Ugly Feelings
2016–2020. With The Bad Vibes Club (Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau) and Manual Labours (Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards)Ugly Feelings was a collaborative line of work that explored emotions often treated as unproductive or embarrassing, including clumsiness, complaining, resentment, and sexual frustration. The work emerged through long-term collaborative relationships and responded to specific social situations rather than a single concept.
These feelings were not treated as problems to be solved, but as states to be explored through movement, games, and participatory situations. The work placed emphasis on collective activity, treating ugly feelings as shared conditions that can produce forms of solidarity when held and extended together.
Complaining was approached as a ritual: something repetitive, familiar, and often dismissed, but capable of holding people together. It appeared as an absurd game and as collective performance. Resentment and bitterness were explored through guided meditations and somatic movement classes that lingered on fatigue, stuckness, and irritation. Sexual frustration, during the COVID-19 lockdowns, was explored through a poetic, confessional audio work and film built from anonymous testimonies, read aloud and re-circulated as shared experience.
Across these formats, choreography was used to exaggerate, slow down, or sustain behaviours usually kept private, allowing ugly feelings to become collective events rather than individual failures.
Horny? Lonely?
2020. Audio work and film with The Bad Vibes Club. Online [WATCH]
Breathe Imperative
2018. Film by Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau and Hamish MacPherson. Somerset House Studios London; Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh; Display Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic [WATCH]
Doomsday is Just Not Coming
2017. Guided Meditation. Part of event with The Bad Vibes Club. Open School East; Margate; Institute for Contemporary Art, London [LISTEN]
Bad Moves
2017. Movement workshop. Part of event with The Bad Vibes Club. Institute for Contemporary Art, London
The Complaining Body
2016. Table top game, text, movement workshop, billboards, film. Part of group exhibition with Manual Labours. Peltz Gallery, London; Showroom, London [READ]