling and experiences becoming an embodiment of dream, myth and the ineffable. Materials are composed as symbols of the elements that resonate with impermanence and hint at transformation - to move the body within time and space “To cross a territory, to walk, to open a path, to recognise a place, to comprehend symbolic values, to invent a geography”5.

Transmerge






Like a refugee, exchanging earth with earth, from one place to another 'to cross a territory' along The Hope Valley train line.
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Transmerge is an artistic desire to merge body and land without boundaries. Prehistorically land art may have been used to define boundaries, and ownership of the land to indicate beliefs. These boundaries of land and people continue today causing global and personal conflict. Land and people are separated by differences that can be transformed into a merger of unique parts at peace with each other, ritualised in the performance of Transmerge.
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" The impassioned inhabitant digs and re-digs, making its very depth active. The fact is not enough, the dream is at work. When it comes to excavated ground, dreams have no limit."3

(Two days; suitcase, dress, trowl, shroud and earth)


Photographed by Julian Hughes.