Important Notice: Due to unforeseen circumstances our venue will be closed on Tuesday 21 October and reopen from Wednesday 22 October with Stanley Picker Fellow Davinia-Ann Robinson Through an Embodied Practice of Stillness until 20 December 2025.
The exhibition Through an Embodied Practice of Stillness is a new series of sculptural installations, soundscapes and film work by Stanley Picker Fellow Davinia-Ann Robinson, which explores encounters with stillness (Sharpe, 2023:241) through the body’s engagement with somatic practices and raw and reclaimed clay.
Through an Embodied Practice of Stillness explores how racial trauma is held within Black and Brown bodies through ancestral, intergenerational and present-day encounters with ‘white-body supremacy’ and how embodied engagements between the body and clay can be conduits for undoing and dismantling racial trauma. Healer and psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem states, “[…] white-body supremacy doesn’t live in our thinking brains, it lives and breathes in our bodies. […] The body is where we fear, hope, and react; where we constrict and release; and where we reflexively fight, flee, or freeze. If we are to upend the status quo of white-body supremacy, we must begin with our bodies” (2017; 5).
Framed by Black Feminist Thinking as ‘presencing’ (De Finney, 2014:30), (Lewis, 2017), and ‘fugitivity’ (Spillers, 2003), (Gumbs, 2016), the works in the exhibition are a catalyst for ‘blackened knowledge’, accessed through embodied practices with clay that enable encounters exploring ancestral decolonial knowledge-based systems held within Black and Brown bodies, and accessed as pre-colonial and Creole spiritual practices, that become intimate practices of grief-work, spiritual activism and practices of care.
Formed through a series of solitary performances, softening inherited knots is the first in a sequence of durational, site-specific installations developed between the body and clay, tracing an embodied practices of uncovering how racial trauma is held and felt within the physical, spiritual, and ancestral body. Holding trace impressions of Robinson’s body, the sculptural works made from raw London clay become sites/earthworks of ‘blackened knowledge’, forming a relational partnership between body and clay as the corporeal body of the earth. Adding to the earthworks throughout the duration of the exhibition, Robinson will return to the installation as a continual practice of engagement between clay, breath, and the body. Through engaging with clay during its varied states of malleability and engaging the body through states of embodied breath and somatic practices, the earthworks conjure an intimate relationship between body and clay as co-collaborators in the active undoing of racial trauma and conduits to healing modalities.
Through an embodied engagement with somatic practices and bearing witness to sensations within both the corporeal and incorporeal body, black ripples and we sat on the floor of the ocean evoke moments of undoing. The works explore how racial trauma resides in Black and Brown bodies through ancestral, intergenerational, and present-day encounters with ‘white-body supremacy’ and how practices of settling and convening with ancestors through a decolonial restoration of rituals and practices (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012:149) can become conduits for undoing and dismantling how racial trauma is held within our bodies.
between body and clay documents the intimate relationship of being with and processing raw clay within Robinson’s practice, made in collaboration with artist Rhiannon Hunter and supported by SHAPE Arts – 2024 Adam Reynolds Award. The clay in the film was gathered in London from a local cemetery and is used within the installation ‘softening inherited knots’. In its original form, the raw clay is dry and unmalleable, necessitating physically demanding gestures of care – removing debris, such as sand and stones, soaking the clay body in water, and burying hands in both the clay body and the water to create clay slip. These processes foster prolonged, repeated, and intimate engagements, creating a relational practice that explores clay and the body as material sites for ancestral liberation.