LAURA HUDSPITH

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Internal Circumstances, CIBC Square

Wild woman’s eye in Smash the ceiling, floor, and walls; take the broken shards and blow it black, Pittsburgh Glass Center

Enduring Emanations, Mrs.

Study of a Kidney Bowl and the Four Humors of the Body, The Plumb

The infinitesimal stirs me as the cosmological in Thump, whoosh, rumble, Miller ICA

Pith, Pelt

Wounds are to fissures, an invitation for a joining in Everything Once Arranged Has Become Scattered, The Anderson Gallery

Animacy Orbs and en- /un- /-en in Vessels, Orbs, and Pyrophytic Pods, Zalucky Contemporary

Bed of Nails in Paradeisos, Galerie Nicolas Robert

Bloom in moveObjects On, The Plumb

Skin Suit performance series in There Are Seams in Purgatory, McDonough Museum  

A quilt to hold the barrier between worlds

Illness and Objecthood in Cuties Who are Nice, Kontort

 

The infitesimal stirs me as the cosmological 
in Thump, whoosh, rumble curated by Elizabeth Chodos

Miller Institute for Contemporary Art
Pittsburgh PA, USA
March 25 - April 16, 2023

Thump, whoosh, rumble is the MFA thesis exhibtion of Carnegie Mellon’s graduating class of 2023, including works by Sarah Bowling, Jessica Fuquay, Laura Hudspith, Rosable Rosalind, Rebecca Shapass, and Caroline Yoo. The six artists have each created solo thesis exhibtions, set across the museum’s three floors. 

Laura Hudspith is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist whose work and research are guided by the experience of living with chronic illness. Using her body, illness, and daily life as guides for philosophical pursuits, she has developed a biophilosophy called feeling with—that proposes relearning the world and one's body within it as ontologically flexible entities. Feeling with—doubles as an actionable meditation practice for envisioning the molecular body that centers inward-looking and deep feeling. Through its practice, Hudspith encounters the healing properties of experiencing the profound sensation of wonder. Through her work, she offers wonder as a form of molecular healing.

At the intersection of philosophy and science, Hudspith’s research traverses medicine, biochemistry, geology, and physics. As an artist, her presence in these spaces allows her to cast around for material resonances to bring back to the studio, searching for materials that might deepen or challenge what she knows of the world and her embodied experience of it. Two such matters that excite her work and thinking are salts and glass. Salts cure and kill, soothe and corrode. Emerging from her ongoing relationship to saline drips, medicinal-grade, obscure, and ordinary salts feature prominently in Hudspith’s work. A glass molecule changes matter- states when in relation to another, inciting itself into movement. Though this activity is imperceptible to humans, salts and glass are on the move. Could being in the presence of these dynamic materials help to reorient our thinking on bodies and illness and allow us to embrace our own changefulness and becoming? Might establishing relationships with the smallest bits of the world impact our larger interactions within it, with each other?

Hudspith’s work titled The infinitesimal stirs me as the cosmological brings macro and micro time/scales into relation with one another. The darkened installation space is an invitation for visitors to practice the tenets of feeling with–, to turn inwards for encounters with their molecular selves, towards the knowledges and perplexities within. Small, cell-like sculptures called Orbs are perched atop varied steel structures arranged to choreograph slow, wandering, and meditative movements. Each holds within it a silken photograph of the artist’s body taken during moments of illness and crystalized by salts to varying degrees of legibility. Others are seeded with medicinal herbs and extracts, small keepsakes, or medical flotsam. Salts within Orbs are on the move, slowly shifting, corroding, and cracking their resin encasement. Though not within our lifetimes, salts will transform metaphors back into materials, then perhaps, to something else unknown. 

At the installation’s core, a large stained glass sculpture titled Body (Torus) holds space as would a body and is witness to the installation around it. Overture, Coda (Braid) – the final element of Hudspith’s immersive installation – acts as a touchstone upon entry and exit from the installation space. Here, a long braid of the artist’s hair is submerged in a medicinal salt brine inside a shallow vessel, slowly crystallizing throughout the course of the exhibition. 


 

        i.  Seeing and being seen, knowing and unknowing: Legibility 

“Sitting at the triage desk, I wonder how I can give this thing a number, pain that although very real, leaves no visible, no tangible trace of its presence on the body. It begins to make sense, the sheer number of conditions that affect femme bodies and the many varied bodies of those at the margins that are shrugged off, misdiagnosed as imagined, granted less research funding, left sitting in the waiting room... I sense an understanding growing in me on the limits of our human perceptual range and the language that we have built up around it.”

The question of legibility holds within it fundamental questions surrounding our (human) capacity to perceive and understand the world as it is. Technologies improve, yet much remains elusive. What is the world from the perspective of a seed crystal or a cell? What might we learn to know from a braid of hair?

Hair is archival; like salts, its many molecules are tightly bound, imporous, slow to decay. Though quick to cut – a way we mark time – hair is slow to grow; braiding it requires attention; it requires care. Once the hair is divided into strands, the action becomes repetitive, looping, and meditative, as in the drawing of figure eights in space, little infinities. Hair archives a life lived; like rings of growth in a tree’s hardwood, hair holds time, codifying biological and socio-cultural data. 

Cut following recovery from her first major autoimmune flare, a long braid of the artist’s hair is curled inside a shallow vessel in Overture, Coda (Braid). The vessel is inset into a tall steel structure as a font, and contains a brine of magnesium sulfate, more commonly known as Epsom salts. Here, the medicinal salts enfold this bodily flotsam, slowly crystallizing it over the course of the exhibition.



       ii.  Bodies, being/s, modalities: Kinship

“Countless liters of saline solution were administered by doctors unable to deduce the originating location of my symptoms. This was before we knew that the ‘location’ was all of me and nowhere specifically, as with autoimmunity. I became interested in matters that pose dialectical problems. I became interested in salts. Salts cure and kill, soothe and corrode. Plastic tubing sketched the relation between us, saline and me, two distinct bodies becoming one and many for a time. And for a time, my body would quiet.”  

Hudspith’s experiences as a patient open new avenues of inquiry. Her work considers the makeup of bodily tissues and the atomic forms of her studio materials. Such querying has led her to imagine a shape that embodies the symptomatic hypervigilance inherent to the experience of chronic illness: the torus. Looking deeply – funneling its focus and tumbling into the center of its being – a torus’s gaze bends around its own curvature and is suddenly looking out into spaces that exceed its surface, yet exist in the same way; an auto-reorientation from within to without and around again. Is a torus centrifugal or is it a witness to a swirling world around it? Body (Torus) motions us to follow in its poetics, to turn inwards so as to look out.



       iii.  To stir in-, to be stirred within: Wonder

“When I am in pain, I shift into pathological time, horizontal time, slow-time. From this position, I can feel around me in search of connections. And I can pause, to witness each point that is the now, and the now, and the now that is also this cell and that molecule and atom of me, all being and knowing their own logics and desires, suspended energetically so as to be apart, but also to hold together–tenderly. Feeling with my illness is a falling-into the biological stuff of my being. The infinitesimal stirs me as the cosmological. As wonder touches the atoms, molecules, cells, and tissues of me, I begin to feel calm, collected, connected... I train my focus to hold onto and to be held by it, to live on from within it.”

Is salt an ontologically stable material; Is a body? A brine is created by stirring a mixture of water and salt until all ions are released. Salts have the capacity to split apart, recombine, become attached to other ions, and to return, like batteries of potential energy. By telescoping toward such seemingly inconsequential matters as salts and cells, how might we come to know the world? Would we re-emerge with a new vantage, one that sees outside of ourselves, sees each other – our porous bodies – more fully and compassionately?

Having been submerged in various brines, images of the artist’s body and surroundings the silken fibers of these images become points for crystal nucleation–invitations for this enduring matter to envelop a document of her being. Warped, curled, and obfuscated to varying degrees by salts, images become objects, then cast in a resin that degrades in ultraviolet light. Orbs appear to have arrested the transformation of materials within, but the salts are on the move.

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• Text in quotations are excerpts from Hudspith’s thesis “Feeling with–”. PDF here.

Each Orb from this series of twenty carries a unique name. Orb [human bean], and Orb [here, reach] are pictured above photographed in daylight. 

Orb [human, bean], (2021). Photographic document taken by the artist during moment of chronic illness of her body and surroundings printed on silk; single crystalization of copper sulfate; pigment, UV degrading resin, steel, light. Orb: 7 x 7 x 2 ½ inches

Orb [here, reach], (2022). Photographic document taken by the artist during moment of chronic illness of her body and surroundings printed on silk; crystalizations of copper sulfate; sage matter pigment, pigment, UV degrading resin, steel, light. Orb: 7 x 7 x  2 ½ inches

©Laura Hudspith