To Avoid Falling Apart

to avoid falling apart was an exhibition of new work by Emmie McLuskey and Janice Parker made specifically for the Travelling Gallery. This two-person show explored our human capacity for connection and inter-dependence through movement, language, and film.

Together Emmie and Janice developed a movement workshop for an invited group of ten friends and colleagues. The workshop asked people to work in pairs with specific movements that focus on the physical act of counterbalancing – where two human bodies lean against or lean away from each other in an act of mutual support. This process of physical listening is a constant and shared negotiation, active and dynamic, we see each person searching for the points of balance between them in order to hold each other up and to avoid falling apart.

Five silent films playing on loop across a series of monitors and projectors, invite viewers to bear witness to, experience and feel these reciprocal acts. Through the hold of a wrist or the roll across a shoulder, we experience a kind of power in ourselves and in each other that is simultaneously about giving and receiving; allowing us to discover new ways of moving that we couldn’t do alone.

Janice Parker is an artist and choreographer, based in Edinburgh. She creates work in collaboration with people, place and context, and believes in art as an act of quiet, or noisy, activism, proposing and putting into practice personal, social and cultural change.

Emmie McLuskey is an artist based in Glasgow. She works with other artists to produce collaborative work; this has previously taken the form of publications, events, objects, conversations, writing and exhibitions.