Penny Chivers Stanley | September 2024

Project title:	the nurture of slow
Location:	Walcot Chapel, Bath, UK
Date(s):	July 2024

artist statement

Penny Chivers Stanley is an interdisciplinary artist based in Wiltshire, England. She works with paint, drawing, text, performance and moving image as interrelated processes with blurred boundaries; working in an emergent way responding to the materiality of varied mediums.

Abstracted figures and gestural marks suggestive of an emotion are a common theme in her painting. Film work includes curated collected sounds and images – Penny is interested in deep listening and capturing moments which convey narrative or a state of being. Her poetry and journalled text emerge through her work. Her performance links to Yin yogic practice; taking slow experiences to connect with and listen to oneself and the more than human world.

Investigating ideas related to lived female experience, slowness, feminist care and how we convey and experience vulnerability are key points of enquiry.

the nurture of slow

My aim was to consider how embracing slowness could shift our attention – to dream, imagine, reflect and pay attention to care theories of our mutual interdependencies and felt vulnerabilities.

The Nurture of Slow was presented as an ambitious five-day solo show and live event in a former mortuary chapel in Bath. Incorporating a range of elements:

a 10 minute film ‘temporalities in sound’

a range of photographs recording ‘corpse pose’ slow, deep listening experiences

a series of small ink, acrylic and text paintings called caesuras (the pauses)

three large mixed media paintings

three ‘rest history’ chairs with invitations to pause

Entangled modes of self-aware thinking and embodied experience inhabited the shifting light of the chapel architecture to produce a meditative, experiential installation. The viewer was invited to slow and reflect as they moved through the exhibition; further underpinned with an evening yin experience within the space, providing a new mode to engage with the work. The film was also shared online as well as q&a and an online walkthrough.

Investigating vulnerability runs throughout my practice; a willingness to use art to open uncomfortable conversations, building connection with self or others – moving toward a Jungian ‘individuation’ – a self-realisation. I had not anticipated a personal trauma early in the project; however, I leaned into making through this ‘painful pause’ as a therapeutic process. Part of the question this project posed was how important my own experience was – the personal within this space.

Several practices were key: learning to rest and be slow, yin yoga and listening.

Frequently reminding myself to pause and consider where I am placing my attention is not what I usually do. Tricia Hershey’s Rest as Resistance (2022) speaks of slowing as ‘imagination work’ which opens a portal when we slow down and rest. This requires an embodied, unravelling of learnt guilt.

Yin yoga (long held restorative poses) has been a revolutionary practice in my ability to still. Sensory awakening through shavasana or corpse pose (the reflective final position of a yoga session) bridging between inner consciousness and the outside world, was a starting point for the work. In combination with deep listening, this ‘laying down’ offers the ability to attune more closely to spatial and auditory presence. Pauline Oliveros described deep listening in Quantum Listening (2022), as an active practice of heightened awareness involving:

“an exchange of energy; sympathetic vibration: tuning into the web of mutually supportive interconnected thoughts, feelings, dreams, vital forces comprising our lives: empathy; the basis for compassion and love.”

Sound and its quality in shifting perception would be a critical mode of research and medium through all pieces as recorded experience in the film work, photographic documentation of process, and ‘sound score’ marks in paintings.

As a multi-layered project, a key methodology involved creating a tone of pared-back simplicity providing opportunity to understand how discrete elements functioned within the collection. A monochrome palette, typed text, pure sounds and abstract mark making evolved as critical components in allowing spaciousness for viewers to interpret work from their own perspective.

Individually, pieces required a lightness of touch – a quiet message – inviting viewers into intimate contemplation, as I aimed to create an immersive meditative experience.

caesura: can you hear the person next to you breathing

Key research involved working technically and critically with a curator, sound artist, film editor and yoga practitioner in realising these aims.

Life factors and a heightened neurodiverse perception have combined with cultural expectations of ‘production’ to ensure a constant ‘doing’ which I and countless others have found to be unsustainable. In the Oxford dictionary, ‘nurture’ is the caring and protecting of something as it grows. Ultimately through this slowness, the ‘something’ has been my work.. but also, myself.