Touching the Nape of Your Neck Online

Eilish Hazell

anca digital program June 3-17

At this point in our history, as we lockdown and as connection necessarily pixelates and shifts into the digital, we need creative, generous and supportive thinking about how we want to restructure our future. But in order to make plans for the future, we need resilience and connection in the present. We must nourish the bonds of community and solidarity. Touching the Nape of your Neck online proposes a project of tenderness, resilience and presence. Considering the new challenges for connectivity and intimacy as well as restrictions on and anxieties around touch in the face of a global pandemic, this new work considers digital architectures as amorous architectures. It utilizes the power of digital platforms as vessels for fostering intimacy and connectedness. Offering up my fears, hopes, desires to you- the viewer, I carve space for grief, loss, healing as well as redemption and strength in vulnerability. By being generous and open with you, I hope to foster a digital safe space and facilitate an exchange of intimacy and collective healing. Informed by the emotional and fleshly intimacy that serves as a buttress of selfhood, my work explores the notion of the lover as collaborator. This new work, responding to the global lockdown, considers the toll on maintaining relationships in the apocalypse and offers resilient alternatives. The work uses sound, touch, poetry and tattoo practice in order to carve space for intimacy, sexuality, sentimentality and healing.