'Unwanted Flesh' Lauren Heckler Performance

Lauren Heckler is an interdisciplinary artist from Carmarthenshire, working across performance, drawing, text, and moving image. Her art explores rhythm and pattern, now working through crip embodiment, somatic camera techniques, and digitally mediated desire. She recently directed, produced and edited the short screendance film ‘Hype.’, which set in a party glitches through euphoria and collapse, the digital and the organic, isolation and community, as a reflection on chronic illness and ‘feeling joy in a body that’s out to get you’. She is currently working on a practice research project with movement artists, to explore the possibilities of the camera as a vector, its capacity as an agent in relationship building, and the haptic qualities of digital framing and being seen.

Lauren has collaborated on public artworks, co-curated online and in-person residencies and socially engaged programmes, and been a participant in various projects centring cross-cultural dialogue. This August-September Lauren travelled to Karachi and Hunza, Pakistan, to develop an ongoing exchange project with visual artist Shanzay Subzwari titled, ‘Sister Sing a Song’. She is now pursuing an MA in Screendance at the London Contemporary Dance School, and recently co-programmed the dance film festival ‘Frame Rush 2024’ at The Place Theatre, London.

"I admire Delphi’s work for its honest illustration of a complicated self-hood. For its expression of self-love in the name of empathy. Before diagnosis with Type 1 Diabetes, I felt intuitively connected to Delphi’s painted depictions of an  ‘unruly body’, subconsciously aware of my own. I’m intrigued by the contradictions of living chronically ill - the pink cosiness of unwanted flesh, pleasure in pain, feeling joy in a body that’s out to get you. 

In the soft bodily cave of ‘Unwanted Flesh’, my performance will encounter these states by weaving together spoken word and moving image."