Elly Stormer Vadseth

I make performance rituals in spaces that are outside and in, embracing the power of the feminine wild, the body, magic, and connection as a social and political practice. My practice is tentacular and messy in conversation with Ecofeminist movements, Extinction studies and multispecies scholarship that propose alternative ways of being and relating to other critters and matter. Thinking and dancing with, I entangle myself in nonlinear stories that exist in the liminal space of potential, somewhere between land and my imagination. I desire to transcend the western colonial human vs land binary by morphing my form with other bodies of fallen leaves, sheered grass, and hay imagining what Donna Haroway calls an "elsewhere that was, still is, and might yet be", A reconfiguring of how we can live with other beings in more sustainable ways. Blending my spatial temporality with these morphing bodies I am reminded of the transformative possibilities and power of the earth, where matter and life goes through continuous biological, ecological and spiritual cycles of death and rebirth. My video installation, "Shapeshifting Bodies," seeks to mirror and convey the essence of these affective earth-body research experience, using the alchemy of color intensities, materiality, and sound to generate new embodied-meaning productions toward eco-healing.