Holly Craig

As you enter the space, notice and greet with your body the air contained within.

With every part of the body available to you today, taste, smell, feel, look and interact with the air that lives in this space.

You might gaze at it with your swivelling shoulders, taste it with a scrape of the foot, smell it with the crown of your head, feel it as you push against it with a jutting hip.

Notice the texture and weight of the air as you interact with it; is it a solid, heavy weight pressing on your body, or a fluid stream of light?

How do you shape it with your movements, and how do you allow it to shape you and the way you move within this place?

Offered in response to: Hillary Goidell, ‘To Catch a Thing in Flight’ (2020). Audiodescription of the film Shape of an Echo 2019 by Anna Seymour, Fayen d’Evie and Pippa Samaya (a gestural description of the sound work Hauntings H M Castlemaine 2019 by Andrew Slater (a description of the Old Castlemaine Gaol composed from field recordings)).

Georgina Kleege: Handling score for a fossilised handshake

Take its weight in your palm. Invert and rotate. Try new orientations until it feels most at home. Try it in the other hand. Carefully trace its outlines with your index and third finger. Watch out for the sharper protrusions.

Marvel at the regular beading along one edge, and now the other. How did that happen? As you ponder this, worry the ridges with the pad of your thumb. Try counting the creases with your fingernail. With the lightest possible touch, feel for the shallow pores and divots.

What do you make of that hole in the upper right (if it is upper or right)? Note how thin the metal is there, as fragile as shell, pressed to the point it almost ceases to be metal How did that happen?

Reconstruct the positions of the two hands that made this shape. My thumb was here, your thumb was….

Isn’t it funny that we say “press the flesh” when in fact it’s the muscles yearning to press bone to bone?

As you ponder this, lift it to your face and press it gently against your cheek. Now rest it against your jawline. Sandwich it between your two palms. Slowly, mindful of the sharper protrusions, press your palms together. Interlace your fingers to make a neat parcel. Wait for it to take your heat. Wait for the moisture to rise to the surface of your skin. Now, lift your two hands to your face as you incline your head to meet them .

Slowly, deeply, inhale its scent.

Repeat.

Offered in response to: Sophie Takách, ‘handling (encounter between Fayen d’Evie and Georgina Kleege, July 2016)’ (2016-2021). Bronze, 90 x 70 x 45mm.