Ben Judd is an artist based in London who makes performances, moving image and installations that examine collectivity and participation, enabling different forms of communities to be explored in relation to site and context. He often works with collaborators as a method to develop self-reflexive folk histories and construct temporary communities.
Ben's project for Estuary 2025, Thought Forms, is a new site-specific participatory work located on the River Medway and Fort Darnet, a nineteenth-century military installation on a small island. The work, which will transport audience members to the island by boat, will be a development of Judd's recent large-scale participatory works, all exploring ideas around community and islands, both real and imaginary.
Ben Judd's work considers ideas around borders, belonging and sovereignty, reflecting on wider global contexts such as the rise of nationalism. This new work is part of a cycle which examines how a group might define themselves in relation to others, and how this is explored within the bounded space of a boat or an island.
The work will respond to folklore associated with the nearby Isle of Sheppey which suggests that until 653 CE the residents of the island thought they were alone in the wilderness, even though they could see mainland Britain from their own shoreline. They believed the nearby coastline to be a reflection, and that Sheppey was situated in a large mirror box. The folk tale concludes when a member of the community built a canoe and made the journey to the mainland at which point they realised they were not alone.
The boat journey is considered as an alternative model of being together; as a vehicle for escape, transformation or change, enhanced by the dreamlike qualities of being on the water and of being suspended, or between worlds. Within storytelling and the imagination, the island is both a place to escape to and is somewhere on which we are marooned, it is both a destination and a point of departure. Within these contexts, the island suggests (and embodies) conflicting ideas of separateness and togetherness; an isolated utopian project where narratives can be invented, reused and recycled within a relatively closed society.
www.benjudd.com
Project Photo: Ben Judd, The Push & the Pull, 2022. Photograph by Sophia Nasif.
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