Davinia-Ann Robinson

softening inherited knots (site-specific installation, performance & soundscape) - 2025

Formed through a series of solitary performances, ‘softening inherited knots’ is a durational, site-specific installations developed between my body and clay, tracing an embodied practices of uncovering how racial trauma is held and felt within the physical, spiritual, and ancestral body. Holding trace impressions of my body, the sculptural works made from raw London clay gathered from a local cemetery become sites/earthworks of ‘blackened knowledge’, forming a relational partnership between body and clay as the corporeal body of the earth. Adding to the earthworks throughout the duration of the exhibition, I returned to the installation as a continual practice of engagement between clay, breath, and the body. Through engaging with clay during its varied states of malleability and engaging the body through states of embodied breath and somatic practices, the earthworks conjure an intimate relationship between body and clay as co-collaborators in the active undoing of racial trauma, and conduits to intimate practices of grief-work and healing modalities.

Commissioned by Stanley Picker Gallery