HEAT BETWEEN
Heat Between is a project made in collaboration with dairy farms in Bedfordshire and Cornwall. Heat Between was made in partnership with Kestle Barton and Wysing Arts Centre and funded by the Henry Moore Foundation.
Heat Between (video) uses thermal cameras to collapse hierarchies between species and substances. Guided by heat as a metaphor, a method, and an intuition; Gendall navigates the seams of the dairy farm: through, around, in and in-between the farm bodies. Heat here is many things; an instinct, a scent, a caregiver, tenderness and transgression. It is cultivated, spilt, extracted, probed, shared, transferred and eroded. Everybody and everything become another vessel for transference; cows and humans rendered in the same glowing stuff. Milk, piss, blood, water, shit, rain, spit all reduced to the same deep unsettling blackness.
A herd of cows in Cornwall were enlisted as collaborators in the sculptural work. Each sculpture is what remains of a block of Himalayan salt after weeks of being in a yard with dairy cows - the blocks slowly and obsessively reshaped by the cows’ tongues into strange, organic forms that serendipitously echo modernist abstraction.
All decisions around final form were relinquished to the cows, who, intuitively lick salt for essential minerals, fixating on one point or a series of points within the block to probe smooth holes through the surface. On closer inspection, these seemingly ethereal sculptures carry the residue of the farm and are embedded with cow hair, straw, and flecks of muck. Dribbling, folding and transferring the internal cow bodies into and through the layers of the precarious sculptures.
Accompanying Heat Between is a special edition hardback book featuring essays by myself, Ben Borthwick and Lizzie Lloyd and also photographs I have taken on the dairy farm developed in my kitchen in an adapted delta-std caffenol mix replacing the water with unpasteurised and unhomogenised milk straight from the herd. Ben Borthwick has written an essay titled: ‘Tongues and Holes OR, Holes ’n’ Tongues ’n’ Holes ’n’ Tongue’ which is about my Salt Lick sculptures and Lizzie Lloyd has written an essay titled: ‘Breath in Time With the cows he Told her’ about my film Heat Between. The essay I have written unfolds the work in the exhibition in a way that only writing can do. I didn’t really mean to write anything but it became a tool to process my time on the farm - the contradictions I felt, the uncertainty of it and how me and my body fitted in to it all.
Together, these works eavesdrop on the farm, making space for complexity, uncertainty and tenderness. They linger at the intimate points of contact between humans, cows, and the land, making visible the unseen visceral entanglements that bind us, the shapes these encounters take and the residues they leave behind. Heat Between borrows its title from a lyric in Prince’s When Doves Cry - “Can you feel the heat, the heat between me and you” - a song blasted out through the milking parlour on Wednesday afternoons.
With thanks to Henry Moore Foundation, Wysing Arts Centre and Kestle Barton for their support in the project. Exhibition documentation by Nick Cooney.