Chapman
bio
I’m an interdisciplinary artist and organiser from Newcastle, living and working in London.
I make experimental performance, drawing, sculpture, video, music and writing. My work moves through sprawling connections and resonances between linguistics, queer theory, pseudoscience, somatics, community work, internet philosophy and pop culture. I’m drawn to phenomena and experiences I find hard to grasp or articulate.
I make my work in oscillation between playful solo-study, and taking the research questions live with others to test out. Turning them cellular, relational. Co-producing material that’s then further expanded, chopped, layered and collaged - coagulating something other from it again. Turning a drawing, into a performance score, into a video, into an installation and back again.
I’m obsessed with what happens when bodies gather - watching, performing, participating; and the messy knowledge that emerges together. I enjoy processes of transformation , as they make me feel like it’s possible for things to change. I want to make art as strange as life is.
Currently, I’m making drawings, sculptures and prompts for movement, and writing poems about dissociation; vibrating and getting lost between the hyper-demand to stay present, and the deep pull to float away. As well as a solo exhibition that uses installation, performance, and tiger print morph suits to explore queer, embodied notions of freedom and collective transformation in response to the polycrisis.
I set up MINCE, a queer WIP night, to create sweaty, imperfect, collective space for testing live ideas. I’m also Managing Director of the radical, feminist, queer liberation ensemble F*Choir, and work as an access support worker - building politicised structures for collaboration and experimentation.