Sleepless with Leah Clements & Jenn Ashworth

Leah Clements (second from left) in her exhibition INSOMNIA, during the FDRG session

This session focuses on ‘That Other Place’ by Leah Clements and Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth, two texts from 2019 that approach insomnia as a result as well as a cause of physical and mental illness. Both authors also highlight the link between sleeplessness and creative output.

In ‘That Other Place’, Clements outlines eight thoughts on sleep from personal experience, her own practice, and further research. Founded in a crip and feminist context, her short essay stems from an excitement at the goodies sleep can hold - from sharing collective dreams to carving out a space of one’s own outside capitalism, and also faces and to a degree embraces some of the horrors of sleep, such as death-likeness, and sleep paralysis. 

Notes Made While Falling is an experimental memoir and a critical exploration of traumatised and sickened selves in fiction and film. Visceral, intense, and at times hallucinatory, it delves into questions of creativity, spirituality, illness, and the limits of fiction. The book centres on Ashworth's experience of traumatic childbirth, its long aftermath, and the roots of trauma and creativity in an unusual childhood. The excerpts selected for this meeting explore how insomnia is caused by and circularly exacerbates physical and mental illness, and query its relationship to creative production.

Readings

Together we will read:

Leah Clements, ‘That Other Place,’ in How To Sleep Faster, Arcadia Missa, Issue 10: Sleep (2019) 

Jenn Ashworth Notes Made While Falling (excerpts), Goldsmiths Press (2019)

Texts will be emailed to participants beforehand.

There is no need to read in advance as we will read them out loud, one person at a time, together.

REGISTER

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sleepless-with-leah-clements-jenn-ashworth-tickets-449507748777?utm_campaign=post_publish&utm_medium=email&utm_source=eventbrite&utm_content=shortLinkNewEmail

Location

This session will be held within Leah Clements’s exhibition INSOMNIA at South Kiosk, London. South Kiosk is located in Copeland Park in Peckham, London. The full address is: Unit DG.1 Bussey Building, 133 Copeland Rd, London SE15 3S. 

https://southkiosk.com

INSOMNIA Exhibition

The meeting takes place within Leah Clements’s solo exhibition INSOMNIA, curated by Mariana Lemos, which opens at South Kiosk in December 2022. INSOMNIA is Clements’s first exhibition of photographic work, looking into the emotional and psychological effects of insomnia-related sleep phenomena and sleep paralysis, through ambiguous, grainy and in-depth photographs, accompanied by vocalised image descriptions. INSOMNIA reveals the surreal or paranormal side of being estranged in one’s own home. Body and mind thrown out of time, between hyper-alertness and loss of consciousness. In these images, there are shadows lurking, eerie lights flickering, water, silence... Taken at night when the atmosphere drops and in the blink of an eye, the hinterland is revealed. Clements’ work often suggests this otherworldly space as a collective alternative to that of the present sick body. In INSOMNIA this will be further explored through integrating creative access adjustments into the artwork, the exhibition-making process and the public programme.

Bios

Jenn Ashworth was born in Preston and studied at Cambridge and Manchester. Her novels include A Kind of Intimacy and Fell. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

Leah Clements is an artist from and based in London whose practice spans film, photography, performance, writing, installation, and other media. Her work is concerned with the relationship between psychological, emotional, and physical states often through personal accounts of unusual or hard-to-articulate experiences. Her practice also focuses on sickness/cripness/disability in art, in critical and practical ways. Recent commissions include an artist residency at Serpentine Galleries, and her solo show ‘The Siren of the Deep’ at Eastside Projects.

Website: www. leahclements.com

IG: @leah_r_clements

Access Docs for Artists, www.accessdocsforartists.com/homepage

Mariana Lemos is a contemporary art curator and gallery professional based in London and Lisbon. She received her MFA in Curating from the Goldsmiths University of London (2020), as well as her BA in Fine Arts (2015). Her curatorial practice is focused on Feminist and Performance Art in times of climate crisis, drawing from Posthumanism, Queer, Feminist, Crip and Affect theories. She currently works as Studio Manager for artist Angela de la Cruz, having previously worked at Union Pacific Gallery, Arcadia Missa, Black Tower and the Feminist Library, following several years at Lisson Gallery. She is an organising member of SALOON London, a network for women and nonbinary people working in the arts, the FDRG feminist reading group, and Plants Speak If We Listen, research group, as well as a contributing editor at Mercurius Magazine.

Website: www.marianalemos.co.uk/

Access

South Kiosk is wheelchair accessible by a ramp. The closest train station is Peckham Rye, which is a 3 minute walk from the gallery at a google map ‘walk’ pace. The station doesn’t have wheelchair access. The closest bus stop is just outside Peckham Rye station. Chairs with backs, as well as softer seating, will be available. An audio track describing the photographic work is part of the exhibition, and attendees will have a chance to hear this within the session. 

British Sign Language

If you require BSL interpretation, please let us know by 1 December by contacting feministduration@gmail.com

For any further questions about the event or for venue questions please contact feministduration@gmail.com

Image Description

An eerie yellow/greenish tinted analogue photograph of the top corner of a room. The ceiling is concrete, the left-hand wall is all windows, with a sheer white curtain covering them from the top, but see-through enough to show the darkness outside. The right-hand wall is plain white with a square mirror almost meeting the other wall, which we can just see the top of, reflecting the curtains back. We can also just about see the reflection of the opposite corner which looks very far away from us because of its doubled distance. There the curtains meet the opposite wall, and a steel extraction unit is fixed in the corner. But beyond its eerie tint, something is a little off with this image. A bright blur flickers across some of the ceiling and curtains: reflected ripples or suspended fire, it holds an active and ghostly presence.

Feminist Duration

This meeting is part of the Feminist Duration series which explores under-known texts, ideas, and movements associated with earlier periods of feminist activity in the UK. Originally organised as part of a year-long residency at the South London Gallery, and moved online during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the programme juxtaposes earlier moments of feminist with current urgencies and struggles.

By restoring material texture to overlooked political and cultural movements, it seeks to resist versions of the past that reduce feminist struggle to one-dimensional stereotypes. Looking to the past to activate its nascent potential, the programme aims to identify tools that can inspire and enrich further collective action, promoting the intergenerational exchange of knowledge and experience. While honouring earlier feminisms, the series also highlights how collaboration, difference, and dissent have characterised previous feminist movements, and how feminists have both negotiated, and failed to significantly attend to, differences between themselves.

Feminist Duration is generously supported by the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership.