residuals – Creative & dance journal

Residuals #10 Light

In January 2025 – a year after starting the Residuals series, I used performance and long exposure photography to record light – its reflection from the surfaces of moving bodies, as a residual – including darkness and shadow too! Here are presented these ‘light graphs’ from the session at Goldsmiths CI at Goldsmiths, University of London on Saturday 18 January.

Residuals #8 Apple picking

The apple harvest of 2024 was one of the most prodigious I’ve known. Dancer Jo Dyer and I performed a dance to celebrate the apple harvest on 12 September 2024 . We picked apples using them as a movement and drawing construct. Not unlike the dancing/dance drawing with potatoes in Residuals #4, and Residuals #7 but now apples. (Pomme rather than pomme de terre!)

Residuals #6 Shadow Mirror

The Residual series #1 – #5, had all used charcoal on paper for mark-making, or as we might otherwise say, charcoal was used for marking the performance!

In Residuals #6 then shadow was the mark-making element. It was performed at OVADA, Osney Mead, Oxford on Tuesday 13 August 2024. The idea of a mirror dance is partly based on the notion that individuals in social relations naturally mirror each other resulting in symmetric patterns. It’s also such a simple dance that it hardly seems like a dance at all – which it is!

Residuals #5 Blocking & Exclusion

Like all of the residuals performances, Residuals #5 was co-created – but this time with an artist who prefers not to be named, and who I’ll address in this article as the Unknown Artist. The idea of blocking movement – which in the visual arts would be ‘masking’ – also has a social narrative too. This performance was at OVADA, Osney Mead, Oxford on Tuesday 6 August 2024.

Residuals #4 – Integrated Research Practice

On Sunday June 2, working with students and volunteers in their community garden at Schumacher College, Dartington, I combined planting potatoes for research into potato yields with the residuals practice of dance making and mark-making. I call this an ‘integrated research practice’ as the residuals practice is a research too.