Between Body and Clay is a new film commissioned by Shape Arts as part of the 2024 Adam Reynolds Award Shortlist Programme, created by artist Davinia-Ann Robinson. Following her fellowship exhibition at Stanley Picker Gallery, we are delighted to premiere Davinia's film online now.

More about the 2024 programme Explore more commissioned films

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Between Body and Clay is a new moving image work made in collaboration with artist and filmmaker Rhiannon Hunter. It documents the intimate relationship of being with and processing raw clay, part of Robinson's practice. Clay in the film was gathered in London from a local cemetery and is used within the artist's installation softening inherited knots (2025) developed for her solo exhibition at Stanley Picker Gallery as part of her artist fellowship programme.

Watch the film

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About the artist

Davinia-Ann Robinson (b Wolverhampton, lives and works in London, UK) is an artist of Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean ancestry. Her art practice and research are explored through sculpture, sound, writing and performance, examining how tactility, presencing and fugitivity, form an undoing of ancestral, intergenerational and present-day racial trauma.

Encountered through corporeal engagements between her body, natural materials, the interactions formed through colonial violence and embodied pre-colonial, Creo and somatic healing practices, her research in tactility examines an engagement of a reciprocal practice and politicised accountability grounded in the ethics of mutual care and responsibility, relating to the care of nature, care of human and non-human beings, ancestral care of those who have passed, and those who are to come. Through these engagements, her work conjures embodied practices of refusal, creating communities of refuge and care, connecting to the land and connecting to physical and spiritual bodies. 

Davinia-Ann is a yoga practitioner, trained with Iya-kin, a BIPOC-led program focused on rest for Black and Brown people and a Yoga Nidra guide, trained with Ashe Yoga Collective, which elevates BIPOC and queer voices.

Visit Davinia's website Follow Davinia on Instagram

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Banner image description: a still frame from the film showing a brown hand pinching a lump of earthy clay between thumb and forefinger. It appears to have just picked it up from the earth below, in which marks have been made by the action of pinching and grabbing.