Around the beginning of the first Lockdown, Alice and Natasha began exchanging emails about their respective artistic and curatorial practices. This interview continues conversations already started, where they find commonalities in their research and making practices; connecting anatomy to sculpture; domestic settings to processes of making and showing. The conversation over time became a methodology for working and discussing possibilities for future collaboration. It is treated as a live space for both Natasha and Alice to circle around, to be in dialogue, to pull out threads that may otherwise become entangled without the presence of an-other.

They discuss:
-Conversation as a methodology
-Collaboration
-Contemporary art
-Curatorial practice
-Objects
-Anatomy
-Motherhood
-Physical injury

Bios:
Natasha MacVoy is an artist, curator and collaborator who makes work about the activity of looking and alternative – non-visual – ways with which our bodies perceive. Drawing on personal experiences and observations her work explores the limits of sight and site through a range of approaches including sculpture, installation and performance. Her work seeks to challenge boundaries and definitions, building communities and support in the process. For Your phone is my gallery (2020-2021), she called her audience to individually read them a live artwork creating a unique and intimate experience.

In 2018 she established HER MIT Projects, curating an ongoing series of pop-up exhibitions, events and conversations using readily available materials, locations and resources. Experimental projects include reconstructing a cigarette packet as a gallery for solo shows and Death Club, a monthly art and reading group, discussing death in order to learn how to live. Natasha lives in Dursley, a small rural town in Gloucestershire and has a studio at Spike Island in Bristol.

Alice is an artist working across performance, dance, facilitation, video and writing. She is interested in the emergent potentials of speaking aloud and being with objects as a way to occupy a ‘middle ground’ between self/selves and other(s). She is currently developing a performance practice in solo and in group, that builds and ‘intra-acts’ in a recursive process. She is a Lecturer in Ba Fine Art at Kingston School of Art and a 2019 Leverhulme Arts Scholar.

Read more:

Natasha’s artist website: https://www.natashamacvoy.com
HER MIT Projects: https://www.hermitprojects.com
Stuck Not Broken, (a podcast on aspects of polyvagal theory): https://www.justinlmft.com/podcast
Skinner Release Technique: https://skinnerreleasingnetwork.org

Keywords:
HER MIT Projects; Third Space; Polyvagal Theory; Dr Stephen Porges; Skinner Release Technique; the pelvis; rural settings; the voice; sculpture; tennis coaching; co-learning; embodied knowledge.