Wormshine (2024, ongoing)

Exhibition history 2025 SOIL, Somerset House, London, UK (video installation); 2024 Dance Remainings, Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg SE (performance)

“Wormshine” is a new, ongoing research project that considers the figure of the worm as an embodied metaphor – a queer body, a soft body, a vulnerable body, one that encourages us to look down instead of up and that ceaselessly turns the soil to level the inequalities we would otherwise be standing on.

It sits in the wider context of my practice which, due to the recent acceleration of environmental, political and social crises and heightened sense of precarity, has become more directly concerned with methods of communal survival and non-human-centric ways-of-being. Recent work has been exploring what we as humans can learn about new-world-building from observing the multispecies entanglements we are a part of. Specifically, how the other creatures, organisms and intelligences we share this planet with come together in hidden, surprising and dynamic ways.

“Wormshine” is a new thread of this research that utilises choreography, sound, video, text and collage as methods of free-exploring the potential not only of the worm-body but of compost, darkness, stillness and softness. The work explores softness and vulnerability as signs of strength; spineless-ness and slippery-ness as modes of resistance; minor gestures and small traces; the hidden labour of the worm and work that goes unseen.

In the form of a video collage, Wormshine coils its way across seven monitors rooted to the ground. The work is an assemblage of research material: footage from university labs and the archives of the Natural History Museum; records of Darwin’s experiments with earthworms at Down House; images of worms in art and popular culture; and myriad other annelid imagery. Two choreographies move through all of this: one is a text that moves linguistically through soil horizons. The other is movement material showing tasks enacted by a lone performer working with rope. The body casts, crawls and turns, flattening and coiling, continuously without acknowledgement. This is an experiment in embodying the worm as an image – in exploring softness, resilience, strength and hidden labour.