Amy Wright

Amy Wright is an artist living and working in London. Her work is about the body as a political space of control; a body that deviates from expected norms and where illness ruptures accepted ways of looking at the world.

Curated, Everything Forever, Online March 2021; Curated, Immanent vibrational logic, South Kiosk, Online May 2020; Curated, Group Exhibition, 302_redirect, Online May-April 2020

Group Exhibitions 2021: Everything Forever, Curated by Anna Souter, “In a future of forever, thought is tentacular, intelligence is kaleidoscopic.“, Online March 2021; Group Exhibition, Everything Forever Radio, Montez Press Radio 25 March 2021; Group Exhibition, Mercurial Mist, Online & Publication March 2021; Group Exhibition, Scrawl X Mecurial Mist, Online March 2021

Group Exhibitions 2020: thisistomorrow, ICA Newsletter, Montez Press Radio, Ashley Holmes' Open Sound at Outpost Gallery, Pot Luck by Cynthia Carllinni at Dyson Gallery RCA, CAPPED OUT at The Old Biscuit Factory and NTS with Mark Leckey

That piece of toast hurt

Scratching in the insides that are pustule and creamy and pinky

With all the discussions globally around the vaccine, the vaccine passport and the outrage to blood clotting side effects, I decided to re-explore my relationship within the medical and pharmaceutical sector and how the body becomes a space of control and, more importantly, what happens when we, the patient, the artist, lose control and try to regain it.

After a diagnosis of a chronic illness at 18, I was inserted into a world of poking, side-effects and embarrassment; embarrassment that my body had let itself down; embarrassment about the procedures being done to me; embarrassment that this disease is all about my insides and bowel habits... SO unsexy... art became a way to regain that control and think critically about the network of systems that health is engulfed in.

This past year has taught many of us about how our bodies can become a political site, wrapped up in macro ideas of government control and our agency of navigating through these systemic systems.

*For best listening experience, please use headphones*

*360 works best on a mobile phone or you can use your cursor to move around on desktop*

Sitting up to watch my own colonoscopies was the inspiration for the text Belly.

As a patient, I don’t have access to the video footage of my own colonoscopies, instead we are given a lime green sheet of paper with stills from the internal video. These photos are to identify the areas of ‘hurts’; for me these are areas of blood, pustule and and creamy sections of the large intestine.

360 provides a speculative space to engage with the text of Belly and position you, the audience, in the driving seat for this journey through the muscular interior walls.

Sick Woman Theory, by Johanna Hedva, “redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable, following from Judith Butler’s work on precarity and resistance”. Hedva describes the visible and invisible and how both can be political. This is a powerful way to engage with making art about illness - making a personal experience, public.

Medium:

360 Video

Size:

00:03:00

In Collaboration with:

CGI Designer

Sarah Blomey @sarahblomey

Sound Design

Nexcyia @nexcyia

lips smack licking the line that is blurred red pinky

chapped raw cracked lips where the line is blurry

licked lips meet cracked flesh

wet tongue slimy slips over wet tongue creamy

raw red line which blurs into skin pinky

breath warm and smells damp like bog

in out

breath that rasps it crinkles like leaves or

wipe wet from cracked lips raw and red now moist

whisper

whisper the words this food is too salty

salt that pucker and pinch

lips red raw stinging

stung

o o o f in breath sharp

salty licking tips of fingers

under nails catching

flecks of salt cling to bits of skin

bite down on red raw lips sinking

thirsty

gulping down wet

swallow

fill

full

gulping down more wet

swallow fill full

s w e l l i n g belly

not popped full growing

stretched skin across tight belly firm

swollen belly big to p o p

popped

Medium:

Text

Food Storytelling text The Body

Exhibited:

[live version], thisistomorrow, Online, 2020; Group Exhibition, Montez Press Radio, 2020; selected for Group Show, Ashley Holmes' Open Sound, Outpost Gallery, 2020 (postponed)

Medium:

Sound

Size:

00:05:40

Food Storytelling text The Body

If you'd like to read more about my research, please follow this link

For more work, please visit my website amywrightartist.com

or email me amy.wright@network.rca.ac.uk

Screening

Back to Back CAP Wednesday 30 June 09:30 (GMT +0)

IdentitiesTerra IncognitoSensualityAlternative Worlds

Amy Wright

Medium:

Size:

In Collaboration with:

Medium:

Medium:

Size:

Social

About

Royal College of Art