Pairs / Pears & Gestures of Practice
Pauses within larger bodies of my work have recently taken the form of Pair Cards, a developing series in which I collect instructional, step-by-step images for making crafts and completing physical exercises. This project is ongoing, as I continue to gather images and refine both the format and the instructions. A version of Pairs / Pears was commissioned by The Photographers’ Gallery, where I developed an activity in response to the exhibition How to Win at Photography - have a look at that here
Alongside this, my ongoing research project Practisenow on Instagram functions as a platform to hold and organise the images as they are collected.
Building on this, I am developing a new workshop offering titled Gestures of Practice, conceived as a kind of visual sense-making exercise. Drawing from the Pairs / Pears cards, in which reworked images found in instructional books are made into playable cards, participants are invited to turn the cards over to find pairings based on the visual steps captured in the cropped instructions. In the workshop context, groups explore a variety of books I have collected to discover what resonates with them.
Above: Pairs/Pears being played at Verzasca Foto Festival, Switzerland Portfolio Reviews August 2023.
