This series of soft improvisations was a direct response to the writing of Sara Ahmed in Queer Feelings and the Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), where she explores the spatial realities of comfort:

"But comfort is about the fit between body and object: my comfortable chair may be awkward for you, with your differently shaped body. Comfort is about an encounter between more than one body, which is the promise of a ‘sinking’ feeling. It is, after all, pain or discomfort that return one’s attention to the surfaces of the body as body... To be comfortable is to be so at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins. One fits, and by fitting, the surfaces of bodies disappear from view. The disappearance of the surface is instructive: in feelings of comfort, bodies extend into spaces, and spaces extend into bodies. The sinking feeling involves a seamless space, or a space where you can’t see the ‘stitches’ between bodies."

I wanted to understand how this 'fit' actually feels when we get up close to the surfaces of the flesh. And so, I began a multi-week process of ad-hoc assemblage, where I would bind everyday objects to my body, using them as makeshift prosthetics to test what happens when and where they meet. I strapped the waxy rind of a lemon directly to my skin with rubber cords, feeling the slow, warm exhalation of citrus scent as it absorbed my body heat. I worked on drawings with my hand obscured by a vellum sheet at my studio desk. As the afternoon sun striped the desk, my hand, and the vellum, I moved through the drawing process with only the ghostly facsimile of a hand apparent. I spread my fingers out wide - sweaty, too warm, and itchy inside the unlined polyester embrace of a knobbly green microfibre duster glove - entwining them through unmown, overgrown grass. I rested my head against a wall, buffered by the bounce of a balloon.

At times, when the experiment felt good, I was able to sit with these objects long enough to let them leave a temporary elastic imprint on my skin. And through this time spent, I came to understand that comfort can be read through a sensitivity to trace. Forgetting the body is what allows these traces to form; when an environment accommodates the physical form so completely that the boundaries of the flesh dissolve from consciousness, the resulting physical mark becomes the tangible proof of a seamless meeting.

By using various attachment mechanisms to bypass the labour of holding, my attention was drawn directly (through its absence) to the physicality and durational quality of holding itself. During these experiments, I created supports to make the act of holding easier. In its absence, the labour of holding became a central focus for me. These experiments brought to the surface dual ways of thinking with comfort: what actually happens to the body when we hold or rest for a long time, and what structures and materials are making this durational connection possible? Rather than resolving into a seamless erasure of the body, these experiments magnified the operational friction of the physical encounter, leaving me wondering: In P-AT environments, whose bodies are being held, and whose bodies actually need holding?

How might one practice with an orientation toward holding?