About the Piece

How to Mime the Kitchen is a work that uses the idea of  muscle memory and its relationship to place. I started with the kitchen from my childhood home, a place where I lived in for over 20 years. I noticed that the walls felt touched, the paint had been layered with innumerable coats of eggshell glossy paint. I witnessed my sister Alex practicing “the wall” a basic mime technique in the kitchen and the idea for the work grew out of this repeated action.

The work consists of two television monitors facing each other, one shows my hands feeling the surface of the walls, the other is an instructional video of how to mime the kitchen.

The idea of muscle memory in mime is fundamental to the art. I collaborated with Alex (an aspiring mime) to investigate the shape of the kitchen through the repeated action of touch and applied pressure, taking note of the positioning of the muscles in my hands. This work was the initial investigation of how the space and surface of the spaced we occupy inform our idea of space and define future spaced by the residue of their memory.

The final installation also consists of a rubbing of the kitchen floor’s linoleum surface and a rubbing of the two windows.

Material: televisions, graphite, contact paper