So many social things happen with a bent head: reading, writing, scrolling on phones, eating at tables or from laps, drawing or making with hands, masturbating

Gloria Anzaldua writes beautifully about writing being social. How writing only comes alive in the hands, mouths, and minds of readers: performances ‘enacted’. I think there’s even a bit when she doubts if writing continues to exist if it’s not being read? I love this idea.

Performance, writing With Carle Gent and Alison Ballance

Looking at gesture in each of our practices as artists, writers, and art writers, we thought about: liquid, the body, and labour. We chose to collaborate on two strands of work: one written and one drawn, each of us working in (hidden) collaboration with each other.

Our dialogue began in a group WhatsApp chat. We migrated to a redacted Google doc, which we each contributed to, writing in fragments: song lyrics, dreams, diary entries, performances, and meditations on each other’s work. Meeting on Zoom, we exposed the redacted text and collaboratively identified paragraphs as heads, tails, and bodies.

Simultaneously we exchanged three physical exquisite corpses via Royal Mail between Peckham, Crystal Palace, Peasedown St John, Trowbridge, and Seaton Carew.

We brought together a list of artworks, books, poems, songs, exhibitions, medieval manuscripts, novels, and plays that we were immersed in while writing.

So many social things happen with a bent head is a dialogue between three friends, Alison Ballance, Carle Gent and Jessa Mockridge, published in the legendary Gestures: A body of work, edited by Nell Osborne, Hilary White and Alice Butler, Manchester University Press, 2025.

For Gestures: A body of work – off the page, we live edit the writing: snip chapter into strips, distribute between three buckets, submerge in drinking water, use drawings as reading score, smear wet slips on buckets, Royal College of Art, 3 April 2025.