This is a creative breath response by Caroline Areskog Jones. Tell your own breath story by taking part in Breathworks, a digital project by Lucy Sabin.
drawing as breath
the body as archive
activated neurological pathways intersect with physical memory of action and through repetition becoming embedded, absorbed, collated into our unique physical history
slowly unfolding, cataloguing through years of growth, from watching, listening, and doing, our bodies remember even when our consciousness may forget.
whether it be through acute, direct observation or a more elegiac transference of experience, a mark can exist as a silence, a whisper, a voice, struggle or shout of protest
drawing is as individual as breathing, as expansive as our environment.
patterns, rhythms, weight, pace, trace
heavily pinned to a surface or suspended in the air, lingering like an exhalation into a crisp cold atmosphere, fragile water droplets the only evidence of its existence.
breath can seep outwards or internally spiral.
the line can trace the same path
and be equally erased, repressed, ignored.
Astrida Neimanis in her text ‘The Breathless Sea’, identifies and discusses the implications of underwater weather and its relationship to our bodies. ‘Residence time’, is identified as that taken to fully recycle whatever comes into the ocean – bodies, histories, chemicals, structures – it includes the sodium in our blood which can apparently linger and exist for 260 million years. Our waters are gradually becoming toxic, impacting the fragile and essential ecosystems that exist, echoing systemic imbalances, the links between human and non-human ever more vital. As Neimanis continues “Grappling with the weather underwater cannot be the simple inflation of categories, such as weather, or climate, or justice. We must remain alert to how differences morph, connect, and come to matter, differently.”
I have been thinking whilst drawing on experience.
Utilising different materialities and processes I have been following this line of enquiry. A digital projection onto ancient oak, a silent witness whilst absorbing carbon and adapting to its shifting environment, tracing tidelines at the intersection between land and sea, exploring movement across thresholds submerged at the critical zone between the inhale and the exhale.
Words and images by Caroline Areskog Jones