Tectonic Body (work in progress)
2018-present
Tags: Photography, Mixed media, Digital media, Somatic ecology, Ecosomatics, Queer gaze, Feminist art, Maternal themes, Generational body, Water, Earth, Butoh, Work in progress
Tectonic Body reframes the female-conditioned body through a queer, ecological lens. Drawn from film stills of Water Mother, the series rejects the conditioned gaze on AFAB bodies by dissolving them into landscapes of stars, lava, and ocean tides. Analog glitch processing distorts familiar contours, breaking apart inherited ideals of form and instead revealing bodies as feral, elemental, and inseparable from the forces that shape the earth.
Featuring three performers across generations—a woman anticipating motherhood, myself —a genderfluid person living within it—, and a woman who has since moved into grandparenthood—the series meditates on matrescence not as a solely private passage but as a collective, ecological process. It gestures toward a form of mothering that exceeds the constricting parameters of culturally sanctioned motherhood, suggesting a need for this transformation to be witnessed and held within a larger communal and ecological field. In these images, bodies grieve, rupture, and transform, surrendering to geologic and cosmic powers beyond human control.
Selections from Tectonic Body were presented during Vermont Studio Center’s Open Studios, in conversation with my Water Body mixed-media works. Performers featured in these images include Fernanda D’Agostino, Jaleesa Johnston, and myself: the In/Body Collective.
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Artist: Sophia Wright Emigh
