My practice is from a place situating movement art/dance and a visual practice, with scholarship in my role as a clinical psychology academic. I am interested in improvised movement and energy manipulation as a way of knowing the self, other beings, and the environment. The body is my primary expressive medium. By using an increasingly careful way of “listening” through all the senses, a form of information is transmitted in an unconscious, or residual manner. Through tuning into the mysteries of a space, site, or other collaborators, I ask how we can use our bodies and movement to learn about the history of the participants and the natural world. I aim to blur the boundaries between art and life, constantly expanding my currently-held notions of “work”, whereby the totality of my actions in the world increasingly come to constitute my practice. I hope to bring together learning acquired through art, physicality, and psychology to expand the borders of each discipline.
I will explore the knowledge gained through improvised impulses in movement and drawing. I am interested in learning whether “knowing” arrives in the body in subliminal form, how (and if) it becomes conscious, and in what ways it changes the body. Importantly, I wonder how this can be expressed fully to an audience. I inquire whether working and living in the nude, in the presence of others doing the same, affords different realizations about the transmission of information than similar work in a clothed state. For example, how does clothing harness our intuitive processes? Does its exclusion free us from these restrictions? Does nudity remove some of the impediments to improvisation? What restrictions might be placed onto the self through nudity, especially if is an unfamiliar practice? The work constructed during this residency will consist of daily practice-as-research (movement and drawing), culminating in a short performance and a series of 2-dimensional works on paper. The work will be furthered into choreography and paintings after the completion of the residency.
Jaime Williams is an artist and scholar, currently employed as an Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University of Regina. She completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of Regina, her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art at Simon Fraser University, and her BFA in painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.