Chapman
tiger helix (oblivion)
— ongoing
Tiger Helix (Oblivion) began during the first COVID lockdown, when my therapist asked me to close my eyes and imagine what freedom looked like to me. In the blackness, I saw a shining, suspended, convulsing double helix - looping like a Möbius strip but chunky and made of shimmering tiger-print spandex, with hands reaching out from inside its coils. That strange, vivid image became a guiding research structure: a way to think through freedom as a cyclical, embodied act of reaching, inward and outward, amidst uncertainty and collapse.
Our relationship to nature is ever evolving - my experience of it is mostly in cities, mediated through concrete and fragments of managed green, making reaching for wildness an imaginative, sometimes speculative gesture. Spirals appear throughout nature at all scales, from the arrangement of leaves and seeds to hurricanes, galaxies, and DNA. Spiralism, a Haitian aesthetic tradition, represents chaos, repetition, and cyclical time. Thinking of time as a spiral resists the anxiety of climate collapse, imagining how life might loop and transform even as the world itself seems to be ending.
Over five years, the project has grown through drawing, writing, installation, and live performance. It’s an unstable, permeable world - cyclical, contradictory, and in process. Participants play through movement and improvisation, forming temporary ecosystems where gestures and sensations ripple between bodies. Improvisation draws on morphic resonance - the idea that living things transmit memory. Through collective play and nonverbal communication, we explore the unknown together. Morph suits blur human and nonhuman boundaries, exploring metamorphosis and queerness in nature’s adaptive persistence.
Repeated imagery of urban development sites and nettles embody tension between destruction and regeneration. Tiger Helix (Oblivion) proposes a queer ecological practice - embracing loops, mutations, and play to reimagine wildness and freedom amidst continual change.
Presented as part of the London Conference of Critical Thought stream 'Art & Architecture: Planetary & Apocalyptic Spaces' 2023. Further developed at The Grange 2023, including wall paintings and a movement collaboration with Zanni CT. Another iteration of the work was performed with Sahjan Kooner at Eastside Projects 2023. Currently in further r&d with Zanni CT, Moa Johansson and Samra Mayanja, supported by Towner Eastbourne and Strange Field Glasgow 2025-26.
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