CHORA is a collaborative enquiry between Sara Barker and Rosie Morris situated within embodied feminist spatial practices, new materialism, and relational methodologies. It explores how immersive installations and intimate objects can act as membranes of a ruined body, archiving and transmitting tacit, and complex knowledges of care. The projects first iteration is a new collaborative public installation for 36 Gallery, Newcastle (Feb–Mar 2026), serving as an artistic output and convening live encounters.
The artwork comprises a semi-translucent fabric 'den’ created by Morris, naturally dyed with domestic waste to transform the material vividly. This architecture becomes host to Barker’s objects and assemblages, and an atmospheric sound work by Sally Pilkington that amplifies the notion of polyphony. Child height structures and forms allow participants to orientate their bodies in relation to the work actively. The works nomadic and iterative form enables future reconfigurations at new sites, accumulating meaning and relational residue over time. Each location forms a temporary community that contributes to the installation's ongoing transformation, taking a haptic approach to archaeological fieldwork.
Rather than using biography as content, the embodied, emotional and sensory become ways of knowing, testing how bathing, stitching, building, patching, smearing, wiping, wringing, brazing and piercing can archive complex relations and fleeting gestures performed through caring encounter and relational bodies including the more-than-human, the materials themselves meet, transform, fatigue, balance and posture, validating the sensorial, tacit, material intra-action and agency.
Specifically, Sara Barker's collected linear brazed works translate drawings through laborious methods, weld-residues and tarnishing capturing time spent with material scored, micro gestures of care that articulate vulnerability. Cast concrete and paper pulp works sit beside these hollow linear and delicate spatial drawings - holding together an altogether denser sedimentary archive of fragmented parts, a site of excavation where imagery emerges slowly through accumulation, aligning with feminist archeological methodologies that reject singular narratives in favour of the partial and layered and reconstructed.
Here again the body enters through the work at the moment of production - a choreography of pouring, manipulating and setting that embodies time and care. Fragments of letters from dust jackets emerge in their surfaces faintly legible, interrupted and overlapping polyphonic voices that in this instance are material, citing Helene Cixious's notion of ecriture feminine where suppressed voices re-emerge through embodied inscription. The material tension becomes a critique between the signifiers of monumentality made intimate, fragile and fibrous, recalling thew work of Eva Hesse in their intention to destabilise.
As collaborators we draw on feminist spatial theory (Kristeva, Irigaray, Grosz), ecofeminist conceptions of material intra-action and polyphony (Barad, Wall Kimmerer, Bakhtin, Ozeki), and contemporary research into felt-knowledge and co-authorship (Springgay; Brand; Pallasmaa, Gale & Larkin). The installation investigates this as a porous, relational architecture (Ebling) —a container that behaves like a living or ruined body (Bachelard): a host, a skin, a shelter, a site of memory.
