Bodybox
Dream Fossils
Miriam Eskildsen
About the work
Dream Fossils is a performance installation that explores the slippery, shapeshifting relationship between relics (both emotional and material) and the living.
The unstable skeleton of a secondhand memory is constructed and then dismantled, the domestic and the artistic blur together, and personal mythos is contextualized within lineages of dreaming. Knitted webs form the basis of the textile works, and are cast in a constellation of contexts - as connective tissue, trappings, or quotidian items, as their meaning shape-shifts throughout the performance installation.
The performer slips in and out of various selves through the choreography. Enacting the uncanny and multi-textured ways emotion haunts the body, the artist attempts in turns to alchemize, absorb, accept, and excise it.
This work has developed its textile ideas in response to the choreographers maternal lineage of craftswomen, a deeply fragmented and surreal window into rural life, and the uncertain border dividing the domestic and artistic.
About the artist
Miriam Eskildsen
Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa
Miriam Eskildsen is a choreographer based in Tāmaki Makaurau, New Zealand. Miriam works with textiles and choreography to create visually distinct and emotionally textured dance works.
Working collaboratively with an array of artists, her choreography draws from intersecting interests and vocabularies to explore recurring visual preoccupations: lineages of dreaming, the delicate and surreal nature of memory, and the bittersweet.