Through Her Breath: Bronwyn Kidd

Through Her Breath is a solo exhibition featuring new photographs by Bronwyn Kidd created in collaboration with choreographer Carol Brown. The exhibition celebrates ancestral breath, placing women, whose bodies are the source of our first breaths, as the inscribers of embodied legacies of past and present. In the artist’s words, “Through Her Breath is my awakening to deeper thought and appreciation of woman, memory and community, expressed through the layering of photography, dance and fashion through a feminine lens.”

Inspired by the feminist philosophy of Luce Irigaray, the work embraces the idea that a corporeal archive is passed down from our mothers’ bodies. Women are the thread, custodians and channel for an archive of embodied memories. As Kidd has said, “this comes at a time of loss of my own mother to whom I am eternally grateful to for the air she breathed for me and the archive of memories she and mothers before bequeathed to me, informing and guiding my life and practice. Embarking on this series it was essential for me to remember my photographic genealogy in order to reimagine it. The sharing of air with choreographer Carol Brown in a deeply layered collaboration reframed a genealogy of breath-inspired movement transmitted through the teachings of expressionist modern dancer Gertrude Bodenwieser (b. Vienna 1890 d. Sydney 1959) the Bess Mensendieck system, and dance and photographic history with particular reference to Margaret Michalis (b.1902 Dzieditz – d. 1985 Melbourne). Remembering air involves remembering our debt to the maternal body for it is our mothers’ bodies that breathe first for us, creating the ground for autonomy through our first breaths. A culture that remembers air is one in which exchanges between natural and cultural spheres are revealed as interconnected and mutually dependent. (Irigaray, 1999)