saffron lily

everyday motion


Every day, we engage with motion. It lives in movements marked differently. A spectrum of shapes - you can find it in looped shoelaces, a weighted lean, fingertips clasping to meet a surface, or skin.  These motions exist in the breath and the battle of movements challenged and free. With each day that passes, it’s easy to feel dislocated from the spaces around us. More than ever, we are reminded of distances marked, spaces designed unevenly, and routines displaced. Time has proven again how bodies are picked apart and removed from shared spaces, a forgotten recollection of a Pangea we once formed.  


But within our fractured movement, a collective choreography exists.


Like a leftover conversation still echoing on, our motions impact each other – linked by the interactions we still share.

While the sum of our shapes align differently, each day, we step between combined territories. Some cross limbs across floorboards, others entangle glances within seconds that split. And while we all walk differently; multitudes built within each soft tissue, our stories interweaved and frayed - we remain stitched by the places, and the moments we imprint with each passing.

Caught across familiar skies and concrete pavements, or held in the pauses before a doorstep - a shared movement is marked, a negotiation of boundaries we must navigate. Even in the moments where action feels individualistic, a larger framework exists. A pattern of corporeal repetitions can be found even in spaces we don’t always get to witness.

What are the ways we mark these movements?

And how can we offer that space for each other?  



If we can find ways to feel the weight of our own action, familiarise ourselves with its shape, then maybe we can witness our movements differently. See them in a conscious light. Outline the angles of where we sit and fold together. Trace the overlap.


What is the architecture of your day to day? And if our bones were buildings, what would the cityscape stand like? Would we meet each other, and could we build a pulse carried from one beat to another: together, continuous, and always evolving?


There is a collective choreography in our individual motion. 
It shapes the ability of free movement for all.

This series was featured in the publication In Real Life  (pictured) produced by Develop the youth programme of The Photographer's Gallery in London.
Copies can be purchased here.  

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