EXHIBITION

TO GATHER TOGETHER TO TOUCH

Spring 2022

Artist duo Lucy Cash & Luke Pell, together known as Phos’, have been collaborating with The Barn throughout the past year. Participants of our inaugural Becoming Earthly programme, they hosted a series of workshop encounters with our volunteers during the pandemic and curated the micro-festival Phosphorescence last October. Here in this exhibition, traces of those meetings are gathered together to touch. The Barn’s gallery becoming a lyric essay; a space to move with a playful and gently provocative assemblage of words, images and ideas. Through their expanded poetics and choreographic practice, they invite us to pay close attention to one another, to the landscapes of our bodies and those of the wider world as an essential act of respair.

On Phos

Lucy and Luke (Phos) are an artist duo who work with scores and expanded poetics. What is expanded poetics? It could mean an unfolding conversation between two people halfway across the globe, or the way a camera lingers on a moving body, or a writing practice that is also a long walk. It is a way of making things that emphasises close attention to all the ripples and currents and unexpected turns that emerge along the way. These kinds of extensions into the world around us suggest how we might see things differently, be together in other ways – a queer politics of taking care.

Phosphorescence was a micro festival in October 2021 curated by Phos that brought together artists across forms concerned with different modalities of attention, the choreographic and deep care for the environment. In a time that was defined by uncertainty, the festival was a space for gathering and for acknowledging absence. A key dimension of absence was that – for a variety of reasons – Luke and Lucy were not able to be physically on site. And yet, those of us who were there felt their presence. These two who had assembled us together were somehow everywhere.

I was invited to act as ‘host’ of the festival and became a witness to the unfolding actions and encounters. Two of the scores in this exhibition are my responses. The first aims to capture the possibilities of palpable absence and the way imagination rushes to fill in gaps and so suggest alternative realities. The second acknowledges the dizzyingly inventive work at the Phosphorescence Festival arising from grounded practices of attention, from Ieva Grigelionyte’s experiments with land and ice cream, to Elizabeth Reeder & Amanda Thompson’s collaborations across text, image, and the hard work of making home. My hope is that these scores offer one further layer, one more expansion, to the poetics that Phos have set in motion.

Johanna Linsley is an artist, writer and lecturer based in Dundee

This is a FREE exhibition, booking not required

*Closed on these dates due to private functions 19 March, 21, 22 and 23 April, 13,14 and 20 May and 2, 3, 4 and 11 June.