Ritual/Bodies: 6th July 2024

Image: Woundlickers (detail) Katharina Ludwig, 2023, costume.

You are warmly invited to Ritual/Bodies, a live performance event and panel discussion, hosted by Goldsmiths CHASE funded Religion and Art Live, at St Pancras Euston Road on Saturday 6th July from 1.45pm, curated by Kate Pickering.

(Un)godly limbs, wombs, wounds, tongues and earthy crumbs materialise through dance, sound, costume, spoken word and performative ritual, resurrecting the hol(e)y, dis/obedient body within Christian tradition. Come and share in an unorthodox communion, take a pilgrimage down into the ground of deathly rebirth, witness the fragmented, in/credulous body on the cusp between inside and out, as the Last Man on Earth wanders among us.

Please note that this is an in person event, video documentation will be made available later in July.

Schedule:

Doors open 1.45pm

Live performances 2-4.30pm

Panel discussion 5-6.30pm

Approximate performance schedule:

1.45-2.30pm Holly Slingsby - Earth Rite (church grounds facing the Euston Road)

2-2.30pm Kate Pickering – St Julian and The Wandering Womb (nave, crypt, threshold to the nave)

2.35-2.45pm Garry Rutter – Condensed Milk Club (nave)

2.50-3.20pm Katharina Ludwig and M. Maria Walhout - Wet Muscle – Conjured Fragments (multiple locations)

3.25-3.45pm Sophie Sleigh-Johnson – Diocletian Canticle (nave)

3.50-4.10pm Sarah White – Oh Crumbs! (garden behind church)

4.15-4.30pm Ric Stott – 100 Flowers of Psyche (nave)

4.30-5pm Garry Rutter - Know that He’s the Last Man on Earth (nave)

An afternoon of performance will be followed by a panel discussion and Q and A, including the Revd Dr Ayla Lepine (art historian and Associate Rector at St James’s Piccadilly); Laura Moffatt (Director, Art and Christianity); Dr Teresa Calonje (art historian and curator); Dr Sophie Sleigh-Johnson (artist, writer and Lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths); Maria Walhout (artist, writer and researcher); Dr Katharina Ludwig (artist, writer and researcher); and Dr Kate Pickering (artist, writer and Associate Lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths). The discussion will focus on a renewed interest in ritual and the body in contemporary art, in particular how contemporary artists are taking up devotional cultures and revisiting the sacred to produce decolonial, feminist, queer and ecologically oriented worlds.

Accessibility: There is access into the church via a ramp to the side of the main steps. Some performances will require walking or standing (more details to come with an updated schedule). Seating will be provided where possible. Please note that there are no public toilets at St Pancras Euston Road. Public toilets are located at Euston, St Pancras International and Kings Cross train stations, alternatively local pubs or cafes will have facilities if you’re willing to buy a drink or two!

Refreshments will be available for a small donation.

We thank the Christian Arts Trust and Goldsmiths Graduate School Fund for their generous support.

Dr Teresa Calonje has recently completed her PhD in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, in which she investigated modes of relating that are produced as bodily gestures are appropriated by artists and made into art property of their own. During her research she has worked through the practice of La Ribot, Tino Sehgal and Luisa Nobrega. In 2014, she edited Live Forever: Collecting Live Art (Koenig Books) and is an occasional curator. She worked on a series of commissions at Second Home, London (2016-2017) and is currently engaged in an art residency project in Madrid, Spain, in collaboration with Norte Joven.

Revd Dr Ayla Lepine is an art historian and Associate Rector at St James’s Piccadilly. Ayla was previously Ahmanson Fellow in Art and Religion at the National Gallery. Originally from Canada, she moved to the UK in 2003 to study theology and art history. Following her PhD in Victorian sacred architecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art, she held fellowships at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music and the Courtauld, and was lecturer and fellow at the University of Essex. She was ordained in 2018 and served her title at Hampstead Parish Church. Ayla’s approach to ministry focuses deeply on belonging, beauty, and social justice. Her publications have appeared in British Art Studies and Tate’s ‘In Focus’ series, as well as books including Modern Architecture and Religious Communities. She is a trustee of the UK charity Art and Christianity, a Visiting Scholar at Sarum College, and a member of the St Paul’s Cathedral Visual Arts Committee.

Katharina Ludwig is a writer, researcher, artist, and sometimes poet, based in Berlin and London. Her/their work is concerned with narrative holes and the insurrectionary poetics and temporalities of the 'wounded text'. Katharina tries to activate textual holes as a subversive feminist practice of resistance and revolt with insurrectional potential that treats the textual wound as a political and writerly strategy in opposition to authoritarian systems. Katharina’s work has been published, shown, performed, and read internationally. In addition to her/their own practice Katharina works on editorial, curatorial, and educational projects.

Laura Moffatt is the director of Art and Christianity. She studied Fine Art at the University of Newcastle and Arts Criticism at City University and has previously worked for Art Monthly and for PEER, and co-authored Contemporary Church Architecture with Edwin Heathcote in 2006. Laura is a member of the London DAC and the Church Buildings Council.

Kate Pickering is a London-based artist, writer, and associate lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths. She researches how the ecological, more-than-human body experiences sacred sites through performative rituals, vocalisation and story-telling, in particular how contemporary artists are taking up devotional cultures and practices to produce decolonial, feminist, queer and ecologically oriented worlds. This research informs her site-based, performative writing. She recently completed an AHRC scholarship PhD at Goldsmiths on the immersive story-world of Lakewood, North America’s largest megachurch in a broader context of climate crisis, End Times obsession and climate change denialism. Pickering has also produced an experimental memoir, ‘There is a Miracle in Your Mouth’ (publisher tbc). Her art has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and her writing has been performed and published widely. Pickering co-runs Peer Sessions, a nomadic crit group for artists and is a trustee for mental health charity Arts Network London.

Garry Rutter is an interdisciplinary artist, primarily focused on performance. Drawing in some part on his mystical liberal Christian faith he plays with outlandish hagiography, magic, myth, his queer identity and the absurdity of ritual. His work takes his audiences on a storytelling trip, either vocally or mimetically, implicating them in his pieces, either by becoming performers themselves, or contributing to the animation they are experiencing through the suspension of disbelief. Rutter has performed and exhibited in many shows, cabarets and performance events in London and throughout the UK including Unperforming at Toynbee Studios, London, Black Swan Arts, Frome, Cabaret Melancholique, London, Espacio Gallery, London, Qube, Oswestry, and others. Rutter won the Hamad Butt Memorial Prize while studying as a mature student on the BA Hons at Goldsmiths. Alongside his husband, artist and filmmaker John Harmer he was the 2021/2022 artist in Residence at St. Mary Magdalene Academy School, London.

Sophie Sleigh-Johnson is a Southend-on-Sea based writer, artist, performer and lecturer. Her ongoing investigations concern the magico-materialist temporality of place and the esoteric ground rock of comedy, in work distributed across text, cassette, sonic environments, lino prints and local newspapers. She is currently working on a book about landscape as the mythic substrate of the sitcom, read at the intersection of the arcane and the post-industrial. Her latest release is the cassette album Nuncio Ref! released by Crow Versus Crow.

Holly Slingsby is a visual artist based in Wales. Her performances, videos and paintings reflect a fascination with iconographic traditions, drawing on Biblical imagery, mythologies, and contemporary culture. Much of her recent work seeks to convey the often unspoken experience of infertility. Slingsby’s work has been performed, screened and exhibited at Chapter, Cardiff; Tate St Ives; Norwich and Norfolk Festival; Turner Contemporary, Margate; Bòlit, Centre d'Art Contemporani, Girona; Tintype, London; Matt’s Gallery London; Spike Island, Bristol; Modern Art Oxford; Freud Museum, London; CCC Barcelona; LABS Bologna; ICA, London; FEM Festival, Girona; Art Licks Weekend, London; and Barbican, London. In 2023 she was joint winner of the Exeter Contemporary Open.

Ric Stott is an artist based in Sheffield with an MFA in fine Art from Sheffield Hallam University. Finding inspiration from diverse experiences studying medical science, theology and art psychotherapy he explores ideas focusing on the sensual queer body, spirituality and the impact of place on our sense of self. His practice is primarily painting, drawing, writing and ritual performance and he sees his art making as an exercise in fully embodied spirituality. Ordained as a Methodist Minister 20 years ago, his spiritual practice now focuses on earth based, animistic practices. It is the boundary blurring aspect of queer experience that inspires his art. Dualistic categories such as male/female, straight/gay, human/divine, me/you are illusory and Ric’s work seeks to hold a space where those boundaries can be questioned and disrupted.

M. Maria Walhout is an artist, writer and researcher based in Amsterdam. Her work centers around language and the body as tools for (un)making sense. She is interested in all things illegible, unstable and shaky, and the interfacing of transness and the sacred. Her current research project with Goldsmiths revolves around private practice, prayer, and poetics of non-disclosure.

Sarah White works across performance, installation and writing, and is currently studying on the MFA Creative Practice: Dance Professional at Trinity Laban, having previously studied at Chelsea College of Art and Aberystwyth University. Sarah's research centres on improvisation, collaboration, and theological enquiry as sites for meaning making. Notable projects include performing for Art Night Dundee, working as artist-in-residence with The Koppel Project, London, and exhibiting and publishing with Siobhan Davies Dance. Most recently Sarah received funding from the Arts Council DYCP for her performance work and publication, 'He Whom You Shall Love Is Absent' shown at The Swiss Church, London. In 2022 Sarah launched the online Agnoscis Journal which publishes writing across art practice, theory and theology. Sarah is the Visual Arts Programme Curator with Morphē Arts and has worked as an artist mentor with the charity since 2012.