Mantic Stain
Embodied Earth Collaboration
Ali Hilton & Rae Story
Holy Creatures Exhibition
Kendal Museum
Embodied Earth Collaboration
Ali Hilton & Rae Story
Holy Creatures Exhibition
Kendal Museum
Ali Hilton and Rae Story’s collaboration Embodied Earth explores malleable raw earth and their transforming mid life bodies.
Making space and time to come together in our present forms feels like a radical act of building relationship and connection despite our geographical distance and busy lives.
We bring together our unique personal experiences of working with earth and the body (Ali has been working in the construction industry in France for 20 years and is now doing an MA in Fine Art at Falmouth University and Rae is a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner specialising in Qigong and Chinese Massage).
Together we share our changing lives, listening and receiving each others tender moments with compassion and hilarity in equal measure. We burrow into the dark places of our psyches whilst working tactile clay making forms sometimes intentional, sometimes intuitive. As we hold and shape this clay we are doing what humans have always done. The curve of our palms easily create rounded forms, our thumbs and fingers easily creating space for holding. We naturally create bowls, eggs, seeds, female forms, just as our ancestors did.
We recognise the wear and tear on our bodies when we make too much, work too long, or over reach. We attend to our posture and position as we work and become more mindful of the interplay between our bodies, mind and earth as a collaboration each part significant to the overall outcome.
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image by @iamsamwallis
We bring together our unique personal experiences of working with earth and the body (Ali has been working in the construction industry in France for 20 years and is now doing an MA in Fine Art at Falmouth University and Rae is a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner specialising in Qigong and Chinese Massage).
Together we share our changing lives, listening and receiving each others tender moments with compassion and hilarity in equal measure. We burrow into the dark places of our psyches whilst working tactile clay making forms sometimes intentional, sometimes intuitive. As we hold and shape this clay we are doing what humans have always done. The curve of our palms easily create rounded forms, our thumbs and fingers easily creating space for holding. We naturally create bowls, eggs, seeds, female forms, just as our ancestors did.
We recognise the wear and tear on our bodies when we make too much, work too long, or over reach. We attend to our posture and position as we work and become more mindful of the interplay between our bodies, mind and earth as a collaboration each part significant to the overall outcome.
image by @iamsamwallisThe sculptures that we make remain unfired keeping earth in its mutable transformable state - we can rehydrate our sculptures and remake them, we can put them with other earth and create larger sculptures or build a home, we can also dissolve them and return to the earth.
We ran a community workshop in 2024 with ten women in Manchester sharing some of our process and inspiration, we completed a residency at Brison’s Veory in Cape Cornwall in 2026 and took part in Holy Creatures exhibition across two venues in the North of England.
We continue to meet once per week for one hour clay making session on a Wednesday morning creating simple forms within the time and keeping company with each other.
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image by @iamsamwallis
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We ran a community workshop in 2024 with ten women in Manchester sharing some of our process and inspiration, we completed a residency at Brison’s Veory in Cape Cornwall in 2026 and took part in Holy Creatures exhibition across two venues in the North of England.
We continue to meet once per week for one hour clay making session on a Wednesday morning creating simple forms within the time and keeping company with each other.
image by @iamsamwallis