Creative responses to the Lygia Clark & Sonia Boyce exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery
- Sullivan Holderbach
- Mar 14
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 21
Traumacapes' Arts Collective was invited to view exhibitions featuring the works of Lygia Clarke and Sonia Boyce and we were generously offered the studio space to produce artistic responses to the works on display. During our time at the gallery, thoughts around the interplay between items, bodies, and spaces came into question. What happens when you invite people into a space and invite them to engage in the artist’s narrative? What happens if you cannot detach yourself from your own legacies when you arrive in this space? What are the implications of inviting two people to play together, or perhaps to touch each other? Can participatory work ever be truly harmless? Should it be? How can art curation protect both creative play and trauma-informed practice? These interrogations underpinned our creative responses.
As members of the Traumascapes' Arts Collective, a group of survivor artist researchers working at the intersection of art and science with the aim of changing the ecosystem of trauma and creating new horizons for survivors, we draw upon our lived experience, creative practices, and scientific underpinnings to inform our work. At the heart of our work is a sense of care and reciprocity, embodied through trauma-sensitive practice.
Intersection and interrelationality
Bodies and spaces carry their own histories: by inviting them to collide, narratives intersect.
Bodies in a space sharing the same activity intersect and form a co-body.
Hair grown from separate heads is woven to intersect and tie two together.
Little images on the wall align and intersect to create a pattern.
Trauma-sensitivity and audience invitation
Play is harmless, play is joyfel, play is powerful, and power can be dangerous.
Touch is powerful; however, touch and embodiment are experienced and perceived very differently across different bodies holding differing experiences.
Anonymity is powerful, anonymity spilling into connection is powerful.
Building a net with a stranger is powerful. Building a net with someone who was a stranger seconds ago is powerful. But not all strangers are kind.
The therapeutic background of Lygia Clarke as a precedent to much of her interactive work on display creates a fascinating backdrop for us as artist-researchers to explore. Throughout our interaction with the exhibition, questions around the ethics of participatory artwork and the risks of play permeated through our minds and bodies. In O eu e o tu, the invitation to explore “the I and the you” by dawning a joint body suit seems harmless and playful; whereby the explicit instructions to unzip and explore a partner's body feels less comfortable and safe - especially when our bodies carry the legacies of violence and abuse. How might touch be explored in a trauma-sensitive way?
A rede de elásticos e outras obras como “transitional objects” (Donald Winnicott)
The invitation for interplay blurs and overlaps the once clear distinction between audience and artwork. Much like the rede de elásticos, whose instructive score invites audiences to contribute, wear, and repair the net, interacting with the piece is objectively (in a literal sense) an exchange – a contribution of a body in its present state, charged with everything that it brings into the space and leaving behind what it may (evidenced by artefacts such as knotted bundles of hair snagged between rubber bands).
Some of our artists were most intrigued by the world which holds these pieces, by the connections and perspectives granted by the use of these pieces as transitional objects, a vessel to interact with the outer world by gently extending or reflecting ourselves into it.
For some, the events of the outer world collided and superimposed themselves into the curated space; while for others, each artefact provided a keyhole into another story, leading to another, eventually creating its own net.
And perhaps the transitional object between the work of the two exhibited artists is a hairnet.
See more images and information on Edmonds' piece here:
PS: We had fun.
