Over the summer I met up with fellow artist and friend Olivia Hicks to make, what turned out to be, an incredible performative experience.

We’d known each other for a brief time online after connecting through a show in Lewes that we’d both been exhibiting in. It turns out that we’d known of each other many years before in previous lives in Oxford through our partners at the time. After realising this we discovered many similarities in difficult experiences we’d been through. We were both on profound journeys of trauma recovery.

One day I received a message from O saying she’d had a dream about us wrapping and unwrapping binds from each others bodies. It felt powerful even then, the thought of a mutual creative acknowledgement and release of everything we’d experienced. An unspoken shared somatic woven drawing.

On a beautiful light filled day in August we made the work on a deserted part of the beach in Hove. We wore simple white garments and stood bare legged facing each other in the shallow waves with skeins of red and magenta traphilo*.

The sea both grounded and connected us; the cleansing and renewal of salt water and the waves echoing emotional ebb and flow. It was silent apart from the rush of tidal flow and the shutter clicks of the photographer who was documenting us.

With no preparation or plans we started to bind each others bodies with the threads. Stepping forward in turn to wrap limbs, face, hands and passing the skeins back and forth. The threads moved with our bodies, many falling into a cat’s cradle of connection that hung between us. The flow was gentle and felt incredibly healing. Neither of us had known how the performance would manifest. Nor imagined this soft entangled structure that emerged between us moving with the water and our bodies.

Every so often we would stoop and wash our face and hands in the sea, an act of cleansing and renewal. When the threads between us became too heavy we stopped -hauling and dragging the cradle up the beach releasing ourselves from the binds.

Neither of us had anticipated how gentle and powerful the performance was. How a mutual acknowledgement of traumatic experience and a focus to heal could reveal itself as this beautiful red/pink structural form.

It felt like veins and vessels, arteries unravelled.. a drawing of recognition.

We are in the infancy of this project, so much more to explore. The name Cat’s cradle came instantly as we realised what we’d woven between us. We have exciting ideas and plans which will be shared further down the line ..or the thread.

From wikipedia

Independent versions of this game have been found in indigenous cultures throughout the world, including in Africa, Eastern Asia, the Pacific Islands, Australia, the Americas, and the Arctic.[2]: page 161 [3][4]

These patterns feel magical to me, a mandala of intent. The structure we wove knits the past and present in such a poignant way, I’m so excited by the prospects for this project.

Find Olivia’s stunning work here Olivia Hicks .

Please do share in comments any reflections on this and memories or knowledge of the game.

❤️

• Traphilo is created from recycled clothing to form a soft and strong fabric thread.

Beautiful words from Rainer Maria Rilke below;

When anxious, uneasy, and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused."Rainer Maria Rilke