Ariki Porteous

During this residency Ariki Porteous will develop interests in the sculptural and temporal qualities of sound, material and space, building on experiences of performance, improvisation, score and composition with the musical and artistic collaborations Muscles of Joy and Full Eye.

Recently Ariki has gathered research materials in the form of conversations, sketches, recorded sound and video footage. This is a process of recording personal observations and experiences influenced by time spent with family members who have suffered mental and physical disruption in the form of dementia and bodily paralysis, as well as the experience of becoming a mother herself.

She is considering the contradictions in perceiving time, the effect of it speeding up but also slowing right down; of blurred memories and random thoughts; the sense of losing control and letting go or attempting to hang on.

Inspired by the meditative style of writing of naturalist Nan Shepherd in her book Living Mountain and her metaphorical descriptions of landscape, Ariki is interested in exploring how perceptions of the environment can sharpen within a reduced field of vision, how repetition affects the intensity of how we hear sound, how small transformations occur in our material, physical encounters and experiences.

The body as the unconscious.
The body as mind.
Landscape as the body.
The mind as landscape.
The dissolution of the self in the breakdown
of inside/outside.
The skin as conceptual membrane.
Pain as knowledge.
Pain as beauty.
Satisfaction as stupification (as catatonia).
The mortification of the appetites.

Bill Viola