Ash Witham

Residence period: February 2019
Web

“Am I healed now?”
Performers: Ash Witham and Grace Cuddy

Ash has developed a fixation with honey. Having already used honey medicinally for years, through research and discussion she found honey to be eagerly depicted as a liquid gold, considered to have a dizzying amount of purposes such as cleansing, soothing, curing, relaxing, consuming and preserving. She sought to experience honey anew, as a material and in its relationship to her own body and imagination.

She began experimenting with de-familiarising honey, taking it out of the kitchen cupboard and letting it ooze over different surfaces, exploring it’s viscous movement, how it coats objects, how it coats her skin and her movement. Through this process of material exploration, research and discussion a realisation emerged that at the origin of her fixation was a fascination with honey’s healing qualities.

As an immersive experiment and symbolic gesture Ash went on a honey-fast in order to break patterns and initiate a deeper self-reprogramming. This was dually a genuine effort and also an intentionally humorous one, as if to say, “And what if I only eat honey: am I healed now?”.

This question of “Am I healed now?” takes on an urgency in the final installation and performance, where rituals of healing are juxtaposed with honey presented in a strange and unfamiliar way. Exploring this tension between alienation and intimacy reveals both how our understanding and connection to a material can transform through sensation and ritual, yet also the limitations of our own physical transformation. Looking at the modern obsession with betterment, Ash hopes to invite people to re-examine their healing efforts and consider that the method and the material matters less than the act of allowing something to bring us back to ourselves in order to do the real work of healing.