Lula Braimbridge Rogers - BA (Hons) Fine Art
Hiding and Holding
Lula lovingly manipulates materials and uses her body as a tool for storytelling – setting up stagings that offer the audience a moment to pause. This might unfold as a live performance or linger as imprints within an installation. Working with her materials is an intimate, laborious experience of absorbing and transferring each other's energies.
She crafts with the dancing fibres of felt, hammers soft metal shields, and caringly carves into stone creating affectionate objects. These objects become more like organisms or familiar beings, friends and family because they feel a part of something bigger.
Lula examines a cyclical exchange of care: starting from the material going to the performer, all the way to the community. Building on the ideas of Joannah Hedvah, Audre Lorde and María Puig de la Bellacasa, her works try to articulate the fundamentals of protecting each other, to establish and practice community. To enact kinship, an interdependent sociality and the politics of care.
As someone sensitive to her surroundings by nature, she recognises the importance of creating space for others to take a moment to pause; to ground in the sensory experience; come back into the body; quieten the mind; and recalibrate from the intensity of our current climate. She encourages viewers to participate in spaces rooted in growth, nourishment and healing.
