Jahnne Pasco-White

Bodily feeling is instinctual. It is beyond my hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, and looking. Bodily feeling is in my gut, beyond even the pit of it, where it merges with my mind. It can be heavy, weighty, or ever so light that it flickers like the sound of cicada wings; and before you know it, it is an orchestra. Are they inside my tummy or is that the piercing tone outside of my skin? Bodily feeling is outside of written language. It is just out of grasp but with big feelers. Bodily feeling is the hair on my forearms pricking up with the shift of temperature, antennas reaching for the rain. Bodily feeling is the shape of water, subsuming different forms and registers, which I can never quite predict. Bodily feeling is that moment when I dive into the ocean and my skin melts. I am swimming like I am water in water. Bodily feeling reaches beyond the porous edges of my body, it is many bodies, its tone, rhythm, composition. Bodily feeling is the unheard, the unseen, the known/unknown on a register that is unrecognisable. Bodily feeling is to imagine one can too be consumable, compostable, evaporating like steam, sopping into someone else’s pores. For me, bodily feeling is the inextricable calmness that comes with a lapping shoreline that makes me feel, perhaps, that I am just a shoreline.

For Stephanie Erev, bodily feeling is vibrational attunement to the environment in which we are entangled, or the background netting, the water, or the air, that enmeshes us. Her works explore that becoming attuned to a visceral register could heighten one’s awareness, of the larger forces, flows, and exchanges within which both human and non-human are knotted. Bodily feeling emphasises that the body and environment are not individual entities, but forces and rhythms that operate on a visceral register that co-mingle, stain and exchange through their malleable boundaries. It is the eco system of the many bodies and materials entangled in an interconnected current that flows and vibrates in rhythms and waves, each effecting the other. Bodily feeling reminds me of the impermanence of all matter. Bodily feeling is an approach. Bodily feeling is in my artmaking. Bodily feeling, like water can be disguised as something else. Bodily feeling can go unnoticed. Bodily feeling is this kind of painting.

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