Mouths Like Starlings
The More-Than-Human Book Club
Sun, 9 Jun 2024 18:00 - 19:30
The Writers' Room
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Reframing The Writer’s room as a throat-like space for generating content, the residency is activated by Rhona’s teenage compulsion for licking the pavement, which extended to a daily gnawing of the bricks of her mother’s bathroom wall. Positioning the mouth as the original site of knowing, GIDDY THRESHOLD encounters mouths as absurd portals, strange vessels, as hybrid wild shrieks, as raw noxious openings in the earth, as centres of creation, sexuality and voicings.
I anticipate developing work across writing, photography, film, performance and sound, drawing lively links between the mouth and my own autobiographical experience of books, literature, conversation, writing and communication as life-saving.
GIDDY THRESHOLD will first be inhabited by myself, before inviting collaboration with others, generating content for public-facing events in the latter half of the residency.
About Rhona Eve Clews
Whether melting her body into the innards of her home photocopier, filming erupting geyser postcards found on eBay or crawling on her belly to enter macro-pollen perspectives, Rhona works across text, image, and performance in attempts to collapse ecological distance. She physically performs her compulsion to meld minds with multiple subjectivities and clamber inside other ‘bodies’ drawing upon her past of growing up a working-class hippie to re-situate photography, writing and filmmaking into expanded, somatic, eco-feminist practices and contribute to wider ecologies of care.
She exhibits internationally and often speaks, co-curates and teaches on the connective tissue between art, ecology and psychology/spirituality with previous audiences including Chelsea College of Art, UCL Department of the Anthropocene and London Science Fiction Research Community. She has performed for Black Mountain College Museum, Creative Time, New York and completed art residencies in UK, Australia, and USA.
Rhona was self-taught in art until aged 33, holds a Bachelors in Psychology, a Postgraduate Diploma in Photography, and an MFA in Fine Art, from Slade School of Fine Art. Her simultaneous healing career (25+ years) unconventionally began as her father was a convicted armed robber, plunging Rhona into addressing her self-esteem, embracing myriad art, ecology, healing and somatic approaches. She has a background in Clinical Psychology and also works as a Healer and Mentor.
She's currently studying a Diploma in Environmental Humanities, is a lively member of three art collectives and co-runs The More-Than-Human book club at the Barbican library.
