The Mud Formed A Finger, Pointed (2017)  Acrylic stage | Rubble Bucket |UV Lighting | Tarp. Production Still of the first iteration of 'The Mud Formed A Finger, Pointed' featuring Nicole Vivien Watson

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Gymnasium Gallery, Berwick - 20/01/2018

Workplace Gallery, Gateshead - 20/12/2017

CCA, Glasgow - 08/12/2017
 

Co-commissioned by James Lowther (Berwick Visual Arts), Mileva Donachi (NAD), Hannah Hooks and Laura Macfarlane (Space Inbetween Gallery) created by Ben Jeans Houghton, Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau and Nicole Vivien Watson

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'The Mud Formed A Finger, Pointed' offers a study of the human body as an uncanny object that oscillates between figuration and abstraction, body and material, depicting an object becoming human, a human becoming an object and the protean states between.

 

Nicole Vivien Watson emerges from an industrial bucket, her body covered in dripping, viscous liquid. The work embodies a contemporary creation myth that melds object and subject, abject and sacred, non-human and human. By invoking the narrative imagery of creation myths where humans are formed from the earth, within the aesthetic of the fetish Messy Play and through the language of Butoh, the performance links our understandings of the contemporary body and our imaginings of a primordial past.