The Glasgow School of Art

MUSCLE THEORY
Catherine Street

Reid Gallery
18 – 30 April 2015

Catherine Street will be performing Wed 22nd, Thurs 23rd, Fri 24th, Sat 25th, Wed 29th and Thurs 30th April in the gallery from 3:30-4:30pm. See below for details

This new work is somewhere between an exhibition and a slowly unfolding piece of theatre. Ideas, sounds and images gradually reveal their connections and antagonisms. Precisely spoken voice recordings, softly flickering projections and live performances are configured to create an atmosphere of intense reverie that is occasionally interrupted by moments of vulnerability, salaciousness, confusion or cynicism.

Catherine Street's work consists of layers of experience: she often incorporates her own body into an installation setting that has video, audio, drawn, sculptural, and written elements. The atmosphere is usually unnerving, tense, sensual, comical. Intense breathing sounds give the viewer the feeling of moving inside the lungs, the body's cavities - whilst her writings often describe a desire to break apart the flesh and return it to its constituent elements.

Street focuses on her body because of its multitudinous natures; on the one hand simply matter subject to physical laws, and on the other a potentially limitless field of meanings: social, political, sexual, spiritual. She pays particular attention to themes of transformation and to the relationship between matter, thought, emotion and sensation.

Performances: 'Breathing then speaking'
Wed 22nd, Thurs 23rd, Fri 24th, Sat 25th, Wed 29th and Thurs 30th April in the gallery from 3:30-4:30pm. 

The artist's voice is slow and meditative as she uses various mental operations in this durational performance combining live and recorded spoken word. The looped imaginings, calculations and speculations mingle with intense breathing and whistling sounds as well as field recordings made in the streets surrounding GSA. The performance features a custom-made garment by Zephyr Liddell. The performance is conceived as part of the installation, audience members are encouraged to come and go as they please. 

Catherine Street is an artist based in Edinburgh. She has made work for performance festivals and exhibitions around the world including in Prague, Bergen, Berlin, Wellington and New York. She collaborates widely, maintaining long-standing collaborations with poet JL Williams and with composer and performance-maker Greg Sinclair. Her most recent work was a commission created for the exhibition project Human Race – Inside the History of Sports Medicine which toured around Scotland. She has contributed to a number of publications, most recently the Modern Edinburgh Film School anthology Queer Information.

For more information please visit: http://catherinestreet.net

The development of this work has been supported by an artist's bursary from Creative Scotland, and will feature work first initiated on residencies at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop, Lumsden; Hospitalfield, Arbroath and CCA, Glasgow and with project !!WAKAKA! in Edinburgh.

View a short film about the show on GSA Vimeo. This film was made by 3rd Year Fine Art Photography student Jack McCombe.