Diptych · 2026
What Remains
A disturbance on the surface of water creates ripples that continue long after the original movement has passed. Two semi-abstract paintings on the traces that experiences leave behind.
Project · 2026
Traces of Being
Two paintings, an original music composition, a film and a dance performance in Coventry Cathedral — a conversation that kept moving between people and forms.
The Project
Where a conversation
can lead
When Em and I first spoke two years ago, neither of us knew where that conversation would lead. It became the starting point for two paintings, an original music composition, a film and a dance performance in Coventry Cathedral.
What began as a conversation about the body's relationship with past experience gradually became an exploration of how ideas can move between people and creative forms, taking on new meanings along the way.
In our conversations, Em described how she had spent many years exploring the body's ability to express experiences that are difficult to put into words. Through somatic movement and anatomy, she had come to understand how trauma can become embedded in the body and nervous system, shaping recurring responses.
Could deeply established patterns change?
This question shaped our conversations and became the starting point for the first painting.
The Trailer
A short film linking the pieces
Chapter One
Transformative Pathways
Painting · Andy Farr
Em's repeated movements became a way of finding small variations within familiar patterns. In the painting, her sense of recycling and replaying took shape as patterns resembling the ancient Vesica Pisces symbol.
To mirror Em's process, I built a pattern-making machine that repeated familiar movements with small variations, allowing patterns to shift and evolve. As Em said, "it was a bit creaky and wobbly, like a human body, forever repeating the same processes in slightly different ways."
Chapter Two
Transformations
Film · Andy Farr
While we were planning the BeingSeen event and exhibition at Coventry Cathedral in 2025, a comment by Georgia Cowie sparked an idea: wouldn't it be amazing to open the event with a dance performance in the transept? Restless Movement Collective turned that idea into a dance performed to Justine's music and inspired by Em's story.
The dancers brought another dimension to the original ideas, exploring them through the physicality, rhythm and expressive possibilities of movement. The original ideas have moved beyond the painting, taking on new forms and meanings through music, movement and performance.
Chapter Three
Becoming
Painting · Andy Farr · 2026
Showing Christian's film of the dance performance in London, as part of a BeingSeen exhibition, drew me back to the theme of movement. It reminded me of something I had explored when I first began my own journey into art: the expressive possibilities of the human body, and the way movement can communicate experiences that words cannot.
Becoming is inspired by the colour, rhythm and gestures of the dancers, their physical energy and interaction, and by Em's experience. In returning to these ideas, I found myself exploring something that connects her journey with my own artistic beginnings.
I see transformation as an ongoing process, not a destination. As ideas move between people, bodies and creative forms, they gather new meanings rather than simply illustrating what came before. What begins as something difficult to articulate can become something shared, experienced and seen.
Also New
Two further bodies of work
Painting · 2026
Breaking Free
Sometimes it takes a profound disruption to change the direction of a life. The carousel horse breaking away from its familiar circular path.