Associate Artist
Michael Mayhew
Michael Mayhew has worked across art forms and in diverse locations across the world. Mayhew makes work through a process of in-depth immersion, of gathering and collecting, of responding to the lives around him. Each work is influenced by its location and surrounding community.
The Vanishing
The Vanishing is a project that enables the artist to fully explore the creative potential of the company.
The Vanishing has been set within a local context and is now extending to the other-side of the planet, Brisbane, Australia a journey that will witness Mayhew travel over land to reach his destination.
Mayhew took advantage of being commissioned by PANDA, as part of their PANDA-monium showcase for the Manchester International Festival, where Mayhew created The Gathering. This was the beginning of the beginning, where Mayhew asked the people of Manchester to tell a story of someone who had vanished from their lives.
Set in the Great Hall of Manchester’s town hall, Mayhew asked a series of questions. How do we talk about the vanished? Where do the vanished go? How do we remember them? What languages do we use to express loss? What is the language of the invisible? What is the language of memory? What are the poetics of vanishing? From this locality of Manchester’s Great Hall Mayhew now begins to put a line of humanity together that will criss-cross Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan, China and into South East Asia where he will be met by a ship in East Timor to get him into the port of Darwin, Australia.
From the micro to the macro, from the single stories of vanishing people to the physical exploration of vanishing landscapes, a global discourse begins, a discourse based on humanity, (whole earth), and the question of relating the vanishing of people to that of geographical locations that are literally dying away, to the potentiality of the human species vanishing. The Vanishing is a portal through which a series of investigations, an infinite sequence of events will occur. This is the beginning of beginnings.
Rituals of Being Not Being: A Residency
‘I was struck by the sense of yearning in it, you seeking to find/define yourself, your past, your path to this point, your acknowledgement of yourself as a conduit for other people's stories, a vessel other people pass through and even a yearning for the work itself, its ephemeral being, its lack of documentation, its here-now-gone tomorrowness.’ Terry O'Connor - Forced Entertainment
Michael Mayhew delivered Rituals of Being Not Being as part of TulcaLive 2007, Galway, Ireland. Here is Michael's project brief...
I am leaving UK
12th November and start performances 19th to 23rd.
Prior to this I have my head shaved whilst i deliver a lecture on 15th ‘for a moment inspired’
The 5 days of ritual are constructed into meeting 5 people per day
5 x 5 = 25
I listen to their stories - stories about people who have vanished from their lives.
At the end of each day I have parts of their language of loss and memory written onto my body - my body is then washed in the water gathered from the river Corrib - this is the river that flows through Galway and into the Atlantic - I gather this treated water and place it into casts of my body – these moulds get placed into freezers and left until water is ice solid.
November 25th these ice bodies are placed onto an island called Nuns Island. We melt them - during this melting i will have 25 words - a word from each person -
tattooed onto my body - body and artist become a living archive of memory - and the
ink and blood from these words are released.
Part of The Vanishing project
Vanished = to die away – from the Latin
For more information about Michael Mayhew see www.michaelmayhew.com