UPON REFLECTION 2020 SARAH MISSELBROOK – £16.99/16.99€ + p&p

I first became aware of Sarah Misselbrook and her work when she made an application to CAS for a two week artist residency to take place online. CAS, otherwise known as Chapel Arts Studios, is a contemporary art organisation in North Hampshire, England. I started at CAS as an Associate Artist, I am now a manager there, and an independent artist, poet, and creativity guide.

For CAS’ artist residency BlockChain 2018 Misselbrook submitted an image of ‘Affirmation’ with her application along with her statement of dissent, as per our request. Sarah was selected by curator Susan Francis to join one of seven pairs of artists collaborating through a dialogue of visual contemporary art and social media.

The photograph submitted by Sarah shows the artist standing in a gallery with her arms outstretched, her chest bound in bandages and constricted by a ‘body cage’ or armament that covers her mouth and encases her head and torso with a metallic ripple. Her gaze is straight on and direct. The artist is holding a knife and fork on the end of long poles that extend her ‘wing span’ by 2 — but I didn’t notice the cutlery at first. It took me a while to realise that this image is, for me, less about silence than it is deeply resonant of hunger, wild appetites, and socially conditioned restraint.

In ‘Women Who Run With Wolves’, Estes explains that,

‘cultural—that is, super-ego—overlays and injunctions, are not experienced by women as emanating from the soul-Self psyche, but are felt as if they come from “out there” from some other source which is not innate. The cultural/super-ego overlays can be very positive or very detrimental.’

(pg82)

Spending time with Sarah and her work, I experience art in the dialogue and the meeting. When I read this book for the first time I found I had tears welling in my heart, ready to burst the banks of my eyelids. There is beauty in this quest. Transformation. In the land she stands. Tears of Love. Tears of beauty. Tears of Life itself. “I am trying to connect with you.” Nature inside and outside. Misselbrook lays bare to me the sensations and questions and rhythms of the forest and I recognise them as my questions. I don’t mean in a possessive way, I am not laying claim to her territories. Rather, she is extending that long-reaching fork so I may taste the fruits I couldn’t reach.

‘Like the tree, growing in a too small space, shaped by what the conditions allow, imbibe, alchemise. There is no separation between me and my environment. Together, this is our moment. We are. This is. I am. We are this.’

Misselbrook’s digital residency as part of CAS’ Blockchain Dissent Art 2018 culminated in a film titled ‘Between Spaces’ filmed in her studio (the forest) in a valley in Catalunya, Spain. What I didn’t know then was that the questions evident in Misselbrook’s performative solitary practice are integral to her approach and were to feed unexpectedly into what I was exploring at CAS. In earlier years as an Associate Artist, and project manager, I had begun an investigation into dissent as a potential emerging methodology. As such, I’ve come to understand it as a dialogic and communally-reflective creative practice. I was about to publish an essay in Chapters of Dissent Vol 1.1 ‘Dissent: a Creative Practice’ (but Sarah didn’t know that yet). And when I accepted Sarah’s invitation to write a foreword for this book I didn’t know quite how resonant her work would become, enriching and breathing more life into the conversational poetry we began to exchange in 2019.

Being with Sarah’s work, not just looking but really ‘being me’ with it, there exists both the discoveries of new meanings—such as those I pen and offer to her, and also the interweaving of text and images in the pages of this book.

Studying further photographs of Sarah’s installation ‘Affirmation’ (pg10) the ‘body cage’ spoke to me of my experience of internalising social constructs and the physical toll it takes when they are not life sustaining and in tune with our human needs and the health of the ecosystems on which we depend. The parable offered by Sarah Misselbrook on page 8 draws attention to the knife and fork in her hands which I had not noticed before. I thought Sarah was posing or at least performing. No, perhaps she is simply reaching out to us.

With her work and indeed this book, Misselbrook is reaching, asking questions of her audience and herself. We journey with the artist — and that is how I arrive here, having responded to a question: “Can you hear me?”

Engaged and engaging with one another via Instagram and then Whatsapp, the year 2019 brought Sarah and I together in a spontaneous collaboration while we were both contributing to The Laboratory of Dissent 2.0 ‘Inside/Outside‘. We can use the context of dissent to remember to ask of ourselves and each other in all our interactions ‘what is your no? what’s your yes? what is happening in the space between us? What can you do to honor yourself, your environment, and your relations, especially when that means acting or responding differently?’ These questions help us find alternatives to prescribed notions and are especially pertinent for the relationships we collectively find ourselves in, in relation to other living things in our non-human ecology such as our planet itself and our respective beloved forests.

Estes says,

“Being real, doesn’t mean being reckless, it means allowing ‘la vos mitologica’, (the mythological voice, to speak. One does this by shutting off the ego for a while and letting that which wishes to speak, speak.”

This is how Sarah and I have been writing to one another. It is an honour and a delight to have connected bravely, reflectively, and creatively with Sarah Misselbrook as we each weave our own grotesque and beautiful personal mythologies which live and breathe, in dialogue, ‘behind’ our artwork offering (we hope) sustenance to ‘others’.

As collaborator, responder, reader, witness, interpreter, critic, or an ‘other’, when you enter into a dialogue with the artwork, medium and media, senses and matter, the narrative laid out by the artist is no longer only ‘hers’ but ‘ours’. As the words and images in this book pierce your heart there is no discernible difference between the two, the work becomes something else in the encounter with it. A new event in the dialogue between forest, self, I and ‘other’, creation and destruction.