Care

Navigating subjective experiences of care, compassion, and love – the project ‘CARE’ shares with viewers a series of tender gestural expressions of human connection.

Fostering virtue and an ethical consideration of the individual’s responsibility and embeddedness in society, the work asks people to consider their own relationships and context to one another.

The exchange between empathy and objectivity in imaging the human figure is a central theme of Wolff’s practice, as they contemplate and search the impact of social structures to understand the ongoing construction of identity.

'CARE' is a fine print magazine commission for 'pause~play'.
This project has been supported by the South Australian government through Arts South Australia.

Exhibited —
'pause~play', fine print magazine (online), 2021.
'Darebin Art Prize', Bundoora Homestead, VIC, 2021.
Adelaide Festival Centre, SA, 2022.

Director, editor, performer and soundscape design —
Henry Wolff

Featuring —
Lur Alghurabi, Jingwei Bu, Jamilla Hujale, Erykah Jennette, Heidi Kenyon, Indigo Kenyon, Iris Kenyon, Ingrid Wolff, Mary-Anne Wolff

Videographer —
Jai McGregor

Colour grade —
Peter Hatzipavlis, Final Grade

Poet —
Lur Alghurabi

Voice over sound design —
Jesse Budel

Mentors —
Hoda Afshar, Eugenia Lim

Doing good; being virtuous. Those two things sound like two sides of the same coin, or two routes for climbing the same mountain—and perhaps they are that. But they are also very different conceptions of the ethical and can give us very different ideas of how we should act.

Henry Wolff's CARE
by Eleen M Deprez and Michael Newell

In Henry Wolff’s video work CARE we see various performers, we’ll call them protagonists, performing slow drawn-out movements. Some appear alone, turning their attention to their own body or interacting with their environment (trees, derelict buildings, tall grasses), others appear together. Henry invited each performer to engage a person they have ‘a relationship of care’ with; for some this is themselves, for others their friend, sibling, parent, or child. These relationships are not made explicit, but trust and intimacy between the performers is tangible and apparent.

As much as our attention is drawn to the protagonists, the theme is connected and further elevated by the sites and locations. An old Morton Bay Fig, the old Royal Adelaide Hospital, a family garden; these locations further develop our thinking and experience of care. Henry and their sibling, Ingrid, appear together with their mother, Mary-Anne, among the disused buildings of Hampstead Rehabilitation Centre. This site is where Mary-Anne started her career as nurse. As much as the location is a background for their touching interaction, the site, like others in the work, resonates with the theme of care and symbolises the transition of care. This is encapsulated in the harrowing moment when Henry carries their mother. As we are reminded of caring for our own ailing and dying parents, we experience again the vulnerable corporeality of the moment in which a body—at one point so strong and protective—becomes frail.

The movements of all protagonists appear deliberate, considered and careful, but lack an external, direct purpose, making them a fleeting melody in a piece of improvisational music. Hands, feet, and arms sway, slither and glide, continuously meandering like a slow-moving stream. Movements mimic each other, different hands touch different surfaces (a tree, railing, wall, root, and bark) and in doing so share a tactile exploration of touch itself. As viewers we are drawn in; we are not a mere eyewitness, for our whole bodies are called into response. As is often the case for performance-based art, the work is partly an exploration and interrogation of the embodied self. As Jingwei Bu lies down, gently lowering her body to the pavement, we are invited to sense our own body becoming heavy, drawn unto and into the earth. As her hand and arm slowly lifts, ours become light. Henry tells us that Jingwei performs as a way to explore care for the self. Performance art often shows our vulnerabilities and strengths by testing the artist's physical and mental capacities. Here, we are more interested in our embeddedness in society, in ethics, what we owe each other and ourselves. In this context, we can see CARE as replacing the focus on testing the embodied self with an exploration and fostering of the ethical self.

Care knows different forms. Some of these come naturally; others are learned, artificially or commercially initiated and supported. Care involves awareness—or better—attention, to others or oneself. Care takes time and commitment, it is a response, reciprocating to a recognised need, but it can also be a spontaneous impulse, undirected and fleeting. Some care relationships are reciprocal, but not all. We dead-head roses in the garden, trim infected branches of an orange tree, scrape fungus off the tree’s bark, or shoo away birds eating fruits before they had the possibility to develop seed. Caring need not be profitable, nor even rewarding. Self-care, actioning your own health or well-being, not only takes time but also requires one to prioritise oneself. This can be pleasantly luxurious to some, but onerous, self-effacingly unnecessary or insurmountably difficult to others. Care can be fetishised and commodified, reduced to clichéd gestures or empty gesticulations. Like the variety of relationships in which care manifests, so our expressions and experiences of care are multifarious, subtle, invisible or incomprehensible to others.

Care entails supporting well-being, fostering growth and development, protecting from harm, actively changing the environment to achieve these things. Deeply embedded in our understanding of care (our care practices) and perhaps essential to it is love. We don’t mean romantic or sexual love, but love as a deep feeling of compassion and affection, either for a particular individual (a parent, sibling, partner, child, animal companion, friend, neighbour, etc.) or, perhaps, towards a community. Without love, care can be emphatic and earnest—but it then becomes a manifestation of duty—and a different kind of virtue, we think. The mute protagonists in the work do not demonstrate or perform care, by mimicking mundane caring actions (like making a sandwich, calling family, offering help, running an errand, etc.—perhaps the fitting of a shoe is a single exception), but they reduce care to its most rudimentary and essential, to that of love. They do so with and through their bodies, becoming a sensorial object in the hands of others, and communicating the intimacy, commitment, trust and reciprocity implicit in care.

How do you workshop CARE?

To ground the conversation on care, the artist reached out to their community and brought together a group of diverse people to delve into what care actually means. This manifested in numerous informal conversations, but most importantly as a group workshop held at Post Office Projects (SA).

The workshop opened with a mindfulness and yoga session led by Steph Cibich. From there the group considered questions around care, such as: what does care mean? Where does care come from? Has the nature of care changed or shifted (particularly in recent times)?

Listening became an integral tool in this process. The responses were documented and explored through gestural translations.

CARE at the Adelaide Festival Centre

View the work and read the essay by
Eleen M. Deprez & Michael Newall
on fine print magazine here.

Listen to Henry Wolff discuss
'CARE' with Steph Fuller on the
SALA Podcast here.