‘Soma Kit’
Tactile . kinaesthetic . Unique . Portable
Haptic & Kinaesthetic Sculpture Meets Embodied Practice
Made by Live Particle
For Exploring the intelligence of your cells
Stick: bones - structure, resonance, locomotion
Fabric: connective tissue - malleability, reciprocity, fluidity
Leather: ligaments - bonds, clarity, tensegrity
Stone: organs - density, weight, time
These natural and synthetic objects operate as sensory metaphors and haptic/kinetic tools. Each object has a physiological reference correlating to a system or organ within you. The object’s shape, density, texture, colour, malleability, and how you move and interact with it, informs your experience. All objects have had previous lives and we invite these histories into your time with them.
Materials: Tea-tree wood, Greywacke stone, rawhide leather, upcycled lycra. Sustainably sourced and respectfully gathered.
Videos: Mark Newbound
Unravel your kit - it will soften, stretch and mark as you interact with its component parts.
Ravel your kit - hang it on your wall or find a place to display it in your home.
Using the Soma kit…
Allow yourself to be shaped by the objects, explore their sonic quality and give time and space for things to emerge. Follow your interest.
We encourage you to keep the following questions in mind as you play with your kit:
- How does this object move?
- How do I move with this object?
- How do we move together?
- How are the things that you notice about each object alive in your physiological systems - your bones, your organs, your ligaments and so forth?
Development of the SomA kit…
The notion of an embodied practice kit emerged from many years of practice, research and teaching. We had been working for some time with large scale kits in our live workshops. We found that playing with haptic objects supported people to feel less awkward, and helped them to more consciously segue their attention into non-verbal ways of knowing. We knew that embodied practice could have profoundly positive impacts on mood, sleep, relational engagement, tissue & joint health, agility, emotional capacity and creativity and that haptic/kinetic objects could pathway people there. Moving, sensing and imagining with the objects cues spatial, physiological and sonic awareness, and offers pathways to whole-bodied engagement.
However, the hand-held Soma Kit you see here emerged as a pandemic necessity in 2020 during our engagement with the Templeton Ritual Art Project. In early 2020 we had a scheduled visit to our studio by the Templeton Project team who were going to engage in an Embodied Practice workshop with us. Lockdowns meant that a virtual visit/workshop was our only option. We therefore needed to scale down the kits so that we could hand deliver a compact and portable version to the team in their homes. We were delighted with the outcome.