2023 POP Gallery Performance Program
POP Gallery, Port Adelaide SA
As part of POP's Performance programming in 2023, Kirsty Martinsen will be developing a new work, Bodiness: hands like wings in collaboration with James Dodd and V Barrat.
Hands up! Who wants to see a huge painting made on the ground?
Who wants to see a woman in a power wheelchair fly?
Who wants to see a performance that is so complex and challenging and beautiful and absorbing it leaves you wanting more?
Kirsty Martinsen, in collaboration with Virginia Barratt and James Dodd will endeavour to do this.
They are collaborating on a performance artwork that will be presented as part of Post Office Projects performance and work-in-progress showings in September 2023. A scratchy little ink drawing called hands like wings by Kirsty Martinsen and a line from a Rumi poem “we are sodden in bodiness…” are their inspiration for the project. While examining attitudes about bodies (their own and society's as a whole) through the lens of memory, they will build a script. Martinsen has discovered how powerful visualisation and memory are whenever she tries to do yoga in her power wheelchair now. She closes her eyes and remembers how her body felt prior to disability: the position of her chin in cobra, the direction of her feet in downward dog, the power in her arms in Warrior. Together Virginia Barratt, James Dodd and Kirsty Martinsen will examine this phenomena while also inventing and constructing a structure around Martinsen’s power wheelchair to enable her arm and hands to move and fly.
