Paloma Proudfoot - Lay Figure Performance

Paloma Proudfoot’s practice brings together sculpture, performance and sound within unsettling installations that explore the porosity of bodies in space.

The artist subtly plays with the perceived fragility of the ceramic medium, augmenting this within other textural dimensions of her work, in order to create an experience that disorientates and unnerves.

Each frieze luxuriates in antagonistic ambiguity, pitching contrasting energies against one another. From the comically overblown to the microscopic detail, the tender to the sinister, the individual to the collective. This exploration of dualities reiterates the power dynamics and vulnerabilities that can shift between bodies.

Proudfoot’s bank of references is ever-evolving. In the last few years, she has been reflecting on the institutional violences carried out on women’s physical and mental health. This has seen the artist investigate the medical theories of 19th century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Charcot, the mentor of celebrated psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud and Giles de la Tourette, was known for leading acoustic medical trials on women who were inflicted with ‘hysteria’.

The tuning fork is a key sculptural and sonic motif within Proudfoot’s work. The presence of this instrument was initially associated with the acoustic stimuli that Charcot employed to provoke catalepsy in his patients.

Such experiments would see women’s bodies become pliable and malleable like lifeless mannequins, or “symbols of compliance” that accepted or submitted to any position that they were placed into.

As researcher Carmel Raz asserts, “Charcot’s acoustic experiments on hysterical patients appear to represent a further iteration of the trope of nervous sounds, now projected onto the tuning fork”.

In Human Tuning, the owner of the hand is ambiguous; disembodied hands holding tuning instruments in Proudfoot’s installations may represent “the trope of nervous sounds”.

This is particularly heightened here, due to the disproportionate scale between the hand and the ear. Who is in control of the tuning? What are they tuning to? This skewing of scale reiterates the asymmetry of power that is the connective tissue within all of Proudfoot’s installations.

The exhibition is accompanied by a performance, made in collaboration with Aniela Piasecka and composer Ailie Ormston.

Ormston’s oscillating sound piece Lay Figure begins with a resounding clang of the tuning fork. Gradually distorted echoes and percussive drilling enter in, as the soundscape begins to swell. We tune in. We tune out.

Throughout the performance, we are introduced to the physical and recorded sounds of the moving ceramic mannequin, its creaking joints are held together with bungee cords, amplifying the sense of intense strain.

The pace of the piece is drawn out, each texture, each tone lengthened to its limit. To experience this work fully, we must become active listeners. This level of attentiveness invokes composer Pauline Oliveros’s thesis on Deep Listening, where listening becomes a conscious, multi-faceted act that heightens our spatialised awareness to the material world of which we are a part. Oliveros also repositions the deliberate act of listening as a way to deepen connection to one another.