As children many of us were beneficiaries of the magical Tooth Fairy, who visited us in the dead of night and wondrously left gifts of money in exchange for the tooth. This simple ritual provides a small rite of passage in the journey towards growing up. Can we imagine rituals that serve to connect us to changes in our physical selves as adults?

Join Experimenta Life Forms artist Helen Pynor as she explores rituals for the human body. This intimate online workshop session will provide participants an opportunity to consider how we acknowledge the body through change.

Get involved at home! Participants will be led through stories and lively conversation that ponder the journey of organic tissue once it leaves the body. Each participant will be posted a materials kit, to engage in a tactile activity while joining in from your home computer. 

This session draws on the themes in Helen Pynor’s work ‘Habitation’, in which she has made a bone china object from her own femur bone material, that was surgically excised during hip replacement surgery. The group conversation will explore how tissues leave our bodies as ‘life forms’ with different meanings and journeys. These tissues could be surgically removed to restore our health or change our appearance, donated to help others, removed as part of a cultural practice, and so forth. What rituals can we imagine to honour these tissues, reconnect severed links, memorialise their loss, process the emotional experience of losing them, and give them a dignified ending or future?

Helen Pynor’s artwork ‘Habitation’ is exhibiting as part of Experimenta Life Forms: International Triennial of Media Art, presenting at The Lock Up (Newcastle, NSW), 10 July – 22 August 2021 and touring nationally until 2024.