Binda Colebrook

emergent work

Helices collaboration

Helices project

A collaboration with Jenny Katz.

The name Helices, which means the plural of “helix,” references both the structure of DNA and the word “Ulysses,” the hero of the poem The Odyssey. The name was chosen to evoke both a mythic journey and the twining, creative, evolutionary nature of the work. Helices includes 2D and 3D visual art, writing, songwriting, music production, and videography.

The project is structured into twelve movements, each two weeks long. Each movement culminates in a “cross” (the strands of the spiral coming together), where the artists exchange and discuss whatever responses they have created to the previous cross. This process of provocation, response, and switch is repeated each movement.

British philosopher Mary Midgley describes myth: “Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning.”

Helices is a myth — an imaginative pattern that, like the DNA that informs its name, creates through its structure a specific, coherent, living being. In fact, Helices is a myth about the evolution of myths. The conception and cadence of the project has invited Binda and Jenny to increase their own sense of aliveness and meaning, ever more tuned to noticing and processing the sensations that occur when their own myth meets someone else’s. Says Binda, “The cross can lead to a moment of incongruence as the body and mind works to make sense of it. But it is also an opportunity to open the sensory gates and catch a glimpse of the wonder that is another world story, inviting acceptance and endless possibility.”

In movements 2 and 3, the pattern language of another myth-maker, Dale Rawlinson, made its way organically into the helixing. This incorporation sparked the artists’ desire to invite other makers to join in this new myth of shared, everyday creation.

This project is now in its 12th movement. Initially, this movement became a clock time space to reflect on all the threads of aliveness that are intertwined within the Helices myth, and all the other nodes that became immersed within the myth. Now, a few months beyond the two week scaffold, the 12th movement has become an incubator with no clocktime for a game that is attempting to capture the elements needed for fostering aliveness. We are holding the question: Can this be held in the framework of a group game that people can play together?

The 12th movement also coincided with learning that Helices will be shown at the APE gallery in Northampton MA next summer. This also prompted exploration around how to display the artifacts in such a way that the process of Helices gets expressed. Alongside this, we are building a website as a repository on the web of the artifacts in all their various forms.

The Helices artifacts will be shown in July of 2024 at APE ltd Gallery in Northampton MA.

LINKS AND IMAGES

Please scroll down for a few of the artifacts, songs and installations that have come out of Helices, or go to the link at the top to see the whole project.

Jenny mvmt 2