This text is a collection of thoughts gathered after artistic inquiry in 2025. The material was collected through talks, writing, and drawings. With this exposition I am sharing early stages of something I am calling an attempt to collapse into the imaginary.
Within this research I spend time thinking about meeting points. When matter collides or edges of bodies meet to collapse, or an attempt to collapse. It was an instruction in the studio to work with falling onto another body that was the supportive structure. The supportive structure/body I sometimes call the landscape in this text.
Falling through fabric, skin, flesh, and bones—where does a body arrive? With this research I am less concerned about form and aesthetics and more curious about the processes of our imaginary landscapes and the felt sensation of the body while doing, holding, and collapsing into the imaginary.
I will use my notebook from the sessions with my collaborator as a structure for this exposition.
Together in the studio with my collaborator we worked in pairs. One person was attempting to collapse, whilst the other person became a landscape to fall into and give their weight to.
Entry 1,
“You are filling up the other person – I have this image of leaking into each other – the landscape and the collapsed body.”
This entry came early in the process and is something we worked with in the studio. These sensations of filling up, leaking, and collapsing into someone else or something else are present in my practice as a way to feel my own body whilst dancing. These ideas and explorations ask for something beyond stable form and individual boundaries. My attention was drawn to the work of Deleuze and Guattari and their book A Thousand Plateaus and their concept “a body without organs”. This concept offers a way to think of the body as not a fixed structure but as a field of intensity, sensations, and relations. It is a very intriguing concept and physically it feels like I’m losing my edges whilst reading. These thoughts around what a body is also allow me to focus less on the form in the studio and prioritise the felt sensations with my collaborators as the spine of the work. The physical action of collapsing is a gateway into sensation rather than focusing on form.
Entry 2,
“Collapsing into the imaginative”
After a session one of my collaborators spoke about the thought of collapsing into the imaginative. For her body to really give weight to the other person she had to imagine her bones soften and penetrate the skin of her partner, and that she felt like the floor became water for her body to release tension. Spending time with her partner who was supporting her body, she felt like their relationship changed. At one moment her partner became her mother, then shapeshifted into a friend, and then arrived as a lover.
Entry 3
“What is left when you leave? – noticing what is left behind”
memory…
To spend time…
One thought that kept coming up within this exploration was the felt sensation of leaving each other. In all the sessions we had conversations about the difficulties of leaving the form that both bodies merged into. My collaborator said she felt like she was in a trance state; she felt her body moving into her partner’s body. She also said that because we were spending a lot of time with the thought of attempting to collapse, it was a challenge to separate herself from the other body that was the structure/landscape. What is left when you leave? As the image dissolved, what’s left is the physical experience within the body. A memory between two people.