To avoid falling apart is an exhibition of new work by Emmie McLuskey and Janice Parker made especially for the Travelling Gallery. This two-person show explores and illuminates our human capacity for mutuality, connection and interdependence through movement, language, and film.

Together Emmie and Janice have developed a movement workshop in collaboration with an invited mix of friends and colleagues. From this they will create several short films focusing on the active state of counterbalance – the physical act of two or more human bodies leaning against or leaning away from each other. The films will invite the viewer to witness shared and reciprocal acts of support, capturing the details and nuances of these movements in the moment as they dynamically unfold between people.

Accompanying the films, will be a series of sculptural apparatus that invite visitors into the simple acts of resting, weight-bearing, and capacity for counterbalance; and a collection of hand-written texts created by the artists in response to the workshop and the films.

Both artists bring to the Travelling Gallery their shared interest in how we live together and how we experience our moving bodies in society; asking what might happen if we led with our movement and our ordinary/extraordinary human bodies.

Janice Parker is an artist and choreographer, based in Edinburgh. She has created a vast body of work in collaboration with people, place and context; she 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.