Making Solid: Unpredictable Bodies

Making Solid Virtual Reality Edition

Sam Metz is an artist who works with movement and performance, which attempts to translate the experiences of being disabled and neurodivergent with sensory processing differences and Tourette's. Using sculpture, drawing, animation, live art and film, their practice explores concepts of 'choreographic objects', which investigate our relationships with the body and movement.

Metz's work is created through movement and rhythm, and attempts to capture a range of 'interruptions', 'aberrations' and uncontrolled actions of their disabled body. The process of making, drawing and short performances are intrinsic parts of their practice. Using still images from performance footage or repetitive gestures represented through 3D mark making, Metz creates non-verbal documentation and poetic installations that explore non-normative descriptions of bodies and challenges societal conventions that actively seek to exclude them.

Making Solid: Unpredictable Bodies explores what an unpredictable body is and how a disabled body's presence transgresses societal restrictions. The project investigates how movement can be made solid, and Metz is interested in the relationship between sculpture, mark-making and stimming. The artist uses drawing as a form of stimming, a common process used by autistic and neurodivergent people to self-regulate their emotions using repetitive movements or sounds to manage feelings of being overwhelmed, but importantly, can also express a range of emotions such as joy.

Using drawing as a form of stimming and choreographic objects, the artist creates their own visual language to explore alternative, non-verbal communication that comes from neurodivergence, and which is often dismissed, devalued and stigmatised in mainstream society.

Sam regularly collaborates with other artists as part of their creative process. Several of the pieces in this exhibition were made through a process of collaboration and creative exchange with Daniel Dearing, NEUK Collective, Danni Spooner, Jamal Sterrett, Scarlett Turner and David Clarkson.

David Clarkson worked with Sam Metz to create this Virtual Reality edition of their current exhibition showing at Attenborough Arts Centre in Leicester 9- April - 5 June.

This experience is intended to be used via a Oculus Quest Device.

Available soon directly on AppLab and SideQuest