The exhibition Through an Embodied Practice of Stillness is a new series of sculptural installations, soundscapes and film work by Stanley Picker Fellow Davinia-Ann Robinson, which explores encounters with stillness through the body's engagement with somatic practices and raw and reclaimed clay.

Through an Embodied Practice of Stillness explores how racial trauma is held within Black and Brown bodies through ancestral, intergenerational and present-day encounters with 'white-body supremacy' and how embodied engagements between the body and clay can be conduits for undoing and dismantling racial trauma. Healer and psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem states, "[…] white-body supremacy doesn't live in our thinking brains, it lives and breathes in our bodies. […] The body is where we fear, hope, and react; where we constrict and release; and where we reflexively fight, flee, or freeze. If we are to upend the status quo of white-body supremacy, we must begin with our bodies".

Framed by Black Feminist Thinking as 'presencing' and 'fugitivity' the works in the exhibition are a catalyst for 'blackened knowledge', accessed through embodied practices with clay that enable encounters exploring ancestral decolonial knowledge-based systems held within Black and Brown bodies, and accessed as pre-colonial and Creole spiritual practices, that become intimate practices of grief-work, spiritual activism and practices of care.

Davinia-Ann Robinson (b Wolverhampton, lives and works in London, UK) is an artist of Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean ancestry. Her art practice and research are explored through sculpture, sound, writing and performance, examining how tactility, presencing and fugitivity, form an undoing of ancestral, intergenerational and present-day racial trauma. Davinia-Ann was appointed a Stanley Picker Fellow in 2023.