Breathing worlds

Art-research project with Professor Derek McCormack. Modern Art Oxford (2020-21).

Our installation at Modern Art Oxford became a nebulous seven-by-three-metre configuration of printed materials: an assemblage of photographs, infographics, sketches, and painstakingly selected quotations. Eventually, through collaborative effort, the content was assorted into eight areas or ‘breathing worlds’, if you will. There was: ‘breathing experience’, ‘breathing health’, ‘breathing environment’, ‘breathing politics’, ‘breathing violence’, ‘breathing technology’, ‘breathing art’, and ‘breathing is…’.

– Lucy Sabin, ‘Following Breathing’, The Polyphony (2021).

An academic counterpart to Breathworks, Breathing worlds was an art-research project that culminated in a large-scale display of research (7×3 m), a vitrine of artefacts, and a panel event.

This project was supported by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and co-produced with Derek McCormack, Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Oxford. McCormack and Sabin co-authored an article for the Inhale/Exhale issue of multidisciplinary journal, Venti…

We describe the dual process of arriving at our collaboration, with the interfaces between our contributions becoming more porous as the piece unfolds. In concluding, we dwell briefly on the idea of breathing worlds as a process and noun that gestures both to the conditions in which breathing takes place and to the labor that goes into making and modifying these conditions.

– McCormack, D. and Sabin, L. (2021). ‘Breathing Worlds’. Venti, 2(1).