A Ribbon Unfurling encompasses a collection of drawings, costumes and video made during my residencies at The British School at Rome, St John’s College, Oxford and currently ACME’s Firestation, London.

The installed drawings resemble ‘unswept’ floors, animal skins, pattern pieces and shrouds often acting as anatomical or neurological maps. They relate to my research into historical and contemporary medicine, disease and ‘holy contagion’. Works include the film Unnamed Saint (2022) and As Sewn to the Earth (2022), a series of drawings inspired by Herjolfsnæs, a Norse settlement on Kalaallit Nunaat in Greenland.

Ribbons appear throughout the pieces on display in the gallery, and run around the space as embroidered reels of text, hinting at the voices that exist between mind and body, produced and stored by both.

This exhibition coincided with a Symposium at Downing College titled Reaching Out: Gesture – Texture – Text, which will explored the interrelations between the idea of the gestural and the textural, with a particular focus on the written word.