Breathwork
2025
hARTslane, 17 Hearts Lane, London, UK.
April 28th - 30th 2025
Breathwork marks a shift away from the codified substances of earlier performances toward a minimal, non-visual causality. Bazeley is enclosed within the sculpture, wearing a ventilator mask that draws clean air from outside the box and returns his exhalations to its interior. Over several hours the internal atmosphere becomes stagnant, and the tube is left as his only point of respiration.
As in 4 and ¼, the exhibition handout gives no indication that a performance is taking place. Viewers are free to approach the apparatus and, without knowing what they are doing, to obstruct it. The transfer of control this allows is the substance of the work: the authority a person casually holds over an environment, exercised here on someone who cannot be seen.
The piece was shown alongside a short screenplay in which warehouse employees gradually assimilate into the architecture of their workplace, ending as its ventilation system. Both script and sculpture developed from documentary notes taken during conversations with friends working for a parcel delivery firm.
Breathwork (2024), found object, polyethylene, cigarette, 100x60x150 cm.
Uncle (2024), Graphite on paper, 200x245x5 mm.
Tallyman (2024), Graphite on paper, 145x210x5 mm.