Imo Coates

About

Imo Coates is a Spatial Practitioner, Creative and Researcher currently based in London. Her work explores the traces and projections of relationships between bodies, materials and landscape, within ecologically distinct yet conventionally marginalised areas, often associated with past extractive practices. She focuses on process based research and thinking through making. Prior to studying at the RCA she worked a small London practice for 2 years and studied at Oxford Brookes University.

SOFT GROUND
Imagining a Relationship Between Self, Ground and Place

You descend steeply down, through the ground, the chalk, destination hidden from view. Enveloped in soft white rock on all sides, the path turns, walls and floor green with algae, water trickles down the slope and drips through the ceiling above.

Emerging into the light you are faced with a new wall, (re)assembled from the removed material. It runs adjacent to its primary face, bordering the proposed footpath, forcing a close encounter with the quarried surface.

The space is narrow, chalk dust catches on clothing. With no view of the horizon, senses are heightened: the air is moist, rustling leaves, a skylark on the distant downs.  One side, a bright, white surface, reflects soft light onto the other: an intensive map of material – of dissonances, of subtle changes in colour and texture.

Situated on, in and of the Chalk bedrock that underlies much of the South of England, an alternate relationship between land, landscape and people is imagined through a material and conceptual investigation of ground, grounding and craft, within the South Downs National Park.

Contrary to typical representation (and hence understanding)of landscape as a view from a distant point, Investigations have focused on the hyper-close and intimate. Intervening on the scale of the felt and held. Interaction with the material, forming, performing, engages a bottom-up logic that contrasts with conventional, stratified sequences of cause and effect, dissolving into a process of continuous becoming and unbecoming.

Processes of recording (photogrammetry, archiving, Clay imprinting, traces of material brought, deliberately and accidentally, between the wall and my home, on tools, on clothes, on shoes). Performance (both in productive and generative sense of conscious making or unmaking and as a continuous process of testing, measuring and tentative intervention between self and site that is part-human, part mineral, part elemental, were used to document and speculate an intimate relationship with place, with ground and a proposed shift towards embodiment within place.

Although the project is situated, describing a relationship with a specific place and a specific material, at a specific time, It describes a shift from ‘modern’ optic based perception to that that is based on haptics, using the individual body as a tool to understand, speculate and explore broader relations between humans and land, proposing a shift towards a wider process of embodiment. Interaction with the material, forming, performing, engages a bottom-up logic that contrasts with conventional, stratified sequences of cause and effect, dissolving into a process of continuous becoming and unbecoming.