Somatic Tours
‘Focused on tuning into our internal perception, these tours see a small group of participants guided to use movement, self-sensing, gentle self-touch and vocalisations to awaken an awareness of the felt sense of the body.
The tour explores how we move and orient ourselves in space, and how we feel in proximity to art.
Drawing on the material, structural and tactile qualities of the sculptures on display, and their resonances with the cellular organisation and expression of our own bodies, Kerton explores how an embodied perspective can enhance our perception and engagement with the relational dynamics of space and form.’
— from the Hayward Gallery Website
Image: preliminary sketch book plan for Hayward Gallery Somatic Tours, AD Kerton, 2024
Somatic Facilitation for Creative Engagement with Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Practices… is a pretty dry albeit accurate description of the artistic-somatic methodology I was invited to develop by the Hayward Gallery, London, for the exhibition ‘When Forms Come Alive’, 7 Feb – 6 May 2024.
‘Somatic Tour’ is another way of referring to this experimental and nascent format, which aims to foreground the primary reality that we enter into exhibition spaces as conscious cellular four dimensional sensory motor processes… complexities otherwise known as bodies.
Somatics is a general term for practices that invite awareness to the internal felt sense of our bodily experience. Somatic practices emphasise the subjectivity of being a body and acknowledge that a body is a living process.
Within the context of an art exhibition, my aim for a ‘Somatic Tour’ is to facilitate awakening to our felt sense of ourselves, in order to invite individual creative responses and embodied perspectives on the experience of being in relation to art.
This is a methodology that recognises perception as a subjective and cellular process and centres e.g: proprioceptive, interoceptive, relational, emotional and phenomenological engagement, thereby I feel expanding the scope of how art might function, affect or inspire us.
Through first taking time to identify thematic, formal, material, spatial, gestural or conceptual qualities and processes within the art works / exhibition or gallery space itself, I then locate these qualities / processes within aspects of our anatomy and physiology. These somatic resonances or analogies - emerging directly from the art work/s or their context - inspire the embodied explorations of movement, self-sensing and self-touch I then facilitate for participants.
‘Somatic Tours’ are an exciting new development in my creative practise. My intention for them is toward new individual perspectives and responses, through a process of becoming more conscious: more conscious of our felt awareness of ourselves, both as we are physically in the present moment and in relation to art.
AD Kerton, 2024