Vibrant Matter was presented as part of the Draw to Perform festival in July 2022. The title of the work is taken from a book of the same name, authored by Jane Bennett. The text argues for the philosophical and political importance of attentiveness to the agency and vitality of matter and “Things”.

Vibrant Matter is the culmination of a body of work made during lockdown that turns the body into a printmaking tool and press. Unlike the normal intent of most printmaking processes, which excel at mass reproduction, mono-printing is a type of printmaking that makes unique one-off works. Monoprints, and the related method monotypes, are often made by painting and drawing directly onto a mono-printing plate (usually metal or glass). In this performance, three performers use their bodies to make marks on large-scale mono-printing plates. The performers feel their way across the plate, every touch or moment of contact with the paper produces a mark on the print. The contact improvisation of the performer is a felt rather than a visual process with the movement being generated through a focus on contact between flesh and plate: the performing body acting as paint-brush, drawing tool and printing press combined. The resultant prints made in this performance are 'contact relics', as art historian Jennifer Roberts would have it; sacred artefacts of a moment of contact, a moment in time.

During the pandemic, touch and contact between persons were prohibited, regulated, and controlled, whilst at the same time, a critical awareness of the impact of touch and contact was ominously present. An object or surface touched by a stranger moments before could be the source of infection. In addition, collaborative enterprise, which is often the backbone of printmaking practice, was inaccessible. Printmaking studios once buzzing with life stood empty yet the ghostly contact relics of inky smudgy fingerprints remained.

Unlike the solo work of the lockdown through which this process was generated, this performance is for multiple performers. At times they appear isolated, lost in reverie, and at other times utterly dependent on one another. At the start of the performance, the performers coat printmaking plates in the vibrant colours common to the four colour separation processes in printmaking; process yellow, magenta, and cyan. Four-colour separation is a method of deconstructing photographic images in order to reconstitute the image in a printmaking process. This deconstruction and reconstruction of the image can perhaps become a metaphor for the deconstruction and reconstruction of contact and touch brought into sharp relief over the last two years. Over the course of the performance layers of colour develop on the paper but at first, the result is hidden from sight in a blind moment of felt contact between the performer and the plate. The resultant prints and printing plates unveil themselves slowly over the course of the performance in shimmering and translucent colour. As if, perhaps, they are emerging from their own strange lockdown, messages from another world, another time; inscribed vibrant matter to vibrant matter.