JANINE GOLDSWORTHY

The Artist

Conscious Isolation

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Janine Goldsworthy (b.1981) is a fine artist and PhD practice-led student at Manchester School of Art. She is a Fine Art tutor on the BTEC Foundation at AIP, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Her works explore the interactions between digital and analog material through tactile manipulation. 

Janine Goldsworthy’s practice aims to generate an understanding of gesture in relation to smartphone interaction. It explores the proposition that the smartphone, connected through the hand, is no longer peripheral, nor merely a technological prosthetic to the body but ‘embodied through visual, felt and proprioceptive senses’ (Kozel et al., 2019:online). The practice involves gestural sculpting of physical materials by hand, through folding and shaping materials including paper, clay, pigment and found objects, in conjunction with unfolding and manipulating digital material comprised of moving image collected on the smartphone. Current processes involve gathering short spontaneous moving images of people appearing to be having a sensual relationship with inanimate objects, to find these moments I use the colour blue as a creative device for selecting gestures. 

The moving image and sculpture are brought together creating intimate fragile assemblages. These assemblages explore the intersections of bodily and technological life, the entwining of self, body, environment, emotions and felt senses. 

Goldsworthy has been developing a way of understanding methodology through what she terms as Un/Folding. It is related to the material processes, to gestures through the hands with the body central to this, and to how her practice unfolds on a journey. The very moving quality of gestural folding is further reflected in the physical act of gesturing itself in which the body is not static but actively moving towards as a way of producing meaning. (Friedland, 2016:online).  The concept for un/folding as a methodology is developed from phenomenological approaches. Drawing on the practice of Suzan Kozel, her research on mediated interactions between bodily and technological life (Kozel et al., 2019:online). Another key reference on un/folding is Gilles Deleuze and his thought of the fold as a way to shape, space movement and time, that the world is a series of infinite folds created through our connections to things. Deleuze describes an  ‘unfolding as that which always accompanies the fold, producing new folds, but also opening us out to that which is yet to be folded’ (Nordstrom, 2013). 

The study reveals the every day habitual relationships between smaller digit-driven material making and larger embodiment and emotional folding of human and technological life. Goldsworthy aims to make sense of the digital material by bringing it into human proportions, to touch it, to hold it in the hand, and through this embodied research makes contributions to how we might re-imagine this relationship in an increasingly uncertain world (Ashley et al., 2016).

All three videos on the exhibition are filmed on her studio rooftop in China, which is also her husband’s studio and her daughter’s play area. She uses large swaths of paper, the size of her body, that are left around in the studio gathering traces and marks overtime before being folded and shaped alongside collected materials, these all bare traces of the hand. The digital material are people working with their hands on the streets in China, filmed as she moves around and tries to make sense of her life in China, they are then edited and manipulated given the same folding and shaping as the physical materials collected. Both are brought together, with the digital projected through her hands becoming the assemblage.  The production values are sensitive to the unconscious phenomenological relationships to it including the displaced sounds merging in and out and the ephemera around it. 

Some of her most recent projects include Residency by Distance, a collaborative project with Netherlands designer/architect Elise Zoetmulder, a simultaneous and virtual residency creating new work and inviting further artists to respond to the concept of by Distance (Supported by Arts Council England) and Residency and Solo Exhibition at AIP Galley, Redtory Guangzhou a studio-based residency supported by Manchester School of Art.

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Bibliography:

• Ashley, T., Cherry, R. and Pell, L. (2016). Embodiment and digital interactivity: Towards posthuman somatic practices. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 8(1), pp.3-9.

• Friedland, S. (2016) The Meaning of the Moves: Gestural Mythologies and the Generic Film. Screendancejournal.org.

• [Online] [Accessed on 12 June 2019] http://screendancejournal.org/article/view/4940/4249#.XQCo2lNKi1s.

• Kozel, S., Guðjónsdóttir, M., Ginslov, J. and Lim, K. (2019) Conspiracy Archives – Researching (in/as) Motion.

• Nordstrom, S., 2013. Object-Interviews: Folding, Unfolding, and Refolding Perceptions of Objects. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 12(1), pp.237-257.