Breaking the Fall

Breaking the Fall is a creative collaboration between mother and daughter. Responding to embodied knowledge of illness and historically unnoticed everyday modes of care in the familial context, this practice-based research foregrounds the affective potential of communities of care outside of the medical institution. Juxtaposing realities and constructed realities of illness and care through creative practice and interplay between the self and other, together we engage in a process of representation and power reclamation. This written reflection, analysis and documentation of our research practice charts processes of material embodiment in a short experimental film following the creation of wearable artworks. Tension and tenderness is revealed in the manipulation of texture, movement and light as lived experiences of illness and care are extended onto the physical and filmic body’s surface. Here phenomenological and affect-based approaches to shifting dynamics of care contribute towards a form of expression that attends to the shimmers of moments felt, yet hidden, in everyday lived experiences of illness.