In October I was in London, to visit friends and to attend Jayne Wilton‘s workshop at the „Catch your breath“ exhibition at the London College of Physicians. Jayne is the resident artist of the Life of Breath Project and I‘d met her at the launch of the project in Durham university, 2015. So this was a happy reunion for us. I went with my friend Vanessa Mildenberg, a theatre artist and change and communications manager. We first participated in the workshop and then went on a guided tour of the exhibition.
Jayne‘s workshop consisted of four activities: a global breath- brushstroke project which I‘ll write about in the next post “Breathe with me”, a breath lithograph, an articulation sculpture and capturing breath bubbles.
Lithograph
We created a portrait of our breath by holding a metal plate in front of our mouth and exhaled on it. „This is one of the most ancient methods of determining whether someone was alive: to hold a metal plate in front of their mouth. The plate was made out of zinc, traditionally used in etching“, Jayne explained to us.
I exhaled onto a zinc plate and Jayne rolled over the plate with ink. The oil based ink doesn‘t mix with vapour, so the shape of the breath condensation of my exhale on the zinc plate remained intact. Then, with an etching press, Jayne printed the image of my exhale onto a piece of paper. An almost perfect little white circle in the blue frame of the ink against the white background of the paper. It looked embodied somehow, as it was, not at all like a drawn circle, more like the residue of a blob of cream.
Articulation sculpture
At a large table in the middle of the room, each of the participants chose a word and imagined the shape it would make coming out of the mouth. If air were denser, more solid what impression would a particular combination of vowels and consonants leave? And how would we then shape this impression with our hands?
The material we used was clay. I chose the word „become“. The most intoned letter for me was the „b“, so I made a platform for it and then a kind of pole which became thinner and smaller towards the end representing the rest of the letters trailing behind. Vanessa had chosen the word „hope“. When I looked at her sculpture and some of the other sculptures, I realised that there are probably lots of different approaches to this task, depending on how you experience making sound and how you hear sound. Even though I had a finished object I was pleased with, the task had generated a lot more questions than it answered, which, to my mind, is a beautiful thing.
Capturing breath bubbles
At another table were sets of plastic cups filled with different coloured inks, a pile of straws and square cut outs of photographic paper. When you blew into one of the cups through the straw, bubbles rose to the top. I then held a piece of photographic paper over the opening of the cup to capture the image of the bubbles. It was surprising to see how different each image was even though it felt as if I was doing the same thing each time. One print looked like a ring, the other was like one big bubble in the centre, and in another delicate loops spread across the piece of paper.
I was very moved in the workshop, I don‘t know why. Paying attention to the breath in combination to exploring it creatively, especially as directly as in the lithograph, was new for me. I‘d never seen my breath, something from inside my body visualised outside of my body. The lithograph was like a testament, you could say, to my existence. Vanessa felt similarly and, as we left the college, summed up the experience perfectly: „it surprised me, it was so simple and at the same time very moving“. That, to me, speaks for the character of the breath itself, it is movement inside and outside of us, all the time. We move it and it moves us.