Working with sign language

In worship, posture, movement and gesture are important elements along with words, rituals and music. But what is gesture? Unfortunately we often, use the term gesture more or less synonymously to movement, action or motion. Gestures are supplements to language. If we want to read meaning, we look at gestures. A more nuanced way of thinking of gestures is that it brings order to attitude of movements of the body. This attitudes of movements carry a certain semiotic significance that are important to all our communication, with god or otherwise.

Our gestures promote the involvement of body, mind and spirit in the act of worship.I am interested to discover how this happens. Here's where sign language comes in. How does sign language compare to gesture? How does it compare to spoken language? Sign language is gestural. It is like speech as in it has a gestural component.Where does the sign stop and the gesture begin? Is sign language a complex systems of gestures developed over centuries? How can it help my inquiry into gestures of worship?

Secretly I believe that our gestures,rhythms and movements have been quietly infiltrated by various coded sets of movements through our unceasing prostration and worship to countless, invisible, indulgent gods over thousands of years, ever since we first conceived the idea of a higher being. What better way to investigate my claims then to use a beautiful and elaborate visual language system that might have developed over hundreds maybe thousand of years using gestures alone in their natural form without the spoken word.

In this series of works, I use handshape poetry through gestures, signs and dance to try to fathom the wonder that is 'kavadi', a hallowed prosthesis that lie at the center of my practice. We use the form, structure and sensitivity of handshapes associated with words like portable altar, pierced, self sacrifice, burden, trance and faith to strive towards an essence.

I strive towards an essence through rhythmic patterns of te following phrases and words.

portable altar/temple
burden ceremony
walking speared temple
pierced temple burden
sacrifice ceremony wow
pierce altar trance
faith burden pierce trance

wow
ceremony
sacrifice
tongue
skin
cheek
trance
sleepwalking
jesus
pierce
wound
sew
spear
altar
portable
faith
serve

Digital archives and activism

Its the crack of dawn on a wet Irish Sunday. A grey pall hangs over a Dublin driven to mourning. All is quiet. Alina and I silently look over our plans for the day over mugs of hot tea. The studio lights are on and the set is ready for the day's shoot. For the umpteenth time, I observe Alina working with the movement of thought through her body. In her silent contemplation, with the slightest shiver in her shoulders, she is redefining her anatomy, freeing her limbs, negotiating gravity and committing to memory. I marvel at the way she gets movement, with barely a glance at the research material I have prepared for her. We are working on a what I call the 'hosanna' gestures today. I have identified some 90 of them. We will get through them quickly. I have spent the last 3 years on a long term research project to archive gestures, movements and rhythms of worship to understand their impact on our everyday lives. I wanted to know how our movements are limited by centuri...

My Sister's Coven

I am angry. I am still angry with my big sister for dying on me. As I embark on this project I am once again angry and helpless, the way I felt when she whispered ‘help me’ , her final words to me from her deathbed. This exhibition is a reified representation of my witchy big sister’s little apartment in Yarraville Melbourne the day she died in 2004. I don't remember it much. There are little details that stick in my mind - bits and pieces of a sparsely populated migrant’s bedsit living on the breadline away from her family and from care and love. Even before my sister got sick and left home for a better life in Australia, she wielded generous healing magic. Living away from her family she escaped the brutal actuality of migrant lives through her magic. She braved the trauma and the many challenges of her new life through her magic. When cancer arrived in 2004, she turned to magic to find the resources for coping with a seemingly endless cycle of h...

MIcro performances - 5 minutes performances

I study gestures. And often, I apply a scientific approach to my study. I reduce bodily movements down to their component parts. I strip my objects of study out of their contexts, removing any artifact, clothing or space/place that might interfere or distract. I often choose to shoot my photographs/videos in a dark studio or in a whited-out space, bereft of all detail. And the work is more times then not the result of short bursts of intense activity. All this helps me bring a certain amount of focus on the gesture itself. This is how my micro-performances came about. I decided to shoot simple, loose ideas quickly. Working with someone like Alina helps tremendously. I appear at my studio with some props and half-baked ideas. I know what I want and I have a visual in my head that directs me. Enter Alina. She gets me and she gets movement, pose and attitude. I proceed to set up the backdrops and lights for the shoot and we spend 5 to 15 minutes pulling something ...

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