Exploring dance through pictures and porcelain
UNTIL January 12, 2019, all of Touchstones’ four art galleries are devoted to a solo exhibition by Rachel Kneebone.
The Dance Project is an exhibition of her new series of sculptures and drawings which deepen her investigations into the experience of inhabiting the body.
Rachel Kneebone’s intricate works seek to address and question the human condition.
She explores renewal and transformation; life cycles and the experience of inhabiting the body: in this instance through the theme of dance.
Working in porcelain, she conveys an awareness of opposing states, appearing to be not only heavy, solid and strong but also light, fragmentary and soft.
This fluid movement between states is reflects the wide range of Rachel’s literary sources that inform her work.
As Ali Smith has written, ‘Michelangelo meets Angela Carter, the renaissance meets the contemporary, while the future simultaneously meets, melts, alters and fuses with the renaissance’.
She herself explains: “The body is what we all have.
“Even though everyone’s experience of the world and life are uniquely theirs, and we are all alone amongst other alone people, the commonality of this visceral experience, of being in possession of a body and feeling informs your experience of the world and what is happening to you, which can or does exist distinctly from what you think about what’s happening.”
As you wander through the galleries taking in the drawings and then the sculptures themselves you are drawn into a world where fragments of the dancing human body multiply, merge and cascade down, in a complex tableaux of forms.
Each sculpture demands far more than a cursory glance.
The Dance reveals more viewed from angles, up-close.
The exhibition is accompanied by a specially commissioned dance theatre performance by acclaimed choreographer TC Howard and dance artists Debbie Milner, Beth Payton and Ellen Turner.
Working with a group of women from across the borough they produced a new piece of Project when several contemporary dance theatre that premiered at Touchstones in conjunction with the exhibition.
Rachel Kneebone was born in 1973 in Oxfordshire and lives and works in London.
She has had many recent prestigious solo exhibitions including in the Victoria & Albert Museum London, White Cube Hong Kong, and the Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Find out more by emailing touchstones@ link4life.org or contact Touchstones’ main reception 01706 924492 or the Visitor Information Centre on 01706 924928.