Feeling Measurements, 2018

Open Space, Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ Territories, (Victoria, BC)

​

​

Feeling Measurements is a multi-media installation including videos, zines, signs and ropes that speak to queer experiences of place, using the fathom as an embodied methodology. The fathom is the distance between two arms outstretched, from fingertip to fingertip. The word fathom derives from the old English word to embrace and speaks to what is graspable or imaginable and what is not. What is fathomable can be understood and embodied, what is unfathomable cannot. The fathom was originally used to measure land, but came to be used to measure of the depth of water. A knot would be tied into a rope for every fathom measured against one’s body.

 

Anchored in the fathom as a metaphor, Feeling Measurements has become an emergent, collaborative, and inter-generational methodology of research, skill-sharing, and storytelling that emerged from a six-month residency at Open Space, Victoria, Canada alongside curators/collaborators Megan Quigley and Doug Jarvis. Exploring the body in space, Feeling Measurements has investigated how we relate to, and move through our physical, emotional, technological, and sonic environments, asking these questions from queer perspectives; such as how do the ways we inherit, inhabit, and/or embody our differing lived experiences inform how we move through space? In the creation of a relational map of stories, emotions, and performances, based on fathomed (and unfathomed) measurements, Feeling Measurements hopes instead to gesture, imperfectly, at the intimate and embodied - at both the visible and invisible ways we move through space. 

​

Feeling Measurements collaborators have generated material through zine-making and risography workshops, Slow-Scan performances, abstract map making, guided bird walks, and podcasting, as well as conversational and storytelling circles. Feeling Measurements takes various components, seemingly disparate in nature, into intimate spaces of shared experiences and skills.

 

Current collaborators include Laura Gildner, Estraven Lupino Smith, Katie Sage, Megan Quigley, Doug Jarvis, and Greta Hamilton. 

​

Slow Scan Mentorship and other support: Patrick Lichty, Peggy Cady and Bill Bartlett
 
Editing/support additional collaborations from: Claire Lyke, Kim Smith, Dan M, Dana Levine, Breanna Fabbro, Helen Marzolf, Rebecca Singer and Jess MacCormack
 
Submitted stories from: My Name Is Scot, Kim Smith, Jamie Ross, Vendela Phutmoh, Libby King, Kara Stanton, Kendra Marks, Greta Hamilton, Dan Mack, Kerri Flannigan, Laura Gildner
 
Project funders: Canada Council for The Arts, The BC Arts Council, The CRD, The Ministry of Casual Living